29. Mantra

Over the past nine weeks, I had the pleasure of guiding a group of writers in a version of my “Writing the Weird and Wonderful” class through Portland’s Literary Arts. It had been three full years since I’d led any kind of class, and each week I would arrive in the Zoom screen jittery and caffeinated and nervous, hoping what I would have to say would be helpful. 

It is the truth that I have changed a lot in the three years since I last taught — as a writer and as a person. I have acquired barnacles. I’m saltier. Three years ago, it was like I had endless ink in me, ready to siphon out into the water. My passion was unbridled; I was less focused than I am now, but more optimistic. I worried that feeling so weather-worn by writing would influence the way I talked about it to my students, and the last thing I wanted to do was taint anyone’s enthusiasm. 

But I was greeted each week by a group of writers, eager to … write. They came from both the rural and urban West, and during every class we would talk for two hours straight, getting tangled up in our collective enthusiasm for the craft. We came up with our own language, dropping the journalistic term “nut graf” from our vocabulary and replacing it with a term that felt more illustrative and familiar to a group of western writers: “trailhead.” By the end, we had our own inside jokes. I was inspired all over again by each of them.

Last week, a group of us met up for dinner and to see each other for the first time off a Zoom screen. As we chattered into the night, one of my students — known for big, philosophical questions — asked me a two-word question that, ever since, I have been thinking about: 

“Why write?”

Think for one second: how would you answer that? 

My heart answered before my brain could: 

“I feel like I’m helping,” I said. 

The reason why I write has, no doubt, been at the core of my thinking for years. It’s mostly something I consider when some aspect of writing starts to corrode me: the parts that don’t involve me and a keyboard, or me and a pen. Most frequently I question why I got myself into writing professionally when I’m not getting paid for work that I did, and then I doubt myself that I misjudged and anchored myself to something that will sink me. In those moments, I can feel myself going down. This happens less frequently than it used to, but now when it does — when I work hard on something and have to beg to be valued for it — it cuts me so much deeper than it used to. It threatens to end me. 

But the act of writing never bothers me, and I think that’s because I don’t know any other way. As a kid, I remember making newspapers — heavy on the comics section, of course — out of magic marker and dot-matrix printer paper, chronicling the events in our house. In my bedroom, I journaled and made “radio shows,” talking into a Fisher-Price cassette player, recording and re-recording on the same orange plastic tape. 

This is just how I am: I write. I make things.

Of course, habit and blind passion are never enough. A creative practice has to be able to withstand storms and keep out the rain. There are many brilliant writers who never write because the elements of life get in the way and because this society is a hostile environment to any creativity that can’t be immediately monetized. 

To that note, I think part of my role as a teacher is to help my students create space in their lives to write. To actually do it, to experiment and let their minds wander out through their fingertips, to see what the shape of their thoughts look like on a page. 

There is no such thing as an ideal environment to write, at least in my experience. I’ll never forget reading Taffy Brodesser-Akner in Slate about how she wrote her brilliant novel, Fleischman Is In Trouble, in six months: 

“I wrote half of my book in the Nordstrom ladies room where there’s a couch and the other half with children sitting next to them watching TV so that they would have the illusion that I was spending time with them. Like, I never ask my sister, who’s a veterinarian, ‘Oh, you’re not blocked today, are you? Because you have that surgery to do.’ This is a profession and you have to treat it professionally. At its heart, writer’s block is the act of thinking about writing instead of doing it. And if you just remember that, you can always know that you could just write the next sentence. It might not be very good, but the one after that probably will be.”

I have devoted my entire existence to writing, and yet even I can’t find the right time to do it: I am writing this to you now in the odd space between work and eating dinner. I have gotten up twice three times to let my dogs out, feed them dinner. I have peeled one orange and filled one water bottle, assessed the status of the laundry and considered eating a piece of leftover pie. I will likely finish this piece of writing in darkness when, inevitably, I wake up at 4 am thinking about writing, wander out into the other room without turning the lights on, put on my headphones and crank “The Rip” and open up my laptop to write. I might edit standing at my kitchen counter, computer at eye level on top of the toaster oven.

You have to fight for the how of writing; our attention for it is a battleground. You have to shut out the world and ask yourself, as Melissa Febos so brilliantly did in Catapult: “Do you want to be known for your writing, or for your swift email responses?” 

“Knock it off! You are ruining it for the rest of us (and yourself) by reinforcing the increasingly accepted expectation of immediate response. Immediate satisfaction is only found in a small list of things that includes narcotics, haircuts, and tattoos. Let go of the dream, or sacrifice your art (and sanity and freedom) at its altar.”

The why of writing is harder to account for. Why in the hell would you do it? 

When I told my friend and former student that I feel like I’m helping, he pressed me further. Who am I helping?

Back when I took my first job in journalism, I knew that it was possible for journalists to give a voice to the voiceless, as they told us in school, but I didn’t know how exactly to go about doing so. In the two decades since, I have learned what systems I want to interrogate. Each time you hold someone accountable, it creates an opportunity to do it again and again. It’s a language you start to speak, a dance you know in your bones. 

I’ve also learned more about what writing can and cannot do. I have learned to temper my expectations of what effect my stories might have. I have learned to stop being so fucking precious. I have learned to remember that when it feels like no one cares, it is best to think about how this world is massive and there is someone out there who does care. You might not ever hear from them. I have learned that having writing idols will only hurt you, and not them. 

And I have learned that sometimes the only thing I feel like I can do is create beauty out of darkness. 

It is what gets me through when I feel sensitive about the label “true crime” being slapped on things I work hard on: a podcast about climate change, a book about religious fanaticism, an article about police brutality. (Whoever came up with this label: I will never forgive you.) I take on work that, very often, is centered on something that feels overlooked to me, or worthy of further examination. 

My book, When the Moon Turns to Blood, is centered on a murder case. Yes, there is a crime and everything in the book is true, but the project does not revel in gory detail: quite the opposite. It is revolted by it, horrified and angry that it happened. Sometimes as I was writing it, I would wonder if I created something beautiful and sobering enough with my words, maybe that would stop one person cold in their tracks. The victims would be known once more.  

Of course, sometimes I write for a lot of other reasons, too. My well of anger over the ways systems are not built to benefit the majority of the American populace is deep: a never-ending abyss of inspiration. I write because I love, too: we all know that at this point, there is nothing in this world I can write more passionately about than Ronnie James Dio. 

But the reality is that the why of writing cannot be done without sitting down to write. For each of us, the answer to “why write?” is complicated and is found in the act of writing itself. It is in the spaces between words: an answer we can seek, but not fully know, unless we look for it on the page.  

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As an end-of-year note, I want to thank every single one of you for subscribing to this newsletter. For those of you who are paid subscribers, you should know that your hard-earned dollars have gone into a boatload of reporting costs for an upcoming story I will be releasing this winter, as well as work on a big long-term project that I’ll tell you about… soon enough.

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See you next year!