Theodora Goss

It feels strange to be where I am now: for the first time in, well, ever, my life feels stable. Oh, I know that could change tomorrow. I’ve gone through so much instability in my life that stability actually worries me . . . I start wondering if I’ve fallen into a period of stasis.

My childhood was marked by constant moving. Before I started third grade, I had lived in four countries and spoken three languages. After that, it was one country and one language, but the longest I ever went to a single school was three years. We just kept moving . . . Then college, then law school, then working as a lawyer for three years, then graduate school . . . I was always either moving or working towards — something else. I was never someplace I could stay. There was never a sense of home.

Now I’m in a place where I could stay, theoretically, for the next twenty years, and honestly it’s a little scary. I have a stable academic position, I teach writing in two places I love — to both undergraduates and graduate students. And I’m writing. I have a novel contract — for two novels, in fact! I have deadlines. Honestly, I’m doing more work than I’ve ever done before in my life, but it’s the work I wanted to do. And I could just keep doing it. This is what I was working towards, all those other years, the unstable ones.

So what now? Because the truth is that I don’t want to fall into stasis, to simply keep doing what I’m doing. What I want is to use this stability as a platform. First and foremost, to keep writing. I have so many ideas, so many things I want to write about. So many projects I haven’t even started tackling yet. And as I said, I have two books coming out: one in 2017 that I’m going to be editing in the next few months and one in 2018 that I still have to mostly write . . .

So I think there are several lessons for me here:

1. Most importantly, stability could change. I know this, know it deeply in my bones. I have cancer in my family, so I know perfectly well that one medical diagnosis can change everything. And I know that anyway, time’s passing. I have a limited amount of time on this earth — none of us knows how limited our time is. So I need to do what I want to get done, not with a sense of panic, but with a sense of purpose.

2. Second, stability is not stasis if you use it wisely. Stability can be where, rather than being blown about by events, you sit down, ask yourself what you want to accomplish, and then accomplish it. And that’s what I need to do . . . the accomplishing part, since I already have a list of the things I want to accomplish. It’s on my cork board, above my desk. It’s not a long list, but it includes items like my goals as a writer.

3. Third and finally, be grateful. I’ve had so little stability in my life that when it came, it felt almost frightening. I had to keep reminding myself that this was a good thing. That this was a place where I could, for the first time, be truly productive.

Once, I read an article about the Hungarian writer Imre Kertész, who won the Nobel Prize. For years, he had worked as a translator, living in a small apartment in Budapest with his wife. He talked about having chosen that life deliberately so nothing would distract him from his writing. He had chosen a life of as much stability as he could, a life that did not require him to earn a great deal of money, a life that would support him just enough so he could write. So he could bring the images in his head into being. I’ve thought about that article ever since. It’s so easy for me to get distracted — this is a very distracting world we live in. But right now, right here, I have all the things I need. A lovely, warm home. Work that supports me — a lot of work, but not so much that it takes absolutely all my time (although some weeks it feels as though it does). Time to write, if I organize my time well enough, and if I have the calm, centered focus I need to do it. That focus is learned, not something that just happens — it’s something I need to create.

So here’s the plan: I’m going to teach, because that’s my job. And I’m going to write, because that’s what I’ve wanted to do just about all my life. In the past, I fit writing in around the instability, and still got a lot done. But it’s only recently that I’ve been able to write anything long, like a novel. Before, writing was always competing with things like, you know, graduate school. And surviving . . . Now I’m not just surviving. I have food in the refrigerator, heating in my apartment, and money in my savings account. (That last one — honestly, I wasn’t sure I’d ever get there!) So it’s time for me to produce.

To be perfectly honest, I feel deep in my bones that where I am now is not where I’ll always be. But the next step, whatever it’s going to be, is something I have to create for myself. So that’s what I’m going to do.

The photographs below are from Christmas Day, when I went to a bird sanctuary and wildlife refuge in Concord, Massachusetts. It was so peaceful there. And I thought about all these issues, about how stability was a good thing. It wasn’t necessarily stasis, or stagnation. Although really if you think about it, what is stagnation? A stagnant pool is absolutely filled with life, at the microscopic level. The fact that we can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there. The fact that we can’t see how what we are doing now is creating our future doesn’t mean it’s not being build, deep underneath, underground in our selves and souls. What we build there during times of stasis often creates the changes in our lives.

It’s as though we are winter forests. We may see dead leaves, bare branches. But the life is all underground, just waiting.

I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot.

Several days ago, I posted the following:

1. Guilt and shame are the enemies of the artist.
2. Guilt is when you feel as though your time should be spent doing something else, for someone else.
3. Shame is when you think what you’re producing is not good enough, or you’re not good enough as an artist.
4. The only way to deal with guilt and shame is to feel them, because you’re going to feel them. Then do, and show, the art anyway.

I have to deal with guilt and shame all the time. I think most artists do. Guilt and shame are two different things, so I’m going to try to define them. But they’re similar in that they’re equally debilitating. And equally difficult not to feel — I think they afflict most of us who are trying to do creative work.

Guilt is focused inward and has to do with a sense of what you should be doing that is not art, and who you should be doing it for. I have a daughter; time I spend writing is time I don’t spend with her. I have a sense of duty as her mother, but of course I have a lot more than that — I want to spend as much time with her as I can, because time passes quickly and I know she’s growing up. Every experience we have together, even if it involves sitting on the sofa watching a movie, is precious. And I have students, a lot of them. I have a sense of duty towards them, and also toward the university programs that employ me — but beyond that, I want them to learn and succeed. Time I spend writing is time I don’t spend grading their papers, creating lessons plans. Would I be a better mother and teacher if I didn’t write? I don’t know. I’m sure I would have more time . . .

So that’s guilt: the continual sense that you should be doing something else, for someone else. The sense that writing is an indulgence, and your duty lies elsewhere.

Shame is different: it’s a sense about the work itself, that it’s not good enough, will never be good enough — for others. Shame has to do with how other people perceive you. If you never showed your work to anyone, you would not have a sense of shame about it. You might have a sense of failure, but it would be a private failure. You would feel relief — at least no one has to see how I failed!

Shortly after I posted about guilt and shame, I also posted the following:

Everything I write is a failure in some way. It never lives up to my original idea of it.

I think that’s true for so many writers. You have the story in your head, which you’re convinced is going to be the best one you’ve every written. And by the time it gets onto the page, it’s a flawed, awkward thing, like a young falcon, wet, tousled, squawking for worms. And you think, what happened to my original perfect conception? All the words are wrong. Even the commas are wrong . . . By that point, you’re convinced it’s the worst story you’ve ever written, and your writing career, such as it was, is over.

The more you write, the more you realize that this is a cycle, that it happens every time. Months later, particularly if you see the story in print, you’ll think — it’s not that bad after all. Not perfect certainly, but not the worst I’ve ever written either. But understanding that it’s a cycle and actually getting rid of the shame are different things — understanding happens in the conscious mind, whereas the sense of shame lies much deeper, in the unconscious. Understanding simply brings it to consciousness, helps you talk to yourself about it. The shame itself doesn’t go away.

At least I’ve found this is the case for most writers. It seems to me that there are writers without that sense of shame, who are confident in their own writing (although how would I know, since I don’t inhabit their heads). They tend to be writers who were encouraged by their families and teachers from a young age. The rest of us, particularly if we were discouraged at some point, have internalized a sort of societal voice. It says both that the work is not good enough and that you, as a writer, probably as a person, are not good enough.

And then it becomes not about the work, but about you: I must not be good enough, I must not be smart and skilled and dedicated enough, to be the writer I imagine I could be.

Therefore, says guilt, you’re wasting time. You really should be doing something else: volunteering at the local food pantry, supporting a political cause you believe in. Serving on the PTA. Don’t get me wrong, those are all good activities. But guilt says, you should do them instead of your art. Because, adds shame, your art is worthless.

If this were a self-help article, this is the point at which I would tell you how to defeat guilt and shame, as though they could be removed like an appendix. It’s not that easy. I’m pretty sure guilt and shame are here to stay.

All I can tell you is what I do. The first step is understanding what they are, and how they’re stopping you. And then, since they’re different, approach them differently.

Guilt: If you have the something inside you that makes you a writer, or a painter, or a musician, it’s like an itch. I find myself writing all the time, whenever I have free time. For fun, because that’s what I enjoy doing. When I can’t write, it’s like an itch in the middle of my back that I can’t scratch. Or worse, because I start getting tangled up inside. It’s as though writing untangles me. What I believe is that if you have that particular itch, something put it in you — call it what you will, but you were created with a purpose, and it’s that purpose, unfulfilled, that causes the itch, that makes you want to scratch at it, almost desperately. You were make to create whatever you have the impulse to create, and your unhappiness when you’re not creating is it the universe itself speaking to you, saying: hey, you’re ignoring me.

So yes, you have a duty to your family, to your students. But you also have a duty to yourself, and to something greater than yourself — to the work itself that wants to be created through you, and to the creative power of the universe that is trying to find a means of expression and has chosen you for it. If you ignore that duty for all the others, you will end up unhappy, unfulfilled. If you’re anything like me, you’ll probably end up feeling guilty for a whole new reason . . . now you’ve failed in your duty in another way, to yourself and God or whatever! But at least you’ll be able to see that these are competing duties, and that sometimes your parenting or teaching need to come first, but at other times your writing needs to come first. And then, maybe, you can start to negotiate among them.

Shame: The only way I know to deal with shame is a form of behavioral therapy in which you do exactly what you’re afraid of. And if you don’t die, then you know that you probably won’t die . . . the next time you receive a rejection, or moderate a panel, or do a reading. It’s not fun, but it works. Whatever you’re afraid of the world seeing you do, do that. Every time I publish a piece of writing, I feel a sense of shame, because as I pointed out, everything I write is a failure. I think, this isn’t good enough to show the world. (It seemed so good after I finished writing it, but by the time I’ve revised it and I’m fixing commas, I realize that I can’t even punctuate properly, so what made me think I could be a writer?) That’s one of the reasons I keep writing and sending out the work — because it’s scary.  And it’s partly why I write this blog, because who am I to offer advice, to tell anyone my views on life, the universe, or anything?

But many of you, in your kindness, tell me that what I write resonates: that you feel and see it too. And I’m betting that many of you, if you’re writers or artists, or maybe if you’re just human beings, will relate to what I’ve written above. Which is perhaps the final way to deal with guilt and shame, and equally applicable to both. Realize that aside from a fortunate few (and we’re not even sure of them), we all feel guilt and shame. We’re all in this together.

(I thought this would be the most appropriate picture for this particular post: it’s of me first thing in the morning, before I’ve washed my face or even brushed my hair. In exceptionally good light, but otherwise, as the universe made me, whatever idea it had in its head at the time. About to eat breakfast . . .)

I’ve been writing poetry for as long as I can remember.

The earliest poems of mine that I still have are from high school. That’s when I started writing seriously, on scraps of paper, whatever I had on hand, and then recopying my poems into a large green notebook. That’s also when I started submitting poems for publication in the school literary journal. I think it was junior year that I won my first poetry prize, for a poem on Icarus. It was published in the literary journal and illustrated by another student. I was so proud . . .

Why does a child start writing poetry? I think it’s natural for us to love poetry: after all, the first literature we’re introduced to is poetry, in the form of nursery rhymes. We clap our hands to poetry, jump rope to poetry. The difference between “Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?” and John Keats’ “Ode to Autumn” is a difference in level of complexity, not fundamentally in kind. We love poetry naturally, and then we are taught out of that love, usually in school. I’m not sure how it happens. I think it starts with having to analyze poetry, to pick it apart for meaning and structure rather than letting it sing in our heads. It also comes from being taught, at the school level, only poetry that is somehow socially relevant: we are taught poetry with a political message because it’s easier to teach. The teacher doesn’t have to deal with the poetry-ness of it at all: it can be taught as social commentary that just happens to rhyme or have an underlying rhythm. Those of us who continue with poetry often belong to a particular sub-category of the high-school nerd, the literary magazine nerd — closely related to the theater nerd, and often found at the same parties.

I belonged to that category in high school. I was in theater, I wrote poetry. You could tell the literary magazine nerds because they tended to do things like read incredibly difficult books, books with intellectual cachet, prominently. They read Franz Kafka. They carried around James Joyce’s Ulysses. If they were female, they often swore allegiance to Sylvia Plath. The danger of belonging to this particular category is a kind of intellectual snobbery, but considering all the dangers of high school, intellectual snobbery is a fairly minor one, on the level of getting burnt by a toaster.

In college, I continued to write poetry. I continued to submit to the school (now university) literary journal, and at one point I was even on the literary journal’s editorial board. I continued to be published. But in college something changed. I started taking classes in writing poetry, and by the time I graduated from college, I was not sure if I wanted to write poetry anymore. I had been taking classes with famous poets (there were a several of them at the University of Virginia, where I went as an undergraduate), and they not only undermined my confidence in my own ability to write, but also made me question whether poetry was worthwhile. I think there were two reasons for this. First, the classes were intellectually lazy: they took place once a week, for several hours, and during those hours all we did was sit around and critique other students’ poetry. There was no rigor to the classes, no actual teaching. The teacher would lean back and let us do most of the work. Second, the teachers all emphasized the poetry that was then in fashion. This was the late 1980s, so confessional poetry still seemed fresh and innovative. That was the poetry we were supposed to be writing. It was all free verse of course, but not free verse in the way earlier 20th century poets had used it, with underlying rhythms and playful patterns. It felt loose, like one of the beanbag pillows that were popular then. And it felt insular, almost parochial (we never studied foreign poetry — it was always the American, sometimes English, poetry of the 1970s and 80s.) I could not make myself interested in it.  If that was the direction poetry was heading in, I wanted out.

If I were to teach an undergraduate class in poetry, I would not start with workshopping at all. No, I would say, first we’re going to start by doing exercises. You’re going to write poetry in different forms: ballads, sonnets, villanelles. Because when Picasso was your age, he was imitating Velasquez. That’s how he eventually became Picasso. And it’s going to be bad, because you’re all going to be terrible at writing formal poetry — most people are. But it’s going to make you better poets, whether you’re writing in forms or in free verse. And we’re going to study the history of poetry, particularly in English but also in translation because you need to look beyond your own literary tradition. In this class you’re going to work . . . That’s the class I wish I’d had, a class that would have taught me about poetry in a deep way. That’s the sort of class I think would have inspired me.

I should rephrase my earlier statement: I still wanted to write poetry, but I no longer wanted to be a poet. Being a poet seemed incredibly pretentious, artificial — an extension of the intellectual snobbery that had seemed so cool in high school. By this point I was in law school, and I was still writing poems, on scraps of paper as I had when I was a teenager, then typing them into my computer and printing them out on a dot-matrix printer. I started sending them to small literary magazines, very small because I had no confidence in my own writing anymore. And my poems were accepted, as they had been when I was in high school and college. So I was still writing and publishing: what had changed was something inside me. I wrote though law school, then through being a lawyer — I have poems I still remember writing in my 42nd floor office in downtown Manhattan. Honestly, they were not particularly good poems. A few of them were good enough that I included them in my poetry collection, but most of them will remain hidden in my notebooks . . . The percentage of good to not-publishable was pretty low.  Still, when I look at my own poems, even as far back as high school, I see something in them I like, a way of using words, an inventiveness. Writing all those poems made me the writer, including the prose writer, I am.

After several years of working as a lawyer, I went back to graduate school for a PhD in English literature. I continued to avoid poetry — all my graduate work was in prose fiction. But I wrote poetry in secret. I didn’t submit much, because it didn’t seem worthwhile. By this time I was attending fiction-writing workshops (Odyssey, and then Clarion), and I was starting to sell short stories. Unlike poetry, those paid — and editors reprinted them, so they continued to circulate, to get attention. Since my first fiction sale, I’ve been writing short stories regularly. Some of them have been finalist for or won awards, and of course I’ve been paid for them, sometimes well, but always something. My first novel will be coming out in 2017. Until a few weeks ago, I’d mostly given up on poetry. I realized, from looking at my notebooks, that I rarely wrote it anymore. At one time, I would write approximately a poem a week. Recently, there have been years when I wrote one or two . . . for the entire year, and then only because I was asked by an editor who wanted a poem for a specific purpose.

So what changed in the last few weeks?  Nowadays I’m a teacher, teaching writing of all sorts, to both undergraduates and graduate students. Since November, I’ve been so busy with end of the semester work that I haven’t had time to write, and that’s not good. When I don’t write, I don’t feel quite myself . . . So I’ve been writing poetry, because that’s something I can do over breakfast, or in between teaching classes. I can finish a poem in a day and feel a sense of accomplishment. But I had to think about what to do with those poems. I didn’t want them to languish in notebooks. Trying to publish them in literary magazines no longer seemed worthwhile. When I sent poems to magazines, they were usually accepted. But it could take weeks to months before I heard back, and longer than that for the poem to actually be published.  And I certainly didn’t write poetry for the money — the average payment for a poem is between a copy of the magazine and $20.  Once the poems were published, few people read them — few people read literary magazines anyway, and poems get the least attention of all.

And yet . . . the few times I had shared poems online, people had liked them.  They had reshared them, commented on them.  That surprised me . . . I thought, why don’t I just continue to do that?  So I started sharing poems on my blog.  That had a magical and unexpected effect: I started writing more poetry. I think when you’re a creative person, you need to get whatever it is you’re creating out, so you can create more. If you keep it in, it starts getting blocked up, and then what you’re left with is stagnant water, like the pool behind a beaver’s dam. You want the creativity to flow like a stream. Once I started putting the poems out there, publishing them online, I started writing a lot more. And that felt good . . .

But I started running out of room on my blog.  So I created a new blog, dedicated specifically to poetry.  It’s called, quite simply, Theodora Goss: Poems.  You can go take a look . . .

The poetry I write is rooted in myth and legend and fairy tale, not as a conscious choice but because those are the things that inhabit my head. They assume the world is deeply alive because that is how I approach the world. In a way, they are the clearest statements of what I believe in and care about — even more than my prose. They are deeply influence by the poets I have loved, some of them poets who are fashionable (W.B. Yeats, Anne Sexton), some of them poets who fell out of fashion long ago, or never were fashionable in the first place (Mary Coleridge, Robert Graves). I am particularly influenced by the history of women writing fantastical poetry, such as Christina Rossetti and Sylvia Townsend Warner. In their poetry I find a subtle subversiveness, and a fine feeling for the underlying magic of human existence. And that, fundamentally, is what I write about.

The blog is an experiment — we’ll see if it works. But my goal is simply to write more poetry and share it. If it does that, it will have fulfilled its purpose.

(The painting is by Edward Robert Hughes.)

This year, my writing income will exceed my expenses. Last year, it was the other way around.

That’s how it is with writing when you’re trying to build a career. I should explain what I mean by a career, because I have a job that gives me a regular income, in addition to which I have writing income (sometimes). It’s not a “day job,” which usually refers to a job unconnected with writing that you intend to do only until the writing works out . . . until writing itself can become a career. For one thing, I don’t just do it during the day. I teach, which means that I’m often up late at night, grading papers or preparing for classes. But I chose it specifically because it was about writing; it immersed me in writing and thinking about writing. My job is to teach writing: both academic writing at the undergraduate level, and creative writing at the graduate level to MFA students. I’m very, very lucky: I get to work on and think about what I love, every day. Oh, sometimes it’s tedious grading student papers. But grading papers, even at the most elementary level of marking the missing commas, makes me think about writing. It makes me consider what good writing is, why certain voices are lively and engaging. And of course it provides me with an income.

Because the thing I’ve learned about writing, over the years, is that it’s very, very difficult to make a living at it. Oh, people certainly do, but it’s a very small percentage of the people who actually write. Most of the people I know who make a living at writing have certain characteristics in common: (1) It took them a long time to get where they are, making a living at writing. Usually, you need several successful books in print before you can make anywhere near enough money from them to live on. (2) In the meantime, they had to rely on regular jobs, or on spouses who could support them. If they did not have those things, they went through a period of terrible struggle, and by terrible I mean not knowing where rent or food was coming from. (3) They write a lot, and they write fiction that is popular, that sells. As writers, they are both popular and prolific. (4) They are generally out there, at conferences or on social media, marketing their books. It’s certainly possible to be a wildly successful reclusive writer, but it’s rare. (5) They continue to supplement their income, with part-time teaching or freelancing or writing tie-ins.

If you want to be a writer, it’s best to confront the realities of writing income. First, you’ll have to write novels. The average short story sale will make you several hundred dollars, which is very useful when you’re trying to buy groceries or pay rent, but won’t sustain you over the long term. And poetry only pays for coffee. So you’ll have to write novels, and you’ll have to write them fairly consistently. The second reality is that writing income is itself inconsistent. I recently received half of the advance for my first and second novels. It was more money than I have ever put into my bank account at one time — I’m pretty sure my bank now thinks I’m money-laundering. But it was also the most money I’ll receive for these novels at once, unless they do every well indeed. I’ll receive more money when each of the final manuscripts are delivered, but it will be a smaller amount. And then of course when the film deal is made . . . Ah, but we’re just dreaming at this point. That happens, but not often, so what I have to count on right now is my advance. For which I am very grateful, but whether I’ll get this much money again from these books is up to the publishing gods. The only thing I can do about it is make these books the absolute best they can be, and then go on to write the next book.

The third reality is that publishing advances sound a lot more impressive than they actually are. For example, think of a writer who gets a quarter million dollar advance for a five-book series. A quarter million dollars! That’s an enormous sum of money. Until you break it down: that’s $50,000 per book. If each of those books takes about six months of work total, to write and revise, then revise again when the edit letter comes, then revise in response to the copyedits, the writer is making about $100,000 per year. That’s still a lot of money! But out of that, the writer is paying all the things that are invisible to regular employees. For example, I cost my employer, the university, about twice what I actually make. Among other things, the university pays for part of my medical insurance and matches any retirement fund contributions. The self-employed writer must pay for medical insurance and fund her own retirement, plus there’s a small thing called self-employment tax. I have to pay it on the writing portion of my income. So that advance isn’t the same as making $100,000 per year at a job. It’s like making $100,000 a year from a business, and then having it reduced by business expenses. If you’re a writer, you’re a business. So sayeth the IRS.  And think about all the marketing for those books.  It takes time to publicize a book, and even if the publisher pays travel expenses for readings and signings, that’s time the writer could be making more money by writing.  It’s unpaid time, or time paid for by the advance.  Finally, it can take considerably longer than six months to write a book.  If it takes a year total, that income goes down to $50,000 per year, minus business expenses.  And that’s on the high end of a novel advance . . . (The average novel advance is well under $20,000 per book.)

When I finished my PhD and started working full-time, I had to confront all this myself. I had to ask myself, are you going to treat writing as a hobby, or are you going to make it your career? Of course the answer was, a career. That’s what I’ve always wanted, to be a professional writer. That doesn’t mean I want to write full-time: I love teaching. It does mean I want to write every day, and produce on a regular schedule. I want to have novels and short stories and poems coming out regularly. I want to be known as a writer. So how, I had to ask myself, was I going to think about money? I had already spent a lot of money on my writing career: I had gone to Odyssey and then Clarion, I had been to any number of conventions. And those were all worth it, because they gave me the training and the contacts I needed. But now, I really wanted to think about my expenses as investments. Was a particular convention worthwhile? Would I learn from it, would I meet people I wanted to meet — writers I admired, editors I would love to work with? It’s wasn’t enough that I would have fun, because let’s face it, conventions are expensive. Did I want to spend $1000 on an industry convention where I wouldn’t necessarily meet readers, or should I put that money toward a research trip to Europe for the second novel? (That was an actual decision I had to make recently.) I haven’t been to as many conventions recently, because of such calculations. I’ll be going to more next year, because I’ll have a novel coming out in 2017 . . . So the investment will make sense.

I also had to do one more thing: I had to confront my own issues with money. My issues come partly out of the fact that I grew up in a household where money was always uncertain. We always had just enough money to get by, although sometimes the bills were paid late. But there was no concept of savings. My mother had grown up in communist Hungary, where if you had anything extra, it was taken away from you. My grandparents could not buy the apartment they had lived in since World War II until after the fall of communism. I was used to money coming and going, but never staying . . . that was my normal. I hated it — it made me feel uncertain, as though I were always standing on ground that could be shaken by an earthquake. But it was still how I, unconsciously, thought about and dealt with money. (It did not help that for years I had been a graduate student living on fellowships.) I had to consciously reevaluate my unconscious attitude toward finances, to make having savings a goal. To tell myself that money in the bank was normal, not an aberration. That it was not all right for me, who was lucky enough to have a stable job (when so many don’t), to get to the end of the month and worry about whether I was going to make it. I had to consciously build better habits. I’m still working on that.

If you want to be a writer, what I would advise is something like the following: (1) Be realistic about what it will mean financially. You may write a best-seller and never have to worry about money again for the rest of your life. That’s very, very unlikely. Even people who write best-sellers have to keep working, keep producing. I know, I’ve met them. They’re sitting with their butts in chairs, just like the writers who are starting out. (2) Deal with your money issues, because in a field as uncertain as writing, they will undo you. If you’re not used to saving and budgeting, start practicing now. (3) Make a plan, revise your plan. How are you going to support yourself? What will your sources of income be, while you write? How will you create a good life for yourself, a life you want to live, that also supports your writing? You don’t have to have a writing career . . . no one does. Writing can be a wonderful, fulfilling hobby. But if you want it to be a career, you need to treat is like a business (you know the IRS will!), even if you’re only making coffee money for right now.

(I should say here that I don’t budget, not formally, although I did while I was in graduate school. What I do now is know, at the beginning of each month, that I will have a number of recurring expenses, such as my electricity bill. On top of that, I will have necessary expenses, like groceries. I don’t worry about those. A certain number of small treats go in with those necessary expenses, like buying cupcakes for myself and my daughter — it’s a weekly ritual.  I know what those recurring and necessary expenses will be, and I know that I can afford them — for those, I don’t need to budget.  Beyond that, I have to think about how much I’m spending and why I’m spending it. I have to justify the expense.  But perhaps that’s a subject for another blog post?  And my taxes have gotten complicated enough that I would not tackle them without an accountant, which is another expense of doing business . . .)

Coming to terms with money, getting to the point where I could handle money with only a moderate amount of trepidation and anxiety, has been an important part of my adult life. But I’ve had to, because if you want to be a writer, and at the same time you want to eat and have a roof over your head, you have to address the money issue. Hopefully this post will help, a little . . .

This was me recently, in my novel-writing uniform. Sweat pants and fuzzy slippers. The fuzzy slippers are particularly important . . .

One of the hardest things about being a writer is that you can only tell your own stories.

I don’t mean that you can only write about yourself, or only about people like you. Of course you can write about different people, different places, different cultures. But the stories have to come from inside you. What you find outside needs to correlate to what you have inside. One of my central stories, for example, is losing a country. Or a family. It’s a story I find myself telling over and over again, almost as though I’m still trying to understand it. I could tell that story in a number of different ways, but the important thing is that it comes from inside and it wants to be written.

I’ve tried, before, to write the way I thought I should write. It never worked — the writing came out stiff, artificial. I see my students do it sometimes. They tell themselves, I’m writing a YA novel and this is the rule for writing a YA novel. They follow the rule, and the writing comes out sounding almost as though it were written by rote. It’s not alive . . .

“You can only tell your own stories” sounds almost inspirational, as though impelling you to tell your stories — it sounds as though it’s saying “you must tell your stories because no one else can tell them.” Which may be true, but it’s a different sentiment. “You can only tell your own stories” is actually a warning and a lament. Why a lament? Because what if your stories are not the ones culturally valued at that particular moment? What if you write poetry like Emily Dickinson or horror like H.P. Lovecraft? It’s going to be a hundred years before you are lauded as the most important poet of your generation, or people crochet Cthulhu hats. What if the stories in you aren’t New Yorker stories, or the sorts of stories that get you teaching positions in creative writing programs? I’m not talking about bad writing. I’m taking about good writing that isn’t what the culture wants or recognizes as innovative at a particular time. Or maybe ever . . .

I’m not sure, here, to what extent I’m talking about my own writing. After all, I’m writing in a genre that’s slowly being recognized as culturally important. I have many opportunities to publish my work. But even I feel, sometimes, as though my work is out of step, as though I am out of step with a mainstream. Or even, sometimes, where my own genre is going. But all I can do is write out of myself, dig deeper into myself, plumb my own depths to find the stories living down there. They are down in the mines of the self . . . And then find the things outside myself that correlate with those stories.

I was thinking, earlier today, of what is mine, what I know to be mine. What has become a part of myself. And I made a list:

1. Lists. Linear thinking, understanding through categorization. I learned it in law school, but it was always in myself. I have a logical mind that wants the world to be orderly. (Hint: it often isn’t.) I love order and structure and the intellect. I love the precision of a ballet class.

2. Flowers, and gardens more generally, and specifically roses. I love their names: Cardinal de Richelieu, Madame Hardy, Cuisse de Nymphe. I know them by name, I know their histories. Tall trees, running water, still pools. The calm of ordered nature.

3. But also wilderness: the beauty of mountains, rushing streams, storms. Mountain slopes covered with forests, like the ones where I grew up. Their blue, one behind the other as though a giant had filed them, fading into the distance.

4. Europe, especially Eastern Europe, which calls itself Central Europe. And Hungary, my own little corner of Europe. Even though I lost it, it’s still mine. I still claim it, and I hope it somehow claims me.

5. The perspective of the immigrant, the emigrant. The one who wonders where she belongs, who thinks in two languages. Who is perpetually an outsider, belonging to both cultures but never entirely to either. Who feels perpetually inadequate, not enough in either place.

6. Fairy tales, especially the dark Eastern European ones I read as a child.

7. Poetry, especially poetry that sings, as it has sung all my life through my head.

8. The nineteenth century, because I studied it as a graduate student. I am professionally trained it in, and have in a sense made it my own. And there is something temperamental that calls me back to the literature and art of that era. The end of the century, which I know best, was a time of transition, of becoming. And I seem to have always been in that process. No wonder I like vases with dragonflies on them . . .

9. Monsters, doubles, the Gothic and all its paraphernalia. Perhaps because I was born in Hungary, perhaps because I am an immigrant, perhaps simply because of who I am. I have always sympathized with those created by mad scientists or infected with vampirism. I have always felt myself to be double, like William Wilson . . .

10. Handicrafts: sewing, knitting, lacemaking. And art, which does not seem so different, I suppose because my grandmother did all these things and they were all expressions of herself, her own creativity. I have always assumed that women make art, because in my family they all do.

So I guess that gives me immigrant monsters who sew and grow rose gardens, somewhere in the forest at the foot of the mountains? And make lists . . . Or maybe the story is in the form of a list? Which, yeah, is actually the sort of thing I write! I’m pretty sure it will never make it into the New Yorker. I think there is an 11:

11. Sincerity, belief in a deeper meaning, a deeper pattern. A pretty complete absence of sarcasm and snark, although I’m all right at irony, I think. A lack of interest in things that are contemporary simply for their own sakes, in brands for example, in things that are culturally “cool” but I feel are pretentious. A belief in the importance of beauty. For its own sake, and for ours. And also,

12. A horror of violence, so that I will never write a story in which random people randomly die, and it doesn’t matter, or it’s done to make a point. Every single character matters, to herself if no one else.

So that’s a bunch of it, at least: the bundle of things that make up what I write, where it comes from. I guess I can only keep discovering my stories by writing them. But they will come from me, from the woman who loves roses and monsters and lace, and hates violence. And if at some point the culture decides they are worthwhile, that will have nothing to do with me. I will have written what is in me, which is really all I can do, and all I aim for.

This is me (the me that all the stories come out of):

The more I study myself and other people, the most I realize that if you don’t find the things you need inside yourself, you won’t find them on the outside. You can’t find the things you need outside yourself.

I’m talking about the things you really need: love, success, affirmation of your fundamental worth. Our physical needs can be met externally. We can find food, shelter. But our emotional needs, our inner needs, can’t. Not really. Or not, at any rate, after childhood. Hopefully when we are children, we feel loved by our parents. We feel as though we are the most important thing in their world, that our successes and failures, our hurts and triumphs, matter deeply to them. This is not narcissistic: it is what a child needs to be healthy. The child then internalizes that love, and it becomes the self-love that he or she will need as an adult. Not having that sort of love as a child is a psychic wound that later needs to be healed. I’ve seen many of my friends with that sort of wound, in the process of healing. It’s not easy.

Once, when my daughter was young, I was sitting in a park playing with her. Another mother was there, also with a young daughter, and a grandmother with her grandson. The grandmother had been watching that other girl (mine was just a toddler at the time) playing in the sandbox. I’m not sure what prompted the comment, but she leaned over to that mother and said, casually, “She’s a little spoiled, isn’t she?” I recognized her accent at once: it was Eastern European. And I thought, I know the culture you come from. I know it so well, because it’s my own. And I know the generation you come from too, because my grandparents came from it. It’s the generation that lived through World War II, and to them, all the younger generations were a little spoiled, their lives a little too easy. You can understand that perspective: they had lived in the worst of times, under the Germans and then under the Russians, through no food and then bread lines. They wanted to prepare children for the reality of the world. Would children who were spoiled, who were too loved, be ready for privation? Starvation, even?

But I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. Children can’t love themselves: they can scarcely love other people, at that stage. They are being bombarded all the time by a strange world, a world too large for them, a world beyond their understanding. Their emotions are in a turmoil. At that stage, they need external love, and hopefully there is someone around — if not a parent, then a grandparent, another relative, a friend — to give it to them. Later, that love will form a sort of rock in their consciousness, a place to stand. They will have the knowledge that they were well and truly loved.

But what happens later? That’s what I’m really concerned with here. Now that we are all online, we get constant glimpses into other people’s lives, and I see so many people mourning their lack of certain things . . . emotional support, a partner to love and care about them, success in their chosen fields. They want those things so badly, and they want those things to come to them from the outside. And those things may, but when they do . . . they won’t be enough. That’s the ironic thing, isn’t it? By the time you’re an adult, if you haven’t built that rock to stand on inside you, nothing that comes from the outside will ever been enough. When love comes, it won’t be enough, and you will doubt it. Surely you’re not worthy of it? Surely it’s not real? When success comes, you will want more success, greater success. You will realize that any success can go away, and the knowledge will be like sawdust in your mouth.

When you’re an adult, in order to recognize the things outside yourself, to benefit from them, you must already have them inside you. This operates on a physical level as well: if you are hungry on the inside, no amount of food will make you feel full. You will continue to hunger. (Then you will need to figure out what you’re hungering for.) It’s a strange image I’ve created here, building a rock. You can’t build a rock, not physically. But maybe you can psychologically, the way nature and time build rocks? I thought of using the word “platform” instead, but that’s not strong enough to express what I mean. It’s a rock to stand on, something solid. And it needs to be inside you, because all the things outside you are ephemeral. They can go away. The people who love you can stop loving you. The success you wanted so badly can end in failure. All the external signs of your worth can disappear, with a turn of the wheel of fortune that medieval scholars thought governed our lives. Then what are you left with? What you have inside, that’s all.

So you have to work on what’s inside. That’s not easy, is it? Particularly if after childhood you were left not with a solid rock but with an emptiness, a sort of windy darkness — if what you are standing on is empty space. But either way, the project is the same: you have to build and maintain a rock on which to stand, your own rock. You have to love yourself, and find love within yourself. You have to feel successful, even when your work has been rejected. How do you do that? Little by little, bit by bit, stone by stone. Everyone does it differently, and it’s hard, and it takes a long time. But learning to find what you need inside yourself is the process of becoming an adult. I wondered if I had any wisdom to offer on how to do this, how to build your rock. And I thought, this is all I know:

1. Treat yourself as though you were someone you loved.
2. If you have failed, reward yourself: you are one of the brave ones who tried.
3. Remember Vincent Van Gogh. He failed all his life, and created some of the greatest beauty of which human beings are capable.

For me, finding what I need inside myself has been a very long process, one that has taken all my life. Am I there yet, at perfect self-sufficiency? Of course not, and I don’t think I ever will be. I don’t think anyone is, except perhaps Buddhist monks. I am not a Buddhist monk. But I can say that I’m better at it now . . .

I do know that the process of finding what you need inside yourself, finding love, courage, peace, is one of the most important processes we go through as human beings . . . and as artists, for those of us in the arts. That rock inside yourself is a platform, from which you can jump. And maybe fly.

(I thought this would be the right image for this post. I took it yesterday, while walking through the woods, visiting my friend Autumn.)

I had a sort of epiphany recently, which makes it sound much more grandiose than it actually was.

When I moved into the apartment where I live now, I had the sense that I was going to live here for a while. And I’ve done a pretty thorough job of decorating, although it’s not done yet. There are still pictures to put up on the walls, and I just bought a new bookshelf, the last bookshelf I need to complete the apartment. It will have to be painted. Still, when I moved in, I had a sense of stability. And honestly, it scared me. I’m not used to stability . . . I’m used to always being on the way somewhere else. In law school, I was on my way to a legal career. In my legal career, I was trying as hard as I could to get out, to go back to graduate school. In graduate school, I had to actually finish and graduate. And then I did: I had my degree and a job I love, teaching writing. But things were still changing: I started teaching at Stonecoast as well as at Boston University, I moved from my smaller apartment into this larger one. I was still in transit. And now . . . I feel as though I’m here, stable, standing still. It’s a strange feeling. I’m not used to it, and I was worried that if I wasn’t moving forward, I was somehow getting stuck, going nowhere.

The epiphany was that I or a divine force (I like to think it was the both of us working together) had gotten me to the perfect place, the place I need to be right now. I have two jobs I love, teaching both undergraduates and graduate students. I love where I live. Oh yes, city living has its annoyances. But from here, I can go anywhere: the museums, the libraries, the train stations, the airport. It’s as though I live at the center of everything, and that center is a tree-lined street with old brownstones that, if you walk along it and then turn right, leads to a bookstore. Or if you turn farther on, a cupcake shop. Perfect, right? My apartment isn’t large, but it has ten-foot ceilings and sunlight streaming in through the windows. It’s the perfect size for what I need it to be, which is a refuge and a place to write. I have a home, an income, and then . . . I have the writing. And that’s at the heart of it all, really. Because what we’re trying to do, if we’re artists, is craft a life that lets us do the art. That’s the whole point.

And it’s not easy, is it? I was thinking about what it entails, and because I am a list-making animal, I came up with a list. Here are the things you need, in order to craft a life for yourself as an artist.

1. Meeting your physical needs.

This is the most basic step, the bottom of the pyramid. You need to meet your physical needs — food, shelter, safety. I know, there’s the cliché of the starving artist. I’ve known plenty of artists who were starving, or at least in situations of serious instability: writers, musicians, cartoonists. Guess what? It’s harder to create art when you’re scrambling to afford groceries, to find an apartment. To afford heating in Maine. (Yes, these examples are based on friends of mine.)

The reality is that it’s incredibly difficult to support yourself solely through art. If you see a writer who doesn’t have a job, the likelihood is that either he or she has an alternative source of income (family money or income from a spouse), or the writer earns most of his or her money through freelancing. Writing technical manuals, tie-in novels, video games: words that are commissioned, that do not belong to the writer because he or she is doing work-for-hire and the copyright is in the company. Very few writers earn enough simply from their creative writing to live on — or raise a family on. Those who do have usually had to work years to get there, to become famous enough, to build up enough of a backlist, to earn significant money from writing.

So if you want a creative life, find a way to meet your physical needs, whether it’s teaching or working at Starbucks. And be proud of yourself for having done so — you’re not selling out. You’re building the bottom of the pyramid that will allow you to become an artist.

2. Meeting your spiritual needs.

I think we have spiritual needs as well as physical ones. By spiritual, I mean a need to connect with sources of creativity. We need libraries, parks, museums. We need to read, to walk by the river, to look at paintings. We need beauty as well as bread. That’s the second level of the pyramid, and for an artist I think it’s as important as the first, although perhaps less immediately crucial. First pay your rent, then stare at a Monet . . .

But remember that if you’re going to create, you will need to feed your soul as well as your body. It’s the spiritual food that will inspire and inform your art. And the physical and spiritual can come together: in your apartment (rent paid for), you can create a beautiful space, filled with music and books. You can hang paintings on the walls. You can create a home for not just your body, but your soul.

3. Learning the craft.

I went back and forth on whether to break this out as a separate step: I was originally going to put it under “creating the art,” below. But I do, after all, think it’s different: this is the process of learning how to create your art, and you need to make a place for it as well. When I first started writing professionally, it was after having gone to writing workshops, but now I learn in other ways: by teaching, for one. Teaching undergraduates and graduate students means that I’m constantly learning.

This is the hard discipline of the ballet dancer who is constantly going to classes, constantly doing his or her exercises . . . The best artists I know, the Charles Vesses or P.J. Lynches of the world, seem to paint or draw every day. They are continually learning.

4. Creating the art.

This is the top of the pyramid, the place we wanted to get to, right? All the other levels of the pyramid lead to here. It’s much easier creating art if you’ve met your physical and spiritual needs, if you’ve learned and are learning about your craft. That’s usually where art happens. It comes not out of starving in a garret, not out of panic and anguish, but out of a small, stable place where you can do the work that is uniquely yours.

My epiphany was that I am in that place: what I need to do now, rather than panic about the fact that I’m not going anywhere, is sit down and write. I have at least five books lined up that I want to write, and guess what? Books don’t write themselves. You need to sit, move the hand across the paper, move the fingers over the keyboard. And that’s what I need to do. (That, and work on meeting my physical need for sleep. I’m much better at meeting my physical need for chocolate!) Write the book, write the next book. Teach fascinating classes, grade smart although grammatically problematic papers, go for walks along the river, remember to use my museum membership, read books. Eat cupcakes. And write . . .

Meeting physical needs: books for a class I’m planning on teaching next fall.

Meeting spiritual needs: flowers on my table.

And the writer herself, in the neighborhood bookstore.