When he wrote “If You Want to Write a Book, Write Every Day or Quit Now,” I believe Stephen Hunter meant to use himself as the standard in which to persuade others to finish their manuscripts. I’ve seen this model in patriarchal and academic spaces that share his overly competitive statement “I will beat them all,” which he tries to play off as a joke, as a humbled ode to those “smarter, more talented, better looking” with “better teeth, more hair, better bodies.” Stephen Hunter is very accomplished, Stephen Hunter argues, because Stephen Hunter is very focused. He doesn’t get distracted by silly things like love and “so many other dazzling prospects.” Well, then. Stephen Hunter does sound down right invincible—he doesn’t “do regrets” because, as he informs us, he doesn’t have to—so forgive me if I don’t quite understand his extended desire for self-deprecation by comparing himself to “better” men (I’m not sure women count as “poor, good-looking devils” whom later in his essay just want to “get laid”) who dress better and have better talent and better bodies, but just can’t seem to finish, better as they might be.
Compliments come easy if you see yourself as undefeated.
I also believe Hunter wanted to send that kind of tough-love message that relies on the same pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps ideology that I’ve heard before, and always from afar, one that discounts a variety of socio-economic factors, among many others, not discounting those, according to Hunter, who have “spouses [who] will begin to grouse over undone errands and abandoned socks on the steps.” (I don’t think my husband Brian has ever groused, but I will check in with him and get back to you.)
But I also decided, at a very late hour, at this very late hour in which is preventing me from handing this in—that is, the current, soon-to-be-revised version of this essay—I really don’t want this to focus on Stephen Hunter, or how his process is the only correct way, less our own processes leave us “breathing raggedly through nasal channels that feel like Navajo pottery.” (Yes, I don’t know what that means either.)
So, I don’t know about you, but I don’t respond well to ultimatums—”write every day or quit now”—however well-intentioned. Who does, anyway? It’s hard enough to “grade” creative writing in academic settings, to demand finished portfolios, especially from a student who’s working a full-time job while juggling a full load of classes, sometimes has a family to help support. I don’t want to give alternative advice (other than: don’t quit, keep writing) because I damn well know there’s not one way to get something done.
I’m a believer in writing as much as you can, though this is not the same as the “you must or quit” of writing every day. I’m a believer in acknowledging the days you do not, cannot, write. Even if those days happen quite often in a single year. Or two. Or, in my case, nearly six.
It’s really late, and I have chronic insomnia, paired with a restless mind, so bear with me.
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Though raised Buddhist, my husband Brian is an atheist. He believes you get one life, one shot, a very brief shot at the doing. He believes there is a difference between being and doing. My mother who grew up raising her many brothers and sisters, and has been working for most of her life, often two jobs at a time; now seventy, she is still working, and agrees with Brian.
No doubt my mother would at least agree with Hunter’s conclusion that one should “FINISH THE DAMN BOOK”—she has exclaimed these words, in fact. (I imagine Hunter challenging her to a contest to see who’s better at “whistling ‘Dixie’ on one foot backwards blindfolded.” My mother Esperanza Gomez would win. But I digress).
My mother would agree because she strives for me to obtain that kind of doing.
Because my mother’s doing has often gone unrewarded, unrecognized, unseen. And she’s very aware of this.
She’s been an hourly worker all her life, clocking out and in, always on someone else’s schedule. Among her most recent gigs: sales representative at Macy’s and working with ESL students, the latter which she finds rewarding not for herself, but for them. She calls it “investing in the future” although she will personally reap no financial dividends. She and my father have lived paycheck to paycheck for most of their lives; that’s the circumstances in which I was raised. She wanted a different life for my brother and me. She wanted our doing to be seen, but moreover, to give us financial stability.
And time and again, I’ve had to explain to her what constitutes as doing for a writer is complicated, especially if you are a poet, because there is not always a difference between being and doing. That writing sometimes also necessitates an unequal balance between the two in the actual finishing of a work, whether it’s a poem or a book. That sometimes you nosedive and disappear, and the only thing left to do is come up to breathe.
Once, not so long ago, it took me nearly six years to surface.
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These days, I write often. I was hired to write weekly for this space at the Kenyon Review blog. (I remember when I first started here, a male poet informed me I’d run out of things to write about, that I would quit after a few months. He was wrong, but I digress.) I did take a month off, just last month in fact, to focus on a large project, which also involves writing. So I do write often. But that was not always the case.
I repeat: this was not always the case.
For a good five or six years, I didn’t really publish anything. I was not visible in writing. I could not be found through writing. While tweeting, for example, is a form of writing, I wasn’t on social media (which in Jerusalem in 2003 wasn’t the monster and godsend that it is today). I checked my personal email sporadically. I wrote back rarely. I did hand-write a few letters to friends, but unless they show them to me now, there’s no record for me to keep of what I wrote to them. I did keep journals, but lost two of them when I moved back to New York because I moved around so frequently during those years. Whatever was in them is gone.
In fact, you could say there was quite a bit of gone-ness to my writing process in those years. I wasn’t visible. I wasn’t found. And with the exception of a few people on a regular basis, to everyone else in my life—including my parents, who I avoided calling—I was gone.
Now I did do some writing during this time. Some of it I ended up publishing—years later, after extensive revisions. But I didn’t write every day because I was in a graduate program I didn’t want to be in. Because I didn’t like living in Jerusalem. Because I couldn’t hear the music. Because upon moving back to the States, I was so broke I would go into stores and stare at the dollar noodles I could not afford. Because even though I’d started adjuncting at three different colleges, my paychecks wouldn’t arrive for another month—or two. And I had rent to pay. I did not eat some days. I certainly did not have health care. I had no fixed address which drove my various HRs crazy. I couldn’t afford a P.O. Box. There came a kind of normalcy to this—the very inheritance my parents feared I would repeat. I was ashamed of hiding this from them, that even with both my MFA and a secondary graduate program I never completed, I had not realized their American Dream. I had not finished anything big like a book.
In those years of gone-ness, I had no idea what I was doing. I was, in fact, in my mid-twenties very good at not having a clue at what I was doing, although I knew what I wanted to do, which was write. At least, I thought then, I had made it back to New York. And I found myself writing again, writing more, albeit slowly, albeit not every day.
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In 2012, three things happened within the span of a summer: I had my first book of poems accepted by a press; I lost my balance in the middle of Queens Boulevard; and I met the man who would become my husband. What followed was recurring numbness on one side of my body, tingling, head pain—and love.
I did a lot of readings for my first book, quite a few with poets and writers I love and admire, though at the time many did not know I was often in pain.
What has resulted is a stronger dedication to both writing (the doing) and living (the being)—and sometimes, truancy. One week when I could (should) be working on prose, I write poems instead. When I have revisions to make, I start something new. Say, that weekend, after teaching prep is completed and the most pressing deadlines are met and I begin to look at the something new I started, I decide to spend the evening—as cheesy as this sounds—wanting to be held by my husband while we watch a really bad movie (I’m talking Attack of the Killer Tomatoes bad), though I don’t know if a bad movie qualifies as one of Hunter’s distracting, “dazzling prospects.” Perhaps I’m eager to finish things but also prioritize love because my body often still hurts. Perhaps because my husband is right: time here is brief on earth, and sometimes the doing of those things that go unrecognized and unseen by others in our professions are what make us most alive. If that means I sometimes give into distraction, then I will tell you this:
On our second date, I forgot I was carrying a jug in my backpack to collect my urine for twenty-four hours for yet another medical test. I was so lost in our conversation that it wasn’t until I caught sight of my backpack for a moment, that I suddenly remembered that only two weeks before, I’d fallen on Queens Boulevard. By the end of the night, I told Brian that I was ill, and that we should break up. He smiled. He took my backpack and shouldered it until we reached my apartment. He slept over. He took two trains with me early the next morning, to make a seven a.m. appointment to turn in my jug and get my blood drawn. He was the one who carried the jug on two different trains. He stayed through my appointment. He bought us egg sandwiches and then dropped me off in front of one of the colleges I adjunct for, and told me he’d be back at my place after work.
Even after all that, I didn’t believe him.
Even when the bell rung that night and he came up and told me I was going to be okay, and even if I wasn’t, he wasn’t going anywhere.
That event changed everything in my life. Everything. Because life is brief, no matter who you think you are beating or besting. Because though some may keep score, I do not grieve those six years I lost. My closest friends are kind people, and they tell me when I came back to New York from Jerusalem, I really did come back. But I’m not the same person. I let the broken-be be just that. I’m not sure what regret is anymore, or if I have them, because time is brief and when I do finish something, like this essay, it has nothing to do with being “better” with habit or time management than others. It’s something far more messy and full of contradictions. It’s full of glorious, radiant failures. But they are my own, and they are part of my process.
These are my reasons alone. Everyone is different. Writers are driven by different impulses, different demons. I too have demons that at first did not allow me to finish much of anything—until I took them and put them into the poems themselves. And then prose. My body says again and again: time is brief. I listen. I write. But I also still watch bad movies with my husband or worse—we take time off to see family which results in no time alone to write because Brian’s mom is reaching for my hand as we shop for dinner in Hong Kong, wandering the streets in the kind of heat that leaves my head spinning and blissful, or running around with my niece at family reunions in the Rio Grande Valley, with so many hours of reading to my wonderful, beautiful niece, and talking about planets and NASA and basketball and the million things we have to cover with a certain urgency. Because our trips are never long enough and our time together is brief, always too brief.
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Lastly—and this is not meant to come for Stephen Hunter’s “I will beat them all” but—I would like to end this piece in a more collective spirit of sharing the work and news of others, just a few of the many whom keeps me in dialogue with the literary worlds being created:
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo will be a Harper Collins author. The newest issue of Poetry celebrates Gwendolyn Brooks. There’s an amazing new journal called The Ellis Review, headed and staffed by Jasmine Cui, Logan February, Brianna Riggio, Ty Kiatathikom and Valerie Wu. Ariel Francisco just had a poem accepted by The American Poetry Review. Jenn Givhan has three new poems (one of which you can read here) in Nine Mile Magazine. Scout Poetry wrote a wonderful review of Cynthia Manick’s Blue Hallelejahs. Eduardo Corral is reading with Yiyun Li in the fall. Fairy Tale Review recently republished some early poems of W. Todd Kaneko—who first brought my attention to the Hunter essay on Facebook—on their website.
Oh, and in case you missed it, Paige Lewis’s cat is in a self-imposed “timeout and now he’s mad about it.”
If ever there were a writing status that blurs the lines of being and doing.