Rin Chupeco on Writing on Purpose

I gave a short talk at a local high school last month, and
one of the first questions I was asked was what advice I had for budding
writers. “If you know anyone who wants to be a writer,” I said,
“tell them to get out before it’s too late. Find some other job that won’t
drive them crazy, like advertising or day trading.”  

I was kidding, partly. Writing for a hobby is a lot
different from writing for a living. Creative writing is the only profession I
know where experience is not required, where you won’t know if you did well
until it’s frequently too late for you to do anything about it, and where
anything you come up with will be put under a microscope almost from the moment
you submit your manuscript and long after it’s been published. And I should know
– I live in a country where writing for a living is a struggle. People working
for actual news publications have a hard time making ends meet, and most local
writers I know need fulltime jobs to support their writing habit.

But even when they barely earn anything for their craft,
most writers I know keep at it. They join vibrant local writing communities,
scramble to find money to fund anthologies with other budding speculative
fiction writers, and work hard to keep doing what they love. I’ve been there, done
that. I quit a well-paying but tiring job to work on my writing instead, went
through a series of small part-time jobs to keep myself afloat while I was at
it, and had the support of family and a very loving partner who believed in me
and were willing to pitch in to help long enough for me to finish my first
novel and query it. As a would-be writer, there’s a certain hunger you need to
possess in the face of all these odds, and it’s the kind of hunger that won’t
be pacified by food (and I say this as someone who loves putting food inside
her face). It’s a bit like a disease, really -if you’ve got that hunger, you’re
going to write whether you can afford to or not, regardless of your
circumstances. Your mileage may vary, but being a writer for me means having
all these ideas and plots floating in my head at all hours of the day,
screaming at me to do something about them. Writing them down is like
exorcising demons from my mind, much like therapy. The goal is to be able to
support yourself comfortably through writing, but not to come into the career
solely for the money – there are easier ways and better jobs to earn that. But
you do have to come in it to write for purpose. Because when things don’t go
your way, or when you encounter stumbling blocks in the course of your career,
it’s going to be that sense of purpose that will keep you going on.

Doesn’t sound like a pleasant experience, right? So why do I
keep doing this? Because it’s not going to be bad all the time. There will be
days when you’ll feel like you’re on top of the world, where you feel like your
writing is exemplary and the plot is coming together quite nicely and your
protagonists are turning out to be multi-layered, well-written characters.
There is no better high than knowing you are a creator of your own little
fully-functioning world. It’s the best feeling I know, and also mentally
rewarding. But to write is also to understand that there will be lows as well
as highs, and you need to be of the mindset where having one or two or seventeen
bad days doesn’t matter if you’ve got a purpose.

Writing sounds like an easy job – after all, it costs
nothing to put words on paper. But if you allow yourself to get caught up in
the business of writing, then you’ll need to do the time. You need to accept
rejections and criticisms. You’ll have to familiarize yourself with long
periods of frustration when a manuscript isn’t coming out the way you want it
to, or when you can’t figure out how to push a plot forward. You need to learn
not to give up when these happen, learn not to abandon your work. Because you
can’t be a writer until you see your novels through to the end, even if it
takes years. You need to love reading all kinds of books, even those you never
thought you’d read, to expand your mind and accept perspectives that aren’t
necessarily your own, to understand why your work needs diverse views, and why
this makes your writing more well-rounded. You need purpose. You need a reason
to write that goes beyond the material rewards. It’s hard work, but it’s good
work.

And if you don’t have that, well – there’s always day
trading.