Dear Friends,
This is adapted from a talk I gave recently for some college students. At the partner site
, writes gorgeously on a visit to his childhood home.Best,
Sam
TEN THINGS THAT I WISH I KNEW WHEN I WAS YOUR AGE
Ok. Who here wants to be an artist — considers themselves a creative person, art, music, etc — and wants that to be a significant part of their lives?
[Hands raised]
And who here wants to be a writer, reads a lot, writes a lot, wants writing to be a major part of their lives?
[Hands raised]
Ok. This talk is called “Ten Things That I Wish I Knew When I Was Your Age,’ and that’s for everyone here, but I’m going to be talking mostly to those of you who just raised your hands.
I’m not coming from a position of having a tremendous amount of money — I expect that all the law students here, if nobody else, will make much more — and I’ve worked on some interesting projects but wouldn’t consider myself successful. But I’ve done a lot of internal work to write and to make writing a central part of my life, and that’s something that’s very important and very fulfilling for me, and that’s what I want to talk about.
So rule number one is: Everything Is Interesting. When you’re young - and this is the way we structure education — the input you get is to be very aspirational. We’re trying to take the best of the world and to put it into a packagable format for you, and there are reasons for that, but if you want to write, or you want to be creative, the thing to do is to just inhale everything. A lot of that starts with reading. This really great playwright Annie Baker says of writing, “There’s a very clear and straightforward way to be a better writer, but for some reason it makes everybody upset to hear it, and that’s to read. The more you read, the better your writing will be.” And that’s basically what school is. We know that there’s a limited time in which your brains are really plastic enough to absorb what you take in and to be formed by it, so we just pour as much text as we can into you.
But that sense of receptivity goes beyond reading. Actually, everything going on around you is interesting. What happens in your lives in adolescence is really interesting — and adults tend to go to a lot of trouble to reclaim that — so, if you can, it’s a good idea to record that and to take it seriously. If I could go back in time, I really would have started keeping a notebook earlier — sometime in my adolescence. That’s usually the moment when somebody crosses over into being a ‘writer’ and it’s great to be able to do it sooner rather than later. There are impulses that people have when they’re young. There’s that thing where you’re at a party and you feel awkward and you kind of stand off to the side and, like you’re an anthropologist, try to figure out the dynamics of what’s going on — and that’s great, that’s a really good impulse. And there’s keeping a diary. And then there’s the moment when you start keeping a notebook — that was a really big deal for me. It was right after college, and the world had quieted down a lot, and I had these notebooks and I would just fill them up. It was fragments, it was all kinds of stuff that I would probably never make use of, but it was that impulse (which I wish I’d had before) that anything — my thoughts, my feelings, my immediate surroundings, my memories — that anything could be interesting. The idea is that all of these things — what your read, what you observe, what you remember — are a well that you can draw from later on; and the more capacious the well, the more interesting that your work will eventually be.
The second rule is: You Are Enough. There’s tremendous pressure, especially in college, to be the best version of yourself. You envision yourself in all these idealized, successful ways, and we encourage that and we give you different tools and resources for it. We surround you with structures and we surround you with other people your own age, and that can be great, but it also means that you’re constantly comparing yourselves with other people around you. And I think I went through a whole journey, that took longer than it should have, to realize that, just as I was, I was enough. That much of my character and personality were inscribed from birth and that there was nothing much I could change about key components of myself, even if I wanted to. So what’s really important to realize, and to take in, is that you are perfect just as you are, that you need to love yourself exactly as you are now, not love yourself for how you’re going to be or to love yourself contingent on one or another accomplishment that you expect to have. And also, by the way, the more you love yourself and treat yourself with respect, the more people will be drawn to you, like to a magnet.
There are a few books that are right for the age you are now, that I would really encourage you to read, because they all seem to have a sell-by date on them, and when you’re about 30 or 40, they lose their magic, but they really speak to being 20, and they all share this sense of extreme self-acceptance. The books that mattered for me at this age were Siddhartha and Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus, and Leaves of Grass (which doesn’t have a sell-by date) by Walt Whitman. Whitman starts it with “I celebrate myself and sing myself and what I assume you shall assume.” The point isn’t to be narcissistic or self-aggrandizing. The point is that it is your divine task to celebrate yourself, and then to have the maturity to recognize that everyone else has an equally capacious, complicated self that is equally worthy of infinite celebration.
So the writing corollary of that is to not to get too hung up on one idea of yourself. There’s a great temptation at this age to identify the thing you do well and then to really lean into that, and that’s ok — that’s part of finding a career — but I would really encourage you to not push yourself too much into a mold, especially in your creative work. You can write about anything in any form. You can be incoherent to yourself. Whitman’s line is: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then. I contradict myself. I contain multitudes.” And the idea is that you treat all these disparate, contradictory aspects of yourself with the same unstinting self-love.
For me, I got into this place after college where I was writing but it wasn’t really working. I was unhappy with my life, and the idea was that you were supposed to kind of write about yourself or in your voice, and I didn’t feel like I had that, or had experiences that I particularly wanted to share, and then at some point I started hearing voices talking to each other, and I didn’t know who they were, but I was curious about them and started trying to write down their conversations, and then I started writing plays — and at the time I really didn’t know what the structure was of plays, or how to write plays, but I tried to do that, and that really freed me up. It took me to a different part of myself that I didn’t know existed and then eventually I was able to come back and write about things related to my own life in something like my own voice.
Rule number three is: Adults know more than you. Rule number two still holds — your are enough and you need to love yourselves boundlessly — but you will also notice that adults, and this is perplexing and annoying, are better than you in all kinds of ways. It’s annoying also because adults, in so many ways, are also really pathetic. They’re dealing with aging. They tend to be boring — they stick to the same routines. And they’re very often afraid in ways that you guys aren’t — maybe they have kids and they’re terrified all the time about their kids; maybe they have jobs and they’ll do anything to keep their jobs — but you’ll get out in the workforce and you’ll work with people who aren’t smarter than you and are not definitely cooler than you, but they are better, simply because they’ve had more time to do the thing that you are trying to do, and so they have the advantage of repetition and they have experience.
There’s a line from a David Foster Wallace commencement address (I actually think he stole it from AA) where he says: “There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’” And the point is that that awareness of water only comes with time and repetition — that when you’re young, you need to notice all the things in your vicinity and sightline, and it takes the world quieting down, and, honestly, takes becoming a little bit lame to start to notice the contours of the water surrounding you.
So the corollary point for writers is just that there’s a difficult phase. You’re supposed to “write what you know” — that’s the usual advice that everybody gives — but you feel that you don’t know anything and you’re at a disadvantage compared to everybody else who has more experience, and then the temptation becomes overwhelming to imitate the people you admire, and you find yourself wrenching your voice into something that’s unrecognizable. And the thing to do is to just be patient with yourself, know that it’s a long and difficult phase, that you’ll have to both take in your influences and separate yourself from them, that you’ll probably spend your 20s developing your “voice,” and the good news is that you can’t help but get older, have more experience, become lamer, start to catch hold of the shape of water and of how it interacts specifically with you.
Rule number four is: You cannot believe how much time you have. I have this vivid memory of leaving college and being by my phone on a Friday night and realizing suddenly that the phone wasn’t ringing — by the end of college, there were always friends, parties, always events — and realizing that the phone wasn’t going to ring all night and that it might never start ringing in the same way again. And that, actually, was an excruciating revelation.
Here’s what Joseph Brodsky said in a commencement address of his:
A substantial part of what lies ahead of you will be claimed by boredom. No humanities faculty prepares you for that eventuality. Neither science nor humanities offers courses in boredom. The worst monotonous drone coming from a lectern or textbook is nothing compared to the psychological Sahara that starts in your bedroom and spurs the horizon.
I came across that when I was about 22, and I was very taken by it. Here was a guy who, from a prison sentence, had spent a couple of years mashing rocks together in the Arctic Circle, and what was on his mind was the agonies of boredom after college graduation, but he was obviously right, and the trick — and a big part of writing — is to learn to accept that and to make a home in it.
I strongly believe that writing — more than stories, more than craft, more than language, more than anything — is the art of learning to be alone. And, after a while, you start to become friends with how much time you have and how lonely you are going to be for so much of that time. That becomes your resource — just as much as all the books and impressions that you poured into yourself when you were younger — and you start to look forward to that time and to crave it, because that’s the time that you do your work in. I always find myself feeling a bit bad for people who don’t have a craft that they want to work on because I really don’t know what they do with all that time when they’re on their own — and suspect that they spend much of it just wishing that they had company.
Rule number five — this isn’t really a rule, more a fact — is: Your mid-20s will probably be terrible. The way that we structure things is that we give you this impression of a smooth ascent — you’re in high school and then you go to college, you’re a freshman and then you get to become a senior, and then you’re the president of all these clubs, or run all these extracurriculars, and you feel (rightly) like you’re very impressive and capable of all these things, and then suddenly, when you’re really feeling good, we pull out the rug from under you. We send you back to the very beginning. Now you’re broke (or in debt), you’re in this new status hierarchy, which is money, and where you’re at the very bottom. If you do things right, you’re maybe getting coffee for some tyrannical boss. If you try to be independent and stay out of it, then you’re really a loser. Meanwhile, all these friends who you were surrounded by and who were the center of your life suddenly disappear. What’s worse, it turns out that some of them seem to be able to swim right away in this new environment, and if you’re having trouble doing that, hearing about them is excruciating. And then there are a few demons that tend to show up. There’s the demon of envy, the demon of self-loathing, the demon of anxiety, the demon of paralysis (which is a bad one).
There’s no advice here really: just know that this is probably going to happen, and in spite of all the voices that start to accumulating inside of you, it’s not your fault — it’s just the way that the education and career system are structured.
If there is a piece of advice here for creative types, it’s: if you start something, finish it. Something else that you’ll start noticing around this time is that there are a lot of different voices (even different selves) clamoring inside of you, so that if you start a project you’ll find yourself estranged from it by the time you get to the end or even the middle — you’ll simply feel very different from how you did when you started it. And the thing to do is to just try to force yourself to finish — that you’ll feel better getting to the end of something that you hate and never show to anyone than you will abandoning something in the middle and then having all these uncompleted projects strewn around in your psyche. This quote applies more to rule number four than it does here, but I’ll quote it anyway. It’s from a poem by Charles Bukowski: “I've lived with some gorgeous women and I was so bewitched by those beautiful creatures that
my eyebrows twitched. But I'd rather drive to New York backwards than to live with any of them again….In their case as in mine they will find that madness is caused by not being often enough alone.”
The point is that, at some point, the temptation towards distraction becomes overwhelming but is to be resisted. It can be awful to be alone, awful to work on things that you don’t like and seem alien from you, but it’s exactly in that slough of time that strength (and, actually, sanity) are to be found.
Rule number six is: To pay attention to your energy. Our education system emphasizes analysis and information, and that’s all important, but what can be overlooked — I basically didn’t think about this at all or even believe in it really until my late 20s — is energy, intuition, the emotional plane in which you really live. Then I had some very interesting experiences, not all of them entirely legal, and started to realize how much more powerful energy and vibration are than any of the analytic modes that we really drill into you in school. I would say anything that’s helpful to you in discovering this side of yourselves is great — whether it’s self-help books, hippie wisdom, whatever. I got very interested in all sorts of bottom-shelf stuff that I would have proudly passed over when I was younger.
The writing corollary to this is that, if the previous rule was that you have to finish anything you start, then you should be careful about what you start. You should know that anything you work on takes on a life of its own and makes its own demands, that you’re going to change immensely as you work on something, that any project is going to drain a great deal of your energy. So, especially as you’re developing discipline and confidence, and your lives are in a certain amount of flux, you want to be very judicious about what you commit to — really pay attention to your energy and to what you have a prayer of finishing. I remember when I started writing seriously that I had this metaphor in my mind that my first projects were always done in sight of the coastline (there were various limitations within the form, particularly in playwriting, that kept me from being too ambitious) and then there were projects where you set out into the open sea and you simply don’t know if there is another side or not — and it’s good to hold off onto those projects until you are really confident in your own energy. A valuable quote for me at this time was from Jonathan Franzen, who said, “You see more sitting still than chasing after.” His point was that there is a lot of pressure on artistic types in their 20s to go the full Hemingway — to try to have as full and adventurous a life as possible — but there’s a real risk there of dissipating your energy, and there’s a great deal to be said for hoarding your energy and relying on the very significant experiences you’ve had in your life (whether you recognize them as significant or not) up till that point.
Rule number seven is: Success is mostly confidence. You will meet people, especially in the workforce, who seem less intelligent than you are, are less competent than you, but are more successful — and they will drive you crazy, but part of what’s driving you crazy about them is that they’re on to something, and it’s valuable to learn from them. This is related to the point about energy. In school, we emphasize craft and competence, but what people are really drawn to is good energy, healthy self-love, confidence, and they will make all kinds of allowances for people who possess those qualities.
The writing corollary to that is that there are no rules — that you can allow your energy and confidence to drive you wherever you want to go. I remember that I’d been writing plays for a couple of years, and they really were a slog — it was slow and it was anxiety-ridden — and then I was in an unfamiliar setting with some very quiet time to myself and I wrote a whole play in a day. And I really thought there was something wrong with that, like I was violating some basic rules of craft, but it was actually ok, and I think that the plays I started writing next were much freer and more interesting. It’s like if you have already gone through the excruciating periods of finding your voice and developing your craft, that you can at some point start to remove all the scaffolding of self-doubt, and then, when you create, you can just go.
And I’ll just say this, that a lot of this business of confidence seems to be harder for women than for men. Here is how Elizabeth Gilbert puts it:
Some of that exclusion is due to regular old misogyny, but it’s also true that — all too often — women are the ones holding themselves back from participating in the first place. Now, I cannot imagine where women ever got the idea that they must be perfect in order to be loved or successful. (Ha ha ha! Just kidding! I can totally imagine: We got it from every single message society has ever sent us! Thanks, all of human history!) But we women must break this habit in ourselves — and we are the only ones who can break it. At some point, you really just have to finish your work and release it as is — if only so that you can go on to make other things with a glad and determined heart. Which is the entire point. Or should be.
My experience has really jibed with this. In school, in the workforce, women have been better and more competent. Full stop. But over and over again, I see this block about extreme self-confidence that everybody has but that women I know especially seem to have — and if there are some aspects of male conditioning that help us to pull out our self-doubt and to engage in radical self-acceptance, those tools seem to be less available in how women are conditioned and that means that women really have to find that within themselves and on their own — which is, in any case, the only domain where it’s possible to really develop that kind of self-confidence.
Rule number eight is related. It’s: The only route to competence is incompetence. That means that you’re going to be unhappy with your work for a long time (maybe a very long time), because nobody likes being incompetent, especially at the thing that they love to do, but it’s the only possible way through. Even extreme self-confidence doesn’t help all that much with this, because your incompetence is bound sooner to later to dent your confidence. The only way here is will, persistence — just loving yourself and loving what you do even if (maybe objectively) it’s “bad.”
If the advice for writers in the last rule is “that there are no rules,” there’s maybe one rule, and that rule is that you have to take risks — you’ll get to different kinds of crossroads in your work and you’ll always want to take the path that’s more uncomfortable, weirder, that the saner parts of yourself are shying away from. Far more than competence or craft, I’m convinced, it’s these choices that are actually what other people really respond to. Because we all know what fear is, and how debilitating it can be — so the people we respect are the ones who push through that, and, usually, the work that survives is work that is sort of weird or sort of inexplicable but represents, deep down, some courageous leap.
At your age there tends to be this obsession with talent. Talent exists — there’s no question about it. Some people open their mouths and have this beautiful singing voice. Some people start writing and there’s something just impressive about the way they express themselves. But people with talent tend to need their own rules for a creative life, because they don’t know how they got their talent and if for some reason they lose their gift it’s very difficult for them to find it again. I was very impressed by this quote I came across — I think it’s from Stella Adler or Uta Hagen, or maybe I just confabulated it — that “an actor’s talent is their courage.” And that seems like a better, or at least more useful, definition of talent than anything else. You’ll get to these different crossroads in your work where there’s some choice that you really don’t want to take — Colson Whitehead talks about getting to slavery and just really not wanting to write about it; Annie Baker talks about this moment when she felt that she had to choose lots of silence in her plays, taking the risk of making her plays slow and boring and alienating — and your courage, which is also your talent, is to take that choice, which somewhere inside yourself you know is the right thing to do, and that may make your work unmarketable or even unreadable but will also make it original and deserving of respect.
Rule number nine is: There is no substitute for work. Somewhere in my mid-20s, I came across Malcolm Gladwell’s idea about the 10,000 hour rule, and partly because I was really annoyed by Gladwell I was also really annoyed by this rule, but basically he was right. “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good, it’s the thing that makes you good,” Gladwell writes.
What’s annoying and intimidating about the 10,000 hour thing is that it really is a lot of hours. And a lot of people I know spend a great deal of time looking for shortcuts around that — they think that if they’re really talented, or get their energy aligned in the right way, then they can skip the 10,000 hours, but, as far as I can see, it just doesn’t work like that. And it’s like rule number four about endless time. It can feel that time is working against you, or that the 10,000 hour thing is some impossible mountain for you to climb, but if you let yourself sink into the tempo of how time passes, or really merge with your discipline, then it’s much easier to live an (at least inwardly) fulfilling life.
For writers and artistic types, that means developing an iron discipline. Most writing teachers advise writing every day without fail. And, if you ever want to amuse yourself, you can read about the writing habits of all these very famous writers — and it’s almost impossible to come up with a more neurotic, more deranged bunch of people — John Cheever putting on a suit and tie to go to the boiler room of his building where he worked; Alice Walker checking into a hotel and then removing all the pictures from the walls when she wanted to start a novel. But the point is that they found something that worked for them and kept at it. “I was a man in a room and I felt that there was something important about men in rooms,” said Don DeLillo of his writing habits. “I get a fine, warm feeling when I’m doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let’s face it, writing is hell,” said William Styron. The point is: whatever works.
For me, there was a place I got to — it had to do with concentrating more on writing at a point when that felt like an utter dead end as opposed to concentrating more on my cool-sounding job — and I realized that it was really important, even if nobody else understood it, to put valuable time in to writing. The voice in my head was that if writing didn’t work out for me because I wasn’t talented or wasn’t good, then I could be ok with that; but if writing didn’t work out because I hadn’t put time into it, then I would never be able to forgive myself. Because the thing about discipline — in contrast to something like ability — is that it’s something that you have complete control over. If you’re bad at writing, then that’s on your lucky star, or whatever. But if you don’t put in the time, then that’s on you.
The tenth and last rule is: You are going to put an insane amount of meaningful time into any meaningful work that you do so you may as well love it. In the West, there are, I think, two great myths about creativity. There’s the myth of Mozart — which is that some people come from the stars imbued with talent and there’s nothing anybody else can do to catch up with them. And then there’s the myth of Beethoven, which is a bit more democratic but is that the route to creativity is through relentless self-torture. I really do think there’s another way. I started to come across it in my early 30s, it was in the Isaac Babel line, “And Benya Krik, he got his way, because he had passion, and passion rules the world,” and in some of David Lynch’s advice about creativity, and I started noticing that my writing had a greater ease to it and the activity was giving me pleasure in a way that definitely wasn’t the case in my 20s and which I didn’t know I was allowed to feel.
If the last piece of advice for writers was that you have to develop an iron discipline and be ruthless with yourself and ruthless with everybody else about maintaining it, the advice here is that discipline actually comes in two parts, and the second part is to forgive yourself completely and generously if you deviate from your discipline. (And actually this second part is just important as the first part.) It’s like keeping a diary. Usually, people start keeping a diary and they’re meticulous about recording everything for every day, and then they miss a few days, and they start going back and start filling in the days they missed and then they get frustrated and guilty and then they get angry at themselves — and then they stop keeping a diary altogether. At least that’s been my experience and I’ve never been able to keep a diary. But. No. The way it works is that life happens, sometimes you miss days or weeks or years, and then you can’t go back and get that lost time, you just have to pick up where you left off and move forward and do so as much as possible without self-recrimination because the whole point of the activity is to take pleasure in it, which is why (or should be why) you decided to do it, and to devote your life to it, in the first place.
Ha, I could have used this about 20 years ago...
Gold.