What Is the Point of the Writing Life?

It was a hot day in early August. The air conditioning in my backyard writing shed was barely functional, and I was sweating as I wrote, overwhelmed by a complex mix of sadness, relief, weariness, and hope. I was trying to figure out how to say goodbye to hundreds of thousands of readers who I’d written to weekly in the New York Times for two years. How could I explain this decision to walk away from this job, I thought, when I’m not sure I understand it myself? I was leaving the dream. Yet, here, at the top of my career ladder, I was climbing right back down to move on to something else. It felt crazy, embarking on a journey to God-knows-where.

(Why You Shouldn't Give Up.)

I was so very tired. So much so that I couldn’t imagine continuing to write each week under deadline. When I started the job at the Times, my youngest son was not yet two. Now, he was nearly four and I missed him. Each week’s looming deadlines, circled in my calendar, had begun, in my imagination, to represent all the things I’d miss: the Monday afternoons we couldn’t read together, the walks I couldn’t take with him, the distraction from some long story he was telling as I hurried off an email to an editor, half-listening.

But there was more. I wrote on faith but faith, for me, in my daily life, felt shifting, uncertain, and illusive. American culture was polarizing. The discourse around religion was often combative and vitriolic, and this had shaped me, over the years:  God began to seem more like a sociological or political phenomenon that we debated and dissected, less like a mystery to seek or to know. About 15 years ago, I began writing and publishing as a way to figure out what I thought, what I believed, what was happening around me and within me. I wrote as an act of personal devotion, but writing each week in a paper of record about God began to feel like I was, accidentally, becoming a pundit in a culture war I didn’t really believe in or feel part of.

And I missed writing books. I missed going deeply into one idea, one subject, for years. I missed the sort of relationship that authors have with readers, the intimacy that comes from long form: It takes an author so very long to write a book and it also takes readers, who are willing to sit with someone’s words for hours. Books require a kind of mutual commitment and compassion between readers and writers that quickly scrolling through an article someone rage posted on social media simply does not.

So I was leaving the dream job, though I still loved parts of it and though I was so deeply grateful for it.

Though I gave up writing for the Times, I knew I had to keep writing. But I was burned out creatively. I faced, for the first time ever, something like writer’s block. I began to read the words of others, drinking deeply from other writers, other thinkers. I read books on faith. I read books on writing. I read books just for fun. And, after a few months off, I started writing again slowly. I put a check mark on a wall calendar for every day I wrote for two hours. Sometimes those two hours produced one short paragraph. Sometimes they produced rambling prose that I deleted the next day. No matter. I gave myself a checkmark. I felt like I was recovering from something. I was recuperating from some kind of creative influenza,  slowly nursing myself back to health.

I looked back on when words flowed freely, when words came fast, fierce, and passionate. I wondered if my career was over. I called my first editor Marcia, who I met two decades ago and still call when I’m discouraged or feeling lost in my writing life. She said to me that the spiritual life and the creative life alike are usually not found in the passion, in the flow state,  in the times that feel abundant, not in a sudden insight, like a burst of a flame, but in “the steady laying on of the logs.” What she told me to do was to keep at it: to keep writing, but to take it bit by bit, not looking for a blaze of inspiration or success, but instead to slowly but consistently feed the fire.

Day by day, page by page, I wrote my next book in fits and starts and, in the process, I sorted out the state of my own soul and creative life. In the end, it turns out, that what matters most to me is not putting the New York Times in my byline or on my resume, but that I’m able to explore the projects that feel most interesting to me, that I’m able to write what feeds my spirit, and also—and this was something that I didn’t know I needed—that I am able to be silent when I want to or need to be or when I’m not sure what to say. I’m able to write and think slowly, to read ancient books and avoid the news for a week. I’m able to sit with my son and listen to his stories and take all the media apps off my phone.

I left two years ago now and I still have no idea if doing so was a good idea. How could I know? Life is only lived in forward motion. We can only choose one path at a time. There’s no comparing the path we took with the path we didn’t, whatever Robert Frost may say.

But this past year, again and again, in my journal and in conversations with other writers, I’ve been reflecting on the question of what, exactly, creative success actually is. Is it having the biggest platform possible or is it the freedom to follow the trails you want to explore? Is it a particular byline or a particular way of being? Or is it a bit of both? How do we decide, for ourselves, what we want and what we are called to? How do we define success by standards that are not just marked by achievement but wisdom, that bring not simply accolades but deep joy? What is the point of the writing life? Is it a particular achievement, or is it writing the words that we most need? Is it to take up the craft of becoming who we are made to be?

The problem with the way American culture often talks about success is that our metaphors are so linear—so aimed at a particular destination. We talk about climbing a ladder or we use the language of “peaking,” as if we are ascending a height. But what if the writing life—and perhaps all of our vocational endeavors—is more like the tending of a fire? Success then is dynamic and changing. This metaphor acknowledges that there will inevitably be moments of brilliance and brightness but also of quiet embers. It tells us that at times things seem to sputter and turn to ash and yet, with just the right breeze, can roar to life again. It leaves room for bonfires but also campfires but also candles. It tells us that the point isn’t a particular result but to tend—and to attend—to those things that need tending. It tells us the point of our lives is not a particular arrival but the quiet, steady work of becoming fully alive.

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