So there I am, just minding my own business, right? It’s a Saturday morning, I just got out of the shower, so I need a minute to cool off because it’s June in Tucson and it’s already 94 degrees outside, so by the time I finish shaving and brushing my teeth my forehead is slicked with sweat, and I need to sit under the fan to return my temperature to equilibrium before I get one last cup of coffee.

1. No, I should not drink hot coffee when it is 94 degrees. But I’m going to anyway. Forever.
2. Yes, I should take cold showers — though I will point out that shaving really should be done with hot water, and that would make me sweat regardless because I am applying said hot water to my face. I do rinse with cold. It doesn’t fix the problem. Only sitting quietly under the fan does.
3. All of this is beside the point.

I’m looking at my phone, trying to decide whether I want to read (I’m trying to get through four more books before the end of June, because I really want to read at least 52 books this year [and I’m at 22 and if I get to 26 before the first six months of the year are gone that will be meaningful, right?] since I have not done that for the last few years, and I know I shouldn’t worry about how many books I read or whether I’m reading books at all, but I’m not going to start another list) or if I should write, because I have really good ideas for blogs that I want to get to while it is summer and school is not destroying me, or if I maybe want to work on my audiobook (I’m recording myself reading Damnation Kane. It’s going slowly.), or maybe just keep building my ULTIMATE FORTRESS in Minecraft, which is what I’ve been doing to relax for the past week or so, because I spent the past week reading 546 essays about napping for the AP Language and Composition exam. And while looking at my phone, I check my email, and there’s a message from Substack (Which I will maybe start posting these essays to, as per my wife’s suggestion, which is a good one and maybe that would get me more readers — but also, can I handle more readers?), so because I’m considering posting to Substack, I go to check it out and see if it’s easy to put a post on there. So I open the email, and I see this teaser and headline:

“I have never felt very comfortable with the stance that writing, as an undertaking, is both very difficult and emotionally intolerable”

In this edition of the Weekender: vows of silence, teenage idols, and exploring whether writing is actually torture.

So I read it.

Now I need to sit under the fan for a minute.

Here, you can read part of what Monica Heisey wrote.

i have never felt very comfortable with the stance, held by some writers, that writing as an undertaking is both very difficult and emotionally intolerable. while i understand there is plenty about being alone with your thoughts, sharing your ideas in public, and attempting to take something from inside your mind and bring it into the physical realm that is uncomfortable, it is not difficult like digging a ditch. it is not intolerable like having your heart broken, or even like having a sunburn. when people say things like “writing is torture,” i often think, if you really feel this way, why not do something else?

i encountered this line of thinking so frequently in the early days of my career that it occasionally caused me to doubt myself. i loved writing. i couldn’t believe i got to do it for a living, and found it, often, actively fun. did this mean i was doing it wrong, somehow? was there a more arduous and therefore more correct method that would lead me to create stronger work? if suffering for one’s art provided no special benefit, why were writers i admired constantly tweeting or appearing on panels to say their working life was hellish and exhausting?

to this day there is a little voice in the back of my mind that pops up once in a while to suggest i am shirking “real work” by enjoying myself. i was immensely soothed to see ali smith, an objectively wonderful writer with a prolific output, call herself “immensely lazy” in an interview at the hay festival, holding a beer and suggesting she doesn’t really work until she has a deadline and a paycheque scheduled, adding that she “does basically nothing until she has to” and considers staring into space an important part of the creative process. there, i thought watching it, is someone who is enjoying their working life.

WORK: it’s supposed to be fun – by monica heisey

Okay, look. I don’t want to attack this person. To each their own (Which is why I’m also not going to comment on the choice this writer made not to use capital letters), and I understand that, indeed, that is the intended point of this piece: not every writer, not every artist, has the same experience as every other. Valid. In some ways I have a much easier time with writing than a number of my fellow wordsmiths because I have a style and a platform that coheres with single draft composition: I get an idea, I go to my computer, I write something close to stream of consciousness, and I hit “Post” without rewriting. I do not, like many of my fellow writers, suffer from anxiety or depression, or struggle with addiction, or trauma. I’m glad that this writer has a generally good time, a generally pleasant experience, both as a writer and with her professional work. I do not think enjoying herself makes her writing worse, and I do not think that it is necessary to suffer for one’s craft, either as an artist or as a professional of any kind.

But hey lady: writing is fucking hard. It is fucking. Hard.

Like I said, I don’t mean to attack, and I don’t mean to judge. The piece does go on to show that the initial stance taken here is not the whole story, because of course it isn’t.

this is not to say that i do not have bad days, or that i am immune from complex feelings about, in particular, the “putting it out into the world” part of writing. in the last week of editing my most recent novel i dreamt every night about dying or being murdered or murdering someone else. one night i physically felt the tip of my nose touch the lid of my own coffin as it closed over me. it was not, let’s say, “chill.” but the actual writing, in the day, sat up in bed and combing through pages, killing only my darlings, was almost pure pleasure.

Okay, that makes more sense. Yes, I agree: writing does feel good when it is flowing, when it is working, when you’re able to see the thing you want to create and you have a path to get there and you can put one metaphorical foot in front of the other on the way towards creating that thing you want. Yes, I do often have fun with my work. I like (sometimes — not lately) reading what I have written in the past. I like laughing at my own jokes: I think I’m funny. I think I have a decent gift for writing the occasional banger of a sentence, and I like reading those when I hit the bullseye. I think that I have sometimes had something valuable to say, and I have said it clearly and well on this blog, and I am proud of that. I am somewhat mystified, but definitely gratified, to see that, despite my lack of production over the last year or two, and despite my constant whinging when I do manage to write something, people are still finding my blog and looking at my old posts. I am equally gratified to have people buy my books from me, and then, as they sometimes do, come back to tell me that they liked reading them. There are many things about writing that are pleasant, and they are certainly part of the reason why I keep doing this.

So I won’t judge you for wanting to focus on similar parts of your own experience. I won’t assume that my writing life is anything like yours, and so I won’t use mine as a standard to lecture you about yours and what you are doing right or what you are doing wrong. As I said: to each their own, and there is no particular reason why someone would have to suffer for their art — but I do understand the cliche that tells us that we should be suffering for our art, and I appreciate the way you question yourself in those terms. No, you are not doing it wrong, and you are not writing inferior art just because you are not suffering.

Oh look, the essay goes on. What else do you have to say on this?

so! four paragraphs of bragging about how i loooove to work and have sooo much fun doing it… this is insufferable, you are probably thinking. i hope this bitch gets back into her own coffin and stays there! give me a minute. i have tips.

Okay. Now. Now you are indeed become insufferable, but not because you have been writing about how much you love work and how much fun you have doing it: now you are insufferable because you have fucking tips.

Let me be clear about a couple of things. One, although I found this piece irksome because it goes some way to invalidating or at least devaluing and minimizing my own experience, I meant what I said: I won’t judge anyone else based on my experience, whether that means thinking they have it better or thinking they have it worse than me. I don’t know enough about another person to even have any opinions about their lives, let alone judge them. Two, I have thus far resisted the temptation to get snotty about the fact that she is young, and talk about how my life as a writer has been harder than hers, because I don’t know her life and because I don’t think it’s fair to use my age and longer lived experience to discredit a younger person’s understanding; and also, as I said, suffering is not a requirement for art, and so the fact that I have had a harder time as a writer than she apparently has doesn’t make me more of a writer. Three, I haven’t wanted to try to flex my writing ability in comparison to hers, nor to humble myself as a writer in comparison to her, because obviously being a good writer doesn’t change someone’s experience of life as a writer, and isn’t necessarily related to one’s process: some artists have the gift of easy production of work, and some of us struggle with every single thing we do; none of that changes good art, and none of it makes any of us less or more of an artist.

But she has tips. She has a newsletter, too. And that means she is not giving anyone else the grace that I am trying to give her: she is specifically telling me (Well, she is speaking to a faceless audience, not to me personally) that I am doing it wrong, and that she knows how to do it better, and if I read her posts — or even better, subscribe to her newsletter — then I can learn to be the same kind of writer that she is. More importantly, this shows that she is not an artist. She’s a hack.

Hold on. Let me sit under the fan for a minute, and cool off.

Nope: it’s not helping.

Okay, it helped a little: I take back the “hack” comment. I’ll explain that first, because I want to be clear about why this angers me so much; and then I want to talk about my own experience of writing. (Right here. Mark this moment. I’ll explain.)

There is a trend in the modern world — maybe an old trend, I don’t know, this is the only world I’ve lived in and been an artist in and been married to another artist in — of people claiming to be artists who are not in fact artists at all. I’m not trying to gatekeep art, by any means; but I think the meanings of words are important, and “artist” is a particularly important word, and therefore the meaning needs to be clear, even while it must be broad enough and inclusive enough to include any and all kinds of art. So here it is:

An artist is someone who defines themselves by their art.

Okay? That’s it, but it’s important, so let me explain — and hold on until the end of this, because I may either confuse you or piss you off, but I’m going somewhere, so come with me until we get there.

Someone who paints or draws for fun is not an artist. Someone who paints or draws for money is not an artist. Someone who teaches painting or drawing is not an artist. Someone who paints houses, or fills in coloring books, or doodles in the margins, is not an artist. Someone who uses drawing and painting as therapy, for themselves or for others, is not an artist.

An artist can be a person who does any of those things. I would assume that most artists do most of those things — certainly making work for fun should be part of the experience of being an artist no matter what the art is. I would hope that everyone who is an artist has the opportunity to make money with their art; it is magical when it happens. As a teacher, married to a former teacher, I think every artist who has the chance to teach their art is doing a good thing both for themselves and for the world. Hopefully we all experiment with various related tasks somehow connected to our art — I would certainly include reading AP Lang essays about napping as connected to my art as a writer, and my wife makes amazing doodles and also is goddamn good at painting houses. And hell yes, my art is therapeutic: why do you think I’m writing this, so I can make money from it? So I can get you to subscribe to my newsletter?

But to be an artist, your identity has to be tied to your art. It has to mean so much to you that it means you. If it doesn’t, it can be a lot of good things, and you can do a lot of good things with it — but it’s not art and you’re not an artist. I will add one caveat to that last comment, which is that art can come from surprising places, so people who are not artists can absolutely produce art, and even great art; and also that people’s identities change, so someone can be an artist for a time, and then change how they identify themselves, how they define themselves, and cease being an artist; that temporary condition is no more or less valid than my lifelong condition (Now it sounds like a disease — Ooo, did you hear? Dusty caught art. Oh man, poor guy.). But during that time, for you to be an artist, you have to see yourself as defined by that art.

I’m not going to get into what is art here; it’s any creative endeavor that, as I’ve been saying, defines the person who pursues it. Art is defined as much by the artist as the artist is defined by the art. It’s the self-definition that matters.

So the trend that is prevalent in the digital world and might have always been present is people who want to make money by calling themselves artists — not people who want to make a living with their art, and not someone who defines themselves as an artist also calling themselves an artist: but someone who is posing as an artist in order to make money. And what these people do is they create a program: a guide, some kind of how-to instruction manual, that tells other people who want to make money by calling themselves an artist, how to do that. And the number one way to do that is to create a program, a guide, some kind of how-to instruction manual on how to make money pretending to be an artist, and then sell it to other people who want to make money by pretending to be an artist.

I see it constantly: any forum, any interaction that connects writing to money, has at least one shmuck trying to shill their system by which they made some remarkable amount of money, and if you pay them money they will tell you the secret how they did it: and that’s the secret. They made a sales pitch to get people to pay them money to find out how to make money “with art.” But, as should be abundantly clear, these people are not artists: they are marketers. They are salespeople. They are, in my own colloquial lexicon, hacks. So now, when I see someone trying to tell me how to be an artist, how to be either successful or happy as an artist, especially someone who has a newsletter, I think, Hack.

Looking through this woman’s tips, I think she may not be a hack. I think she may actually be a writer: one of her tips is to read, and another is to write, and she has some points about not being too hard on yourself, which is all genuinely good advice for other writers. Sharing your own experience as an artist, even selling your own experience as an artist or using your experience as an artist in order to gain a following, are all valid things to do. As I have no experience of this woman’s work other than this one piece, I will try not to judge her too harshly for what seems to me like hackery but might not be. If she is an artist, then my problem is not with her, it is only with what she said here; so we’ll assume that, and let it go for now.

Now let me tell you why she is wrong.

Let me tell you why writing is fucking hard.

Because I never know. Never.

I never know if I should be writing, or not. Sometimes I try, and it doesn’t work, and I get incredibly frustrated and also caustically self-critical — because why the fuck can’t I write? Am I not smart? Am I not wordly (Should I use that word which is not a word? Will people even see that word, or will they just think I wrote “worldly” and skip past it? Have I made this point too obvious by adding this parenthetical?)? Am I not literate? Am I not creative? Do I not have good ideas? At my most generous, I will think I guess this just isn’t the time to write, and at my least I will think: Because I am not a writer. And when I think that — which is fairly frequently — it hurts. I do not want to be not a writer. I define myself as a writer. It matters to me.

But even though I am a writer, I never know if my writing is good. I never know if it is done, which is why I tend towards one-draft posting; because if I write it fast and then publish it fast, I push it away from me, and that way I don’t have to think about it any more, it’s already out there, it’s already published, I can’t make it any better, it has to be good enough. I never finish: I only surrender. And as I said, I sometimes like reading what I have written; but I don’t like how I always find flaws, or at least things I could have improved. Because then I know that I gave up too soon, that I should have kept working; and maybe that’s why I’m not successful, because I give up too soon, because I don’t revise and polish my work enough.

Because I am not a writer.

I have a thousand ideas. I never know which one is the right one to be working on. I never know which one is the right idea, and I never know what is the right time, and I never know what is the right thing to say, and I never know if I have said it or if I have said it well enough. I never know who my audience is or will be, and I never know how they will accept my writing, whether it will seem good to them or not, whether it will be meaningful or not, whether it will be right or not. That’s why I told you to mark that spot, up above: that was the moment when I thought, Ahhh, nobody wants to read that. Nobody wants to know what your experience of being a writer is. They don’t care. They won’t understand. I think that, or some version of it, every single time I write. Am I right about that? Am I wrong? I never know. And if somebody reads my work, and they tell me it was good and meaningful and right, I don’t know why, and I don’t know how to do it again. I never know. I’m always guessing, always taking a chance, especially when I publish my work; because there’s always the chance that I’m wrong, that I did it wrong, that the work is bad or ineffective: that it is not the art I wanted to produce. And that matters to me, it matters to me if the work is not what it should have been, what it could have been if I had worked harder, or if I had thought more, or if I had greater innate skill or more training or more practice or — I don’t know what. I never know what is lacking. But I know that something always is.

Because I am not a writer.

That’s what I end up telling myself. If I were a writer, then I would know. Then I would be sure. Sometimes I think that’s a matter of innate skill or intelligence, because I didn’t do the thing that great writers do, and create THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL when I was in my 20s; sometimes I think it’s a matter of the choices I have made, and the choices I have not been able to make, in my life. I became a teacher because I didn’t think I could write successful novels fast enough to make a living with them right out of college, and I wanted to make a living, so I chose to do something other than writing: and for the last three decades, I have thought that maybe that was the wrong choice. Maybe I could have been a writer if I had tried to do that and nothing else.

But also, I know there are other factors. I couldn’t be a journalist, for instance, because I’m an introvert, so I suck at interviewing people and finding sources and networking and all the rest of that; I didn’t go into film or television writing because I grew up loving books even more than movies or TV. I don’t know if there’s any reason for that, but that’s been my experience, so my writing career has been slow, because I write novels. I have written six, and started several more. And I am still a teacher.

I tried to make a living out of my writing. I tried submitting stories to magazines, and I tried submitting my novels to agents and to publishers. I have never gotten anything other than rejection. Once — once — an agent liked the first six pages I sent them, and asked to see the first 50 pages of my novel; I sent them 50 pages… and they rejected it. (I first wrote “They rejected me.” Which should I say, here? Should I show the self-confidence to recognize that rejection of my work is not rejection of me as a person or as an artist? Or should I say what it felt like, what it always feels like? I know that everyone’s advice is to keep submitting, to never give up, to always send your work in and never take rejection personally. I know that. And I still wrote “They rejected me.” Because that’s how I feel. Should I not feel that way? Maybe I’m doing it all wrong. I guess it’s because I am not a writer.)

I don’t regret becoming a teacher; I am incredibly proud of what I have accomplished as a teacher, the difference I have made in the lives of my students, the ways I have had a positive impact on the world; if I had gone directly into writing and made a career of it, I think I would struggle with not having given back to the world in the way I think I have as a teacher. By the same token, I’m never sorry that I made the life I have: I do not regret moving to the places I have moved, even though I never moved to New York City so I could immerse myself in the writing life. I do not regret the time and energy I have put into being a pet parent, and I am absolutely and always happy with my choice of life partner, because my wife is the best thing in my world, followed by my pets.

But see, maybe if I didn’t have those things, I would be a better writer. Maybe I would have been able to focus more, or been more driven; maybe I would have spent more time, when I was younger and more energetic or more confident or didn’t sometimes struggle with words or didn’t have so many doubts or so many obligations or so many difficult things to deal with — maybe I could have succeeded. Maybe that’s why I am not a writer.

I never know. I never know what I am, or what I am not, or why I got to be this way, or how to change it. I have ideas, and I have feelings, and I have inspirations, and I have despairs: but I never know.

But I still keep trying to write. To be a writer.

That’s why I AM a writer.

That’s why I am an artist. I define myself by my art, by my work, by my ambitions to keep making work, to make better work, to make more work. But because I never know what I’m doing, it’s so goddamn hard to keep coming back to it and trying. I mean, if I had all the time and money in the world, maybe it wouldn’t be hard; and if I knew that a million people would read my work and love it no matter what I wrote, then it wouldn’t be hard; and if I didn’t fucking care, then it wouldn’t be hard.

But none of those things are true. What is always true is: I never know. So it’s always hard. It’s always hard to make myself do this. Even when it’s fun, which it often is, and even when I’m proud of my work, which I often am, and even when I have had some success, which I have had, at least a little, it is still hard to make myself write. Because I never know.

So spare me, Ms. Heisey. I don’t want to attack you, because all this means is that I wasn’t the right audience for your post. I hope the right audience finds it, and I hope it is good and meaningful and right to them. It was not, to me. And I would leave it at that, let your work fly past me to where it belongs — except you tried to tell me how I could live more like you, you tried to give me advice. But you don’t have any idea what this experience of being a writer is like to me, even though you presume to know, and I find that annoying. So spare me.

Let me also stick in here the part that really makes me angry about this, and the reason why I’m not just letting this go: it’s the privilege. I’m glad that this person doesn’t go through what so many artists go through: so many of us deal with depression and anxiety, with mental health issues, with trauma, with addictions; I have none of those, and my life as an artist is still hard. The simple fact of the stress in my life, which is not inconsiderable, makes everything to do with my art even more difficult on top of the difficulties of being an artist that I have tried to show here; I haven’t mentioned all the shit going on right now, which is making everything hard. To go through everything that I go through, AND to suffer as mental illness or trauma make us suffer? Those people, those artists, who deal with that are the strongest fucking people in the world. Everyone who has mental illness or trauma or both, and who nonetheless pursue their life’s goals, are the strongest fucking people in the world. And while that’s certainly not exclusive to artists, it is prevalent among artists, largely because artists are frequently more sensitive and observant and contemplative of the world and our place in it (Is that because we are artists, or are we artists because of that? Egg or chicken?), and I assume also because art is in fact excellent therapy, and because one of the most therapeutic aspects of art is the way it helps us to understand and to connect with our fellow humans so that we can feel less alone, which is so very necessary for someone struggling with mental health or trauma or both. So yeah, a lot of artists have trauma and mental health issues; a lot of people with trauma and mental health issues become artists. And for you to fucking sit there and pull out this, “Ummm, you guys, art is supposed to be fun! If it’s not fun you’re doing it wrong!” That makes me mad. That makes me want to say things to you, and about you, that are not nice. But all I will say directly is this: check your privilege.

Maybe when you have collected more experiences like mine, you will understand more why those of us who say that art is hard keep saying that; maybe when you do, if you do, you will want to read something written by someone who knows why art is hard, why it is always hard. Maybe you’ll even read this. Maybe it will be interesting, and meaningful, and right.

I’ll never know.