Ambition

essay

Here’s a little note to anyone who wants to write—or, maybe more importantly, to anyone who wants to practice any sort of art form.

AMBITION

“I liberated myself into productivity through a complete lack of ambition.” Jim Harrison

Do you want to “be a writer” or do you want to write?

I ask that question because the former often gets in the way of the latter.

Many people—I’m not saying you, of course—many people who catch the writing disease get into the habit of reading too much about writing as a career. They read about how you should “study the market” and “develop a platform,” whatever that means. They subscribe to writing magazines and they take as gospel, and are limited by, the mantra that you should “write what you know.” They dream of “being a writer.”

It’s a lovely dream. I can say that because I have dreamed it, too, and if you check the About page of this newsletter you will see that I’ve had some modest, respectable success. I’ve achieved the status of “obscure writer,” a very minor celebrity in my neighborhood, and a source of disappointed, slightly bemused head scratching among my family members. No, I’ve not achieved my dream, and I don’t expect to anymore.

But I’m happily working away at my craft. I don’t study the market. Instead, I read and study the masters, like Chekhov and Maupassant and Katherine Anne Porter. Cultivating an intimacy with them has more to teach me than the group-think of a writing workshop. But, of course, in such workshops you “make connections,” which, of course, helps you become “a writer.”

Or not.

And write what you know? Yes, of course, but not only that. Writing fiction is not only about exploring your own experience. It is also about imagining other lives. You will be told as a (fill in the blank) you can’t imagine what it’s like to be a (fill in another blank). You will be told you are appropriating somebody else’s story, but creating characters, imagining their lives, is an act of empathy. You should do it. Yes, with respect and humility, but yes.

You may not be a great artist and your gift may not be large, but it is your gift, however humble. Embrace it. In the long run, I think your work benefits from this attitude. Certainly, in my case, I have become more productive and less constrained, and maybe more ambitious for my craft, if not for “success.”

But that calls for some clarification.

To wish for nothing more than creating your vision of a good, well-written story is a childlike (not childish) place to take your imagination. It’s a garden, a woods crisscrossed by footpaths and game trails, bogs and sunlit clearings, a place of surprise meetings with old friends and wild creatures. It is a place in service to the craft of storytelling, a place to remember not to allow your getting-ahead ambition to dull your vision.

If you want, you can take that business up later. But don’t be fooled. Many are called, but few are chosen. If it becomes clear that you will not be chosen, will you continue to write?

Do you want to “be a writer” or do you want to write? That’s the question to answer.