Enduring and Flourishing as a Writer

Everything’s a story, science, religion, history, and even biology. That doesn’t mean they can’t be true or give us glimpses of truth, but our species can only understand reality through stories. And that is great news for writers, because that’s what we’re good at.

According to the Darwinian story, humans (including poets) have two evolutionary drives: To survive and to procreate. This is a binary code on which all of our movements and behaviors are built.

That's it.

And although I understand the efficiency of starting with a duality (many complex systems begin with duality), I don’t think this story describes the poet or poetry.

This binary division doesn’t even apply to most people I know. Most of us don’t need to think much about survival, since, thankfully! we survive very well, at least enough to be able to read this text without looking over our shoulder thinking we might be murdered by another clan (hopefully!) or eaten by a wild animal.

I prefer the language of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, who replaces survival with enduring, that is, continuing on. To NOT DIE. To fight entropy. People will fight death until the end.

Obviously, there are some sad cases where people give up and want to die, but in general we want to live.

People in their late 90s don’t want to die. We are coded to continue to be, to endure. A writer wants to continue to be a writer. A dreamer wants to continue to dream.

The other part of the Darwin story is “procreation.”

The problem with this term is immediately obvious. Having kids could be what some people want at some stage of their life, but many of us don't want kids. Does that mean we’re not relevant representations of the human species?

There are some species whose imperatives weighs heavy on the procreate side, so they die after giving birth, like octopi and pacific salmon. Poets may delight to know there is a word for this kind of species, and it’s kind of rhythmic and beautiful if you say it aloud three times, semelparity.

Rather than “procreation,” Damasio says humans want to flourish, which is to expand, to create new things, to seek adventure, to walk the hero’s journey, to grow a family, to get rich, to buy a plot of land and raise chickens. This is a product of our organism, which has been called by some neuroscientists the “get-rich phenomenon.” We are driven to expansion. Some people want to become billionaires, others might want to become one with God. There is something about our organism that wants to grow, to expand our field, to be a part of something larger.

Writers reach for the ineffable.

Tracy K. Smith, a poet who seeks to explore the limits of our wonder, writes

Some like to imagine

a cosmic mother watching through a spray of stars,

Mouthing yes, yes as we toddle toward the light

Here’s the link to the poem. It’s worth reading!

To Endure and to Flourish is the basic code of our organism. We want to endure (if you’re an artist you want to continue to be an artist) and we want to flourish (if you’re a writer you want to be a successful one). This is the foundation of human life, and we can “hack” these evolutionary drives to help us achieve our goals. In The Writer and the Brain, I will offer free information on how to hack your organism to help you write more often and more deeply.

The Basic Code for Success as a Creative Writer:

Craft, Community, and the Brain.

HOWEVER: No matter what protocols you practice, it is impossible to be successful as writer without these three things:

CRAFT

Obviously, you need to learn your craft.

It's not enough to want to be a writer. You need to NEED to be a writer.

You need to need it.

Traditional advice from the MFA culture, having its roots in the Flannery O’Connor/Bernard Malamud imperatives, is this: If you can give up writing, Do it.

You’re probably not a writer, they say.

Implicit in this is that a writer cannot stop writing, cannot give up the dream. You love writing so much that you want to understand all aspects of it, how to get better, how to understand traditions and forms; basically, you want to read a lot of books. You geek out on being a writer. You read more than you write, and not out of obligation, but because you love to read!

Successful writers read. If you don’t love reading, you probably find writing --except for some few moments of flow—a laborious task. It's hard work all the time. For “real” writers, it’s hard work a lot of the time, but it’s worth it, because we also have multiple moments of total absorption in the process, and time disappears.

Learning your craft should not be unpleasant. It should be exciting, because when you have those moments of Flow or The Writer’s High, you are mentally and spiritually walking into an abstract landscape, a world that exists parallel to the real world, and if you know the craft, your conjuring powers in that world are increased, and you can go into higher and lower realms of existence. If you’re not equipped with the tools of your craft, you won’t survive in that world for very long.

I’ll provide free information on craft, directing you to videos and writings that will help you enhance and hone the craft; and I’ll offer some workshops both online and in person. I will also offer creative writing exercises.

Community

No matter what you do with your life, success cannot be achieved without interacting with other humans. This seems to be a law built on the imperatives of our organisms. You cannot survive or endure without other humans.

You cannot flourish or be successful without having a community or, even better, being a part of various communities. Do you want to start your own business, maybe a restaurant? Good luck without good relations with other people, the suppliers, the people who work for you, the customers. You need community to be successful.

To be a successful poet, you need to know poets. You need to interact and communicate with writers, publishers, and readers who buy your books and book your next gigs.

You need to expand your social field, go to conferences, listen to podcasts and be on them or start one yourself. And even though you may not want to hear this, you need social media.

It might be-- for some iconoclastic writers and brilliant thinkers –they don't want to be a part of all that.

I want to do my own thing, man!

And that's fine. But it’s not real.

The idea of the writer separating themselves from everybody, going to an island and writing and producing bestsellers, is a myth. You need community.

The Brain (and body)

One of the problems of our time in my humble opinion (and who am I? I'm just a Chicano writer) is that people are increasingly deprived of the ability to focus or achieve a state of FLOW. To do deep work (see my review on Cal Newport’s book, Deep Work).

This is the ability to think about a possibility and to go deeply into it, to reach beyond the story and language and linger in abstractions and the imagination, like a philosopher or scientist doing a Gedankenexperiment. Like a writer exploring the boundaries of a novel.

Many people can’t do this. Especially now, they lose focus. The average person has an eight-second attention span.

Writers have to be able to enter into and linger within imaginary realms. To be absorbed.

Our ability to think abstractly is something that we have been given by previous civilizations and cultures, but the key for the writer is to be able to return to those abstractions the next day or two days later and to deepen our exploration of that theoretical world. This is what a novelist does. They create a world that they have to enter into daily, sometimes for years. It takes me five years at minimum to write a novel, which means I need to return to that imaginary world over and over again. When I’m not taking care of myself, not sleeping well, or I’m stressed out about things I have to do, it’s very difficult to maintain focus, so when I try to return to the other realm, I need to relearn the basics, to remember where I left off. If I cannot do that immediately, I spend energy repeating the work that I already did. Energy is eternal delight. We need to use ours to create, not to laboriously recover what we already created.

We can prompt our system, our brains and our bodies, so that we can experience maximum focus when we need it and to deepen our exploration of the imaginary world.