I started to think I might never write again. Why would I? Around 2018, I noticed it becoming a struggle. I didn’t want to anymore. I went to workshops to make myself externally accountable, and I set aside time to write, and I made it happen (sometimes). But the flow state was hard to achieve. My mind almost never cleared enough to just let the words through. 

Instead, my mind got louder. I couldn’t even have an idea for something I could write without a flood of institutionalized thinking (What would the market for this be? Could I get it published? Would anyone like it? What kind of person would like it? How would I market it? Do I need to get back on Twitter again for anyone to read it?) and traumatized thinking (intrusive thoughts about grad school, intrusive thoughts about exes, intrusive thoughts about my mental state, intrusive thoughts about former professors). Writing was not about clearing the way and letting something deeper arise; it became about forcing one thought to be louder than all the others.

This process was unsustainable, and in 2021, I made the conscious decision to give writing up. I moved to a new state for a new non-writing job. I attended exactly one writing workshop and decided never to go again. I didn’t attend a reading for three years, and I did not enjoy the one I then attended. I made no new friends in writing or the arts.

I thought I might feel empty, or that I would have trouble connecting with people, or I wouldn’t know what to do with myself—but that wasn’t what happened. What really happened was in a span of a few years, my life dramatically improved. I excelled at my tech job where I was valued and treated humanely. I made lots of friends with relatively little effort. I gained a lot of clarity about my interpersonal relationships and the will to remove harmful connections. I got sober. The things I worked for, I achieved.

This was not the experience I had with writing, or my life when I identified primarily as a writer. Every minor publication was achieved through hours of effort. Scholarships or prizes I won from one place broke even with fees I paid another. I increased my income a couple thousand dollars a year by getting aggressive with my current employers or making relatively horizontal moves to new employers. All of my romantic relationships, and most of my platonic relationships, made me feel crazy. When I was writing, in sheer effort and hours, I worked way harder and achieved way less.

If artistic achievement is about meritocracy, where was my reward? Even thinking the thought meant I wasn’t enlightened enough to deserve it.

If artistic achievement is about personal fulfillment, where was my joy? This couldn’t be the same me who spent hours a day as a teenager writing self-insert fanfiction about Teen Titans and Kingdom Hearts. Sure, writing towards goals couldn’t be the same as writing bad fantasies based on other people’s hard work. But why didn’t it feel even a little bit the same?

WRITING IS NOT WRITING

Profoundly lucky is the writer who achieves publication and accolades on the basis of their writing. For most of us, writing is the stuff we do to represent a personal brand. A writing teacher of any stripe gives a good business education when they tell you that your classmates are your network and your query letters are the most important work you’ll ever do.

Yes, the writing has to be done, and edited, and improved. You need to read, and have decent ideas, and thoughtfully execute them—the stuff of writing.

The craft of writing might be the Work, but there is other work. For every hour of writing, another hour or two must be spent somehow promoting that writing. You need to write about your writing and submit to agents and publishers, big and small. You need to be your own social media manager, ideally maintaining a presence on every major platform.

Writers are no longer made by just writing. They are made by branding, networking, advertising, and managing. They are made by the harmful stuff of corporations.

I am not completely incompatible with capitalism. I have made a conventional career for myself, and I’m not allergic to office customs and routine. But one of the defining realizations of my creative career is that I am completely incompatible with the institutions of writing. I have a kind of hustle and work ethic, but none for the painstaking, step-by-step way most successful writers earn their spot—and earn it they do.

Especially now, despite our cultural stories about youth and talent, most famous writers are not exploding on the scene because their exceptional talent was noticed independently by a gatekeeper. There were years of meeting as many other writers as possible and making one’s self memorable to them, thousands of Tweets and Instagrams made before one went viral, and dozens (if not hundreds) of query letters for a manuscript that was almost certainly not a first manuscript before one was published.

I want to be someone who can do this. I think I can even say I know how, and that before I gave writing up, I was building momentum. The energy I put in was, to some extent, paying off. My publications got shinier, my connections became more labyrinthian, and more exalted gatekeepers began to take notice. But every submission to a magazine, every handshake with a newly met poet, and every application to a relevant opportunity took something away from the part of me I needed to write at all. Until the writing stopped happening.

The narrative that you must hustle, hustle, hustle for your writing is disingenuous and unsound. The narrative is that this is the price for success, and if you respect your own writing, you will pay it. Our ancestors have been telling stories for tens of thousands of years, and the concept of personal branding has been around for a few tens. 

We haven’t even had enough time to unpack what all this means for writing. And what can we even expect from relative “success” in writing? For the opportunity cost of all that work, what can you even reasonably achieve?

WRITING IS NOT FINANCIALLY SOUND

Writing is a full-time profession for a small percentage of the people who intentionally write. Creative writing probably a laughably small percentage of that small percent. This isn’t news to anyone. 

Even the people distributing others’ writing are in trouble. Universities are closing their journals, and publishers (even large ones) are merging or shrinking or folding. There isn’t enough money to go around and there isn’t any easy way to solve it. 

Writers who say it’s a burden to pay $2-3 per reading fee and $15-50 for application fees for publications and other opportunities aren’t wrong. It does add up, and it does have the vague air of a pyramid scheme or a scam that you can easily pay hundreds of dollars a year just for someone’s consideration, with limited chance and no guarantee to earn that money back.

Journals and reading panels who say they must charge fees for their opportunities also aren’t wrong. Providing publication and retreats and educational opportunities and employment positions in creative writing costs money at the most basic level. It’s not unusual for editors to make less than minimum wage for their time, or no money at all.

Many publishers say the solution is for writers and readers to actually pay for their journal subscriptions to support the arts. It makes sense on paper, but is not unusual for journals to cost an hour or two of someone’s wages per issue. Writers gearing for relative success and exposure will also likely submit to at least one hundred publications per year. Who could pay for all those fees and buy the journals on top of that?

The funding and philanthropic landscape has also changed for the arts. Publications that have relied on grants have likely seen those grants dry up (especially in the post-2020 era). Personally, I find it difficult to care. Arts institutions are inherently elitist. They are selective, hierarchical, and basically unnecessary by nature. I would never take a dollar off of someone’s plate to put it in someone’s book binding. It doesn’t bother me that some funders are starting to feel the same way.

Everyone wants the money to come from somewhere else. It’s easy to say someone else isn’t doing enough. Many people could do more. When it comes to writing, I think most people engaging with the institutions give more than they get, in their money and time, then hear from all directions they haven’t given enough. Probably the single greatest risk to writers and publishers in the United States is the cost of housing, which writers and publishers are not going to fix.

WRITING MAKES ME VULNERABLE TO EXPLOITATIVE RELATIONSHIPS

The most unusual problem I developed in life while writing is my relationships became more unhealthy when creativity was an emphasis.

This is most easily understood in professional and educational relationships. You are “lucky” if you get to make any money at all while writing. You should be grateful to the university that mandates you to live under the poverty line because it pays you to learn, teach, and edit writing. You should be grateful to the employer that doesn’t pay enough for a studio apartment because you get to be in the field. You should work excessive overtime on what barely qualifies as a salary because if you are fired, a hundred other professional writers will line up and clamor for your place. For every boot lined with a little cash, there are dozens of writers begging to lick it.

While I made a few good, true, lifelong friends who have continued to love me with or without writing in the writing scene, the social scene itself was also nightmarish. Regular readings and salons had nearly impenetrable cliques. The social dynamics within them were mostly the same.

When going to a new community, I would usually be deemed of high enough “merit” to be worth speaking with. While participating in these workshops or readings, I was allowed into the more inner circle, which was equal parts trying to gain more success in writing and shockingly malicious gossip. My writing-related feedback or advice or adjacency to other writing scenes was welcomed because I could improve someone else’s writing or chance of success through networking or osmosis. Then, they would say the bitterest things about people held at arm’s length or people who were not there that night for the regularly scheduled, hissingly whispered roast.

For whatever reason, I also never found a community of writers who actually enveloped me in the community aspect. I never found a group of friends. I was never invited to the non-writing social events. Not everyone has to be friends with everyone else, but it wore on my self-confidence in a fundamental way that I spent several hours a week with people who only liked me for my writing, and never my personhood. It reinforced an idea that my writing was my personhood, and not evidence of it, and that neither my writing nor my personhood were enough.

My station in everyone else’s life was always relative to whoever else was around. Someone I thought was my friend would commit to my birthday party, then bail at the last second because they had a chance to talk to a famous writer touring that night. It was not unusual for me to sit with a group of writers I knew at an event, just for the conversation to become about a private social event they all regularly attended, but I was not invited to. 

Sometimes, it felt like people wanted to publicly draw clear lines of who was in or out, and in writing communities I always felt like I was half-in and half-out, objectively appreciated but not subjectively accepted—in the scene just enough to understand how much of the intimacy I was missing. This was, for whatever reason, the paradigm I encountered in every creative community. Participating in the arts socially made me desperate for genuine affection, which bled into my other platonic and romantic relationships. I always thought about my relationships in terms of what else I could do to make someone else truly love and accept me, instead of looking for love and acceptance where they inherently existed.

Because there is little money in writing, and clout is therefore the biggest currency, there are also perverse social incentives. Some social organizers really do just like writing and people and want to create spaces where these things come together. However, for each of these well-intentioned leaders, there are one or two looking for validation or power. The scene is full of scumbags who invite someone to perform at their reading under the guise of merit, and then hit on their performers. I received more backlash for calling out damaging performances from community leaders than those leaders received for being damaging. 

I learned it did not take much to rise above critique: Lead one regularly scheduled open mic; form one spoken word collective; edit one relatively selective publication. If you do something damaging, ten people desperate for your approval will shout louder than the one person who musters up the courage to talk about the harmful thing you did. And with so much opportunity in the greater scene, how dare someone risk the existence of a publication by calling out the creep who runs it!

When I exited writing, and therefore exited this social paradigm, I almost immediately gained clarity on the toxicity I was willing to accept. Paradoxically, my relationships now would probably appear shallow to these creative circles. They are not founded on some of the strange habits of social creativity, like mutual trauma dumping and gossip so malicious it would create mutual destruction if anyone leaked what was said.

Now, the energy I give is the energy I receive. When I invite people to socialize, they commit early and show up consistently, not waiting for a better invitation to arrive. I can trust people to prioritize our best interests. They don’t weigh my external accomplishments as a measure of my inherent self-worth. And we do not bond over consistent, mutual misery. I am no longer encouraged to accept hot and cold behavior, or to view self-destructive behavior as a quirky aesthetic. Harm you commit or accept isn’t something interesting you can write about later; it’s just harm.

WRITING IS BAD FOR MY CHARACTER

Truthfully, I didn’t like who writing was making me become. It’s embarrassing to list the ways writing changed me for the worst. 

It takes a more enlightened person than me to be exposed to the level of hierarchy, bureaucracy, and elitism present in the institutions of writing and not meaningfully internalize them. There are visible leaderboards of who is more or less successful, and even those leaderboards are ranked in what is high-brow or low-brow.

I am embarrassed to say I have cried more than once over being rejected from a journal I viewed as “beneath” me. It became impossible not to feel absolute stomach churns of envy upon hearing about the successes of fellow writers, even if they objectively deserved those successes. 

I felt split cleanly in two. In one heart, I strove to contribute to my community, emphasize any positivity I felt about others’ work, and celebrate others’ great and small successes. My other heart was pure poison. It was the evaluative mindset, where everything is better or worse than everything else. It was grabbing everything I could get my hands on so I wouldn’t starve in a situation where there wasn’t enough to go around.

For years, the poison little Grinch heart grew. It was fed by every interaction I had with writing that wasn’t just writing. I tried to intentionally feed the parts of my nature I preferred. In practice, what this looked like was I would receive any kind of external news about mine or others’ writing, have an automatic, outsized, and completely toxic reaction to it (which I would strain and fail to keep internalized), and then spend hours or days trying to coach myself into being a better person who did not feel that way.

Whether it makes me a bad person, or a good person, or just a person, it never worked. It got worse despite trying harder and harder. Maybe a stronger, better, or different person could excise or starve their negative character traits by directly addressing those traits. I couldn’t. But I also couldn’t feel that way anymore, so I starved those traits at the source—no more workshops, no more readings, no more submissions, no more applications, and no more writing.

I don’t know how or if I will engage with the institutions of writing again. If I am going to write without treating myself like a product, bitterly overspending my money, opening myself to exploitation, or becoming a worse person, I may simply have to stay away.

This website is an exercise in writing in a way that feels good to me. It is intentionally throwing away any intention to be creatively successful as my only remaining means of being creative.