I’m sure you know that almost all the memes and inspirational quotes people share on social media are what we experts refer to as bollocks. Google any old crap and sure enough you’ll find something that, on the face of it, feels meaningful and profound until you actually think about it and conclude it doesn’t mean anything. Yet, from time to time, one comes across something that makes some kind of sense in that it resonates with you, or in my case, me. And today I found this one by the writer Kurt Vonnegut:
I admit that my knowledge of Vonnegut’s work is threadbare, in that I have heard of him, but that’s as far as it goes. I do like it though because I feel it sums up my efforts over nearly 10 years to ‘make it’ as a writer. But first, I need to post the quote in its entirety because the one I have copied and pasted from X (formerly twitter) isn’t complete. A bit at the beginning has been edited out, so at the risk of losing your attention and indeed interest in this blog, I’m going to post the entire thing:
“If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
(I appreciate the addition adds nothing to continuity, I am sad enough to want to quote Vonnegut precisely and not omit “If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is”.)
Anyway, in the unlikely event you’re still with me, let’s get back to the point and the point is I have, despite mutterings to the contrary, always done it to the best of my ability. I regard this blog as the most important work of my life, the culmination of a lifetime’s desire to write as much as possible, previously denied to me due to the need to do paid work in order to avoid starvation and the belief I wasn’t a good enough writer. And given that this is my 5474th blog in nearly 10 years – I didn’t make that number up – you’ll have to agree that in one way or another it’s been a success of sorts. In fact, over a quarter of a million readers is testament to my great success which, given that number of over nearly a decade isn’t nearly as impressive as I might think.
I am certainly limited in my artistic abilities since I can’t sketch, draw or paint, I can’t play an instrument, I can’t sing or dance oir do anything else that might be considered art. But I can, after a fashion, write.
Mistakenly, I did believe for a short while that I would be able to make a living from “the arts” but reality soon slapped me in the face with a metaphorical cold, wet flannel, before it deposited an imaginary bucket of shit over my head. I felt I could write reasonably well, given that my ADHD/depression addled brain struggled with the technical stuff like basic grammar, I might be recognised and snapped up by a top media outlet. I think all of us with a modicum of talent think that way at some time or other but the wacky world of creative writing, or any kind of writing come to think of it, is in terms of making a living out of it but a distant dream for almost all creative writers. So, us creative types – I mean; just read that again: us creative types. Christ – keep banging on closed and indeed heavily locked doors until the dream is over, which I suspect will be the time we shuffle off out mortal coils.
No one has asked me, “Why do you do it?” but I have the answer at hand if anyone ever does. It’s because I love writing, it makes my soul grow and I have created something from nothing. I do not consider writing to be a gift because I work bloody hard at it. I am always thinking about what to write and how to write it and while I do not have access to an editor, a proof-reader or even a ghostwriter – you have probably long worked that one out yourself – what you get is always my best. (You can make your own joke about the last line.)
It occurred to me, far later than it should have done, that the best things in life are sometimes free. I left the world of full-time work ten years before my state pension age and will never regret losing most of that income or any of the material things I might have been able to buy with it. Given the choice of working to the retirement age, or even death in service, and doing what I really want to do, which is this, it’s a very easy choice.
I’m never going to earn a living at this writing malarkey, although you can buy me a coffee if you think at least some of it was worth reading. But I can still find the fulfilment I never found in other aspects of life. Kurt Vonnegut’s quote holds true to me and I suspect it always will, so unless I fall under a bus later today (I couldn’t afford to fall under a taxi), there’s a lot more of this to come.
