Yes, writing requires sacrifice
If you want it to be any cop
There is a sort of ambient hum of anxiety about writing on Substack and why and how to do it; to be clear, you can answer one of these questions without even addressing the other. People here are self-conscious about whether they’re doing writing right.
Few Substacks are more popular than the one advising you how to gain subscribers quickly and convert them to paying within weeks. Follow this ten-point plan and always be closing. Writers, on Substack and elsewhere, are anxious about being writers, which is perhaps inevitable given that the medium of the craft is how you express your worries about it; when composers are stressing about an unpaid invoice, they don’t do it via musical notes.
I’d always thought my Substack would be at a natural end when I wrote an essay entitled ‘Why write’, the only answer there being of course ‘Why not?’ You write because you are one of those people who are drawn to writing. Why does that happen? To a certain extent it’s like anything; some people like skateboarding, others like getting flogged on a Saturday night. It takes all sorts to make a world.
People who want to write are, in my experience, those who are unusually interested in language and its capacity to organise experience; writing can provide a sort of pattern to the disruptions of experience. Struggling over the years to find a working definition of a writer, I’ve settled on ‘Someone interested in written language to an unusual degree.’
One idea which seems very much to have gone out of fashion even in all these angsty discussions of whether and how to write is the idea that writing requires some kind of sacrifice. It was still a big theme knocking around when I grew up, the idea of having to choose between what Yeats called ‘perfection of the life, or of the work’. One led to spiritual compromise, the other to poverty. There was also still very much the idea about that people had to choose between families and writing, that pram in the hall as the enemy of talent idea, a fear of men in particular (ironic given they’ve generally done much less child-rearing).
In part because women have come to dominate publishing, the idea that writing should ever be a rival for children has become more and more discredited; women have always had to cram in their work between caring responsibilities for others, and the idea of unadulterated, responsibility-free time to write has an undoubted air of male entitlement, or at least of class privilege. Women have never had the luxury to indulge that sense of their rarefied creative destiny and have still got their writing done, so why would that need to change now female writers only have more means and are more central to literary culture?
Nonetheless, I’d like to offer a little nostalgic pleading for the idea that producing great art requires sacrifice. The Sistine Chapel required sacrifice to paint; the Baháʼà gardens at Haifa require constant maintenance to retain their perfection. Doing anything really really well requires sacrifice and the very best literary productions are no exception. Note in this context sacrifice is not a synonym for ‘without pleasure’.
The writer who has meant the most to me, Henry James, lived his life as a sort of high-art Brahmin, producing a vast oeuvre, albeit one whose creation sustained by private funds. He took it seriously, thought about it deeply, and the work he left behind it is better than many of the Victorians around him more famous in their times.
At a basic level, if you show that level of commitment to your writing, and have some talent, there will likely be an increase the quality of your work and a diminishment of the accomplishment in the rest of your life. James never had an adult romantic relationship, though his ambiguous sexuality was almost certainly part of that.
My own commitment to my writing in adult life has been robust. For twenty-five years I have laboured at my craft, producing two novels, many short stories, about thirty articles, six theatre scripts, multiple short film scripts, a feature screenplay and now four years of the newsletter you’re reading now. I’ve also written an awful lot of poetry and even, in my old fashioned way, letters. (And erotica, but you'd need to know who to ask). No-one could have worked harder at their craft than me, no-one could have been as productive, and that it’s gone largely unrewarded only brings it into clearer relief that it has required sacrifice.
I can’t really remember why I set off on this particular path of writing. I started very young, filling notebooks as a kid with lurid and violent adventure stories. By the time I was an adolescent people were telling me I had talent; I was encouraged. There was a sense that I had that I wanted to follow where it all led me. As time went on, others continued to tell me that I was getting better at it too. Above all there was the joy and thrill of working with language and the chance to become a master of something. Perhaps the fact that women often loved what I wrote helped too, tho I severely doubt prose ever, unlike comedy, got me laid.
There’s certainly been no pecuniary reward for what I’ve done. My debut self-published novel ‘Midlands’ brought me about 250 quid so far; my articles probably a few grand since I sold the first one in 2017. This newsletter has been pretty successful in financial terms, for which I thank as ever my paying subscribers.
But there’s never been a serious payday for all that effort and of course it could could have been invested in the sensible world of law conversions, driving lessons and steady internal promotions. I’ve scrabbled from job to job, assembling a CV which makes the Curate’s Egg look like the company man.
I’m doing my best to catch up economically in my career now, but spending all those years where my writing – and comedy as a more lucrative and now retired subsidiary of it – came first has left me, in my early 40s, seriously behind. Younger me, for all the memories he left me, hasn’t left any sort of financial legacy, and my years trying to crack comedy in London stand out as a particular economic disaster.
It’s in part middle-class entitlement that led me to be able to live life in this low-income way, but it was also a genuine consuming addiction to getting a style. How do you like it? Was it worth all the hours? Maybe one day one of my stories will break out and earn me a bob or two, but I wouldn’t hold my breath; after two years of work on my latest novel, my best literary contact has just refused to even read it.
And what about the personal sacrifices? Did writing, eine brotlose Kunst, make it less likely that I settled down and had kids? Did it really diminish my sexual opportunities? But maybe in part I wrote because I have a sexual imagination I find very difficult to translate into reality, at least ethically. Hence the erotica.
On the other hand, I think having a literary metier helped in my longer relationships as it gave me something that I was as obviously obsessed with as my partner, which always took the pressure off them. I did have one girlfriend who directly asked me to stop writing, but I think she might have been winding me up as much as anything. She’s in my first novel.
Our age, then, is disenchanted with the idea that art, and that perhaps anything good, requires sacrifice; this idea has obviously found its apotheosis in AI, where you push a few buttons and it does the whole thing for you.
Why would I need to write well, the stupid person thinks, if AI can do it for me – despite the fairly relevant caveat that if AI does it for you that means you have not learnt to do it yourself. You have learnt nothing; you have become nothing. Your only skill is the ability to type an effective prompt, and then read a reheated summary of the internet. There is nothing new in your head apart from a slight sinking of personal standards.
Still, even the broader idea that a writing commitment is perfectly compatible with a full outside existence gives me pause for thought. Of course, no-one should be playing their families off against art; our deepest responsibility is always to our nearest and dearest, never to our ‘productions’. Furthermore art which doesn’t engaged with the love of family and friends always becomes sterile and self-regarding. Yet the idea that writing doesn’t require sacrifice at all also strikes me as naively Panglossian.
If it’s right that writing requires no sacrifice, we should be seeing our age’s literary productions be the equal of or even better than previous epoques. In fact, I think most would struggle to argue that we’re in a golden literary age, that the novel or play is in a particularly healthy state; a lot of the stuff which gets celebrated, even the high-level stuff, seems notably simplistic compared to the golden products of previous ages. It's all pop psychology and agitprop; there’s no language as rich and subversive as say, Restoration Comedy, about. Lots of good music is getting made, mind.
To generalise, our age which doesn’t believe art is worth sacrifice and is always subservient to ‘real life’ seems to be producing rather worse art. A lot of it very much indeed looks like art for which no sacrifice has been made whatever, a sort of affectless, transcribed internet anhedonia, personal lives subject to only the mildest fictionalisation. Worst Boyfriend Ever. Delicious Tacos. At the more prestigious end, Tao Lin and Sam Pink. With the exception of WBE, I like these writers, but I still suspect they’re basically putting out lightly edited diaries, and making a big virtue out of being ‘unfiltered’. A stance which just so happens to not require any editing.
A lot of people need to ask themselves: How good a writer do you really want to be?
I’m a man out of time in may ways, one being that I’ve certainly offered old-school sacrifice for my art. My art has meant a poorer financial existence, less sex, and has brought me enormous personal suffering in its failures to be recognised. I speak these words without any bitterness; it’s just how things played out. Of course, I’d feel differently if one of those plays had been produced, or if my new novel, of which I am very proud, were to find a home. In a way, I write essays like this out of a desire for them to be proved wrong.
Of late I can perceive the sacrifice I have made very acutely, and the idea that it was worth appears strikingly absurd. Nothing could be worth something where the effort and reward are so wildly disproportionate. The only question is whether it would have been worse not to have tried.
And writing has given me things – the joy of seeing my name in print, the kind messages from readers here, seeing photos of my book appear in various European countries. Small moments of adamantine pride. These just weren’t the things I necessarily set out to get from it and it has been harder to get even them than I ever dreamt. I view writing now more as the mistake that only I could make, the mistake which was truest to myself. The foundational one. Once you’re making that kind of mistake, it’s pretty easy to own the sacrifice.
Well done.
Well written. I always remember John Cleese saying "you need to write for at least 2 hours before you start to get to the good stuff." It's always haunted me.