Do great writers need to be deep thinkers?
Um….
Photo by @earbiscuits from Unsplash.
“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.”
I wrote this in my journal the other day:
How absurd will we seem in the future?
It’s a very mundane thought and question, of course. Not original in the slightest, with an obvious answer to boot. Because the future will progress to a point we may be incapable of imagining at the present moment, and we’ll look back and feel ashamed or embarrassed, or will play the part of forced forgetting because of the painful shame associated with the now.
I’m not prolific or excessively wise. My thoughts are pitifully prosaic, and at a different time, they may have brought me an inflated sense of pride. It is far from that now. Is it impossible to be an excellent writer if I am not a great thinker? Must I be an authority, a quotable someone whom an impressionable youth will admire, going so far as to fill a notebook with my bloated musings? I was that youth once, after all, which is perhaps why I have so many rattling quotes stored latently in my memory.
Sandy says I’m brave, but brave does not equal wise. It is alright to be cowardly, after all. There may be some benefit in cowardice even. For much of my life, I have been a coward, which was the smartest thing to be in the predicament I was in. I will survive with that thought, with knowing I was at one point both wise and ignorant, brave and a coward.
I share this excerpt for two reasons. One, because I express my thoughts on what it means to be a great writer. Two, because in it, I find myself participating in “thinking,” even if it’s with the recognition that I will never be a great writer because of my very unoriginal thoughts.
Truthfully, I have done very little thinking lately. There are times I wish to wander through the woods and sit on the stump of a tree, legs crossed and staring into the creeping pull of nature, inhaling pollen and listening to the crunching of fallen branches and the cooing of birds in love. This thought is appealing to me. The associated endlessness of it gives me pause. What great thinking can be accomplished in that solitude? What could I think that Thoreau hasn’t already?
Or maybe I just need to read more books? Maybe I need to escape beyond my comfort of popular fiction or speculative works. Should I read theory? Should I read memoirs? Is it alright to exist in the comfort of what I know and understand? Will that make me a great writer or a complacent person?
Is that even what I want?
It isn’t what I want. I want to lead a slow life, an easy life, A life where I can write in molasses-coated solitude, somewhere far away from the buzzing of a city. I want to read the books I want to read. I want to think the thoughts I want to think, even if they’re about the mundaneness of my day or the same thoughts I have wondered about a million times.
So can I still be a great writer?
In some ways, yes. In others, no.
I doubt I will ever be of the same caliber as Thoreau or Milton or Shelley. I doubt I’ll think so deeply to be considered a modern genius, like Ocean Vuong, Douglas Stewart, or Mieko Kawakami. I’ll always be the me who leads a slow, unbothered life, one where I write to alleviate the pains of the past and reconcile with the future. If anything, I write to see another day.
I think about this a lot — how to become great. How to become recognizable. How to make a living off writing and to do every day enjoying something I’m good at.
We received criticism from our superiors at work the other day because they sense we don’t love our jobs and aren’t having fun doing them. I don’t love my job, nor do I have fun. If that were a prerequisite, I wonder how many people would be in the jobs they’re in now. How flooded would the arts be? How enormous the consumption of what we love and enjoy and look forward to.
I’ll always enjoy writing. And I’ll always continue to do so. I may never be great and may never make a living doing what I love. But perhaps it’s time for me to become okay with that. The most important thing is to keep doing it. To keep loving it. And to continue sharing it with the people I love.
