If you're waiting for the green light, the go-ahead, the reassuring wand to tap your shoulder and anoint you as a writer, you'd better pull out your thermos and folding chair because you're going to be waiting for a good long while. Accountants go to business school and when they graduate with their degrees, they don't ask themselves whether they have permission to do people's taxes. Lawyers pass the bar, medical students become doctors, academics become professors, all without considering whether or not they have a right to be going to work. But nothing and no one gives us permission to wake up and sit at home staring at a computer screen while everybody else sets their alarm clocks, puts on reasonable attire, and boards the train. No one is counting on us, or waiting for whatever we produce. People look at us funny, very possibly because we look funny, strange, and out of sync with the rest of the world after spending our days alone in our bathrobes, talking only to our household pets, if at all. I can't imagine what my UPS delivery guy thinks when I crack open the door to sign for a package. There's that weird lady again. My husband, who has been a successful journalist and screenwriter for most of his adult life, was in his forties before his father stopped asking him when he was going to get a real job.
Sure, there are advanced degrees in writing and various signifiers that a career might be under way, but ultimately a writer is someone who writes. And a writer who writes is one who finds a way to give herself permission. The advanced degree is useless in this regard. No writer I know wakes up in the morning and, while brushing her teeth, thinks: Check me out, I have an MFA. Or, for that matter, I've published x number of books, or even, I've won the Pulitzer Prize. There is no magical place of arrival. There is only the solitary self facing the page.
It's strange and challenging, glorious and devastating, this business of being a writer. Every day, a new indignity. The rejection is without end. Almost any short story you ever see published in The Atlantic Monthly or Harper's has been rejected first by The New Yorker. Press many of us-including those you'd think might have moved beyond this-and you will discover that we can quote you the most painful passages from our worst reviews. We can give you a list of critics who are dismissive of our work. We'll tell you which judge on what academic committee blackballed us. On some mornings, these rejections, reviews, enemies seem to stand between us and our work like a mutant army. Who are you to give yourself permission to write? They seem to shout. We writers are a thin-skinned, anxious lot, and often feel like we're getting away with something, that we're going to be revealed, at any moment, as the frauds we really are.
Whether you are a writer just mustering up the nerve to sign up for your first weekend workshop, or filling out your MFA applications, or one gazing moodily out from a big poster in the window of your local Barnes & Noble, you are far from alone in this business of granting yourself the permission to do your work. Masters of the form quake before the page. They often feel hopeless and despairing. They may also fall prey to petty musings. They have days in which they simply can't get out of their own way.
But when we give ourselves permission, we move past this. The world once again reveals itself to us. We become open and aware, patient and ready to receive it. We doesn't ask why that particular slant of sunlight, snippet of dialogue, old couple walking along the road hand-in-hand seems to evoke an entire world. We give ourselves permission because we are the only ones who can do so. There's a great expression in Twelve Step programs: Act as if. Act as if you're a writer. Sit down and begin. Act as if you might just create something beautiful, and by beautiful I mean something authentic and universal. Don't wait for anybody to tell you it's okay. Take that shimmer and show us our humanity. That's your job.
