Recipe for writing joy: Go big. Go bigger. Go home and fucking dance in the kitchen. Be really full on with your love. Love yourself enough to do the biggest work you can imagine. Believe enough to submit it. Dream the hugest things and go after them.
Some of them will not work out. People will fail to pay you. Books will sometimes flop. But when you’re done, if you do it, your work will exist, and it’s worth it.
It is as hard to do small things as it is to do large ones. Do the most you can imagine. Doing the half version will only mean you’ll feel frustrated and keep scratching at the same projects.
For me, seriously, my goal is to topple the structures of toxic hierarchy. On as many levels as I can. All at once. I want damn equality and that is why I write these books. Stories make the world.
Everything I’ve ever done as a writer has been because of sudden OMGGGGGGG ideas about how to change the world. And then, you know, I sat down and wrote them as hard as I could.
Today, 20+ years of kicking at the project, writing and writing and writing, publishing all the damn time, I feel pretty excited, but not satisfied. I have way more to do. But the things I’ve gotten to do so far? Rule.
And that’s because I broke rules. All the time. People told me I should write all of my books in the same genre, in the same form, that I shouldn’t try to do everything I wanted to do. Fuck that noise.
I’ve published books that live in all kinds of bookshelves. I’ve edited. I’ve written plays. This new BEOWULF translation? Poetry and translation at once. I do not suffer from lack of fun.
The last time I published any poetry, I was about 17, but god I started out a poet. There were years when all I did was write poems. It feels so perfect to roll back around to that at age 40.
All this is to say: it is not to late to show up for your life. You can be an activist and revolutionary and writer all at once. You can have love. You can give the world the most you have in you. You can start now.
All this is also to say, your most is glorious. No one else’s standards of most apply. Do the things YOU imagine. Don’t try to make yourself into someone else’s version of a How To Be A Writer. Be the writer you are, & reach for the most amazing work you can do.
Get up into things and seek to amaze yourself. Think there are things that are too hard to write? There are. Approach and learn how to get into those stories. Tell them in whispers. Teach yourself new myths and imagine new truths. Those are yours.
You can make yourself into the person you wish you were. It takes work and small steps and brave goals. Set those brave impossible goals. Tell yourself you are on the right path. Don’t die today. Live. Stay alive. Keep pushing yourself into your best case.
People will tell you things about the world, ways in which they think you might fail. Some of the things they tell you might be right. Failure can be survived. Keep making a list of your best version, and keep ticking items off. Keep learning. Write your world.
You can do it. You can be completely daunted and scared, and still, if you do the work to learn how to write, and do the work of writing, you can make stories people will read. You can change myths people think they’ve committed to memory. You can rock this place.
My career, right now, is what about 23 years of commitment to rocking this place as hard as I could manage to rock it, looks like. My version. Old stories reshaped. New stories spitting at old structures. New translations of old songs. Projects that are too weird, done anyway.
And let me say it loud: it will not all work. I have books that flopped so flat they died. I have a book that meant everything to me and every single publisher passed on it. Hard. It will be embarrassing and uncertain and sometimes fucking awful. This ain’t utopia.
This is just slow build and big ambition, and some luck. Not everyone gets everything they want. I don’t have everything I want. But when something goes right, even in the wrong direction, I try to celebrate that shit.
And while I’m celebrating I start a new thing, on paper or in my head. Sometimes you have to write five things to sell one. That’s real. I have a drawer that I don’t look into. There are books there I will never publish. But I wrote them, and they wrote me to the next next thing.
I apply to things all the time and I don’t always get them. Whenever I get a no, I apply to another, and off it goes. It’s not personal. It’s just that there are lots of people and the world is full of no. You don’t need every yes. You need one, and then the next.
The first yes, though, is the one you tell yourself. That one’s huge. It’s when you say, I will do this anyway. I will do it because it matters to me to make this attempt at the summit. You will not be perfect. No one is perfect. It will be hard. Everything is hard.
But you don’t know what you can do until you try it. And trying is the reason you’re here. ❤️
It is never nothing to be alive and on this planet and able to make words. It is never nothing to have survived pain, to have kept yourself going, to be this tough thing who is a miracle. I am saying this to you. I’ve had to say it to myself. You are something.
