“I think by the time you’re grown you’re as happy as you’re goin to be. You’ll have good times and bad times, but in the end you’ll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I’ve knowed people that just never did get the hang of it.” —Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men
✸
A lot of people, if not most people, take a long time finding out what they are “meant” to do. That thing they are especially geared toward devoting their whole being to, be it a hobby or occupation or ideology or relationship. It is no small matter, finding purpose that isn’t a fleeting interest or whim, but one which will sustain a person for the remainder of their days, and not only sustain them in the sense of occupying time, but sustain them in joy.
Those who do not find this—or worse, give up trying—wind up leading lives that are unfulfilling, vacant, and cruelly random. They sell insurance, go on fad diets, read every self-help book from Dale Carnegie to Dr. Phil, die of heart disease, and have their obituaries printed on funeral home websites instead of in the paper.
In this sense, then, I got lucky. I found my purpose when I was 13 years old.
It began in summer camp, when other junior high boys in my cabin read me the love letters they had written to crushes, and I started to make suggestions I thought would improve their chances (despite never having been in a relationship myself). “Rather than saying ‘X’ why don’t you try mentioning ‘Y’?”, “Rather than telling her exactly what you want, maybe describe everything around what you want, so she’ll think what you want was her idea and not your suggestion.”
Eventually my friends—and even a few highschoolers in the next cabin—decided I was good enough at “saying things” that instead of writing their own messages, they would have me write them instead. I may or may not have charged for this service, but nevertheless, I am proud to say, half of all relationships that started at camp in that summer of 2004 were a result of my letters. At some later point, one girl began to brag about the sweet note she received from her new boyfriend, and then another girl piped up, and another, and another… until eventually they all compared letters and the jig was up. To my surprise, this didn’t earn me their ire but instead their praise. “That was the sweetest letter I got from ‘Doug’! You're a great writer!”, “I knew that handwriting was too good to have come from Tom!”
This was the moment I discovered the thing I was good at.
Some kids are good at sports. Some kids play instruments. But as for me, I determined in that moment that I would be a writer for the rest of my days. Despite such a frivolous and deceptive beginning, the conclusion was incontestable: Race Hochdorf being a writer was as incontrovertible a fact as my father being a minister and my mother an artist.
It’s been ten years since that summer and this article is essentially what I’ve learned so far. Not the nuts-and-bolts of writing—you can get that at workshops and conferences—but rather what I’ve learned about the nature of writing. What the act of writing is, and why people like me do it. I have come to find that the writing process, and the mentality of writers in general, is closely intertwined with the subjects of sanity, meaning, and death, and I’ve decided to break those down into three distinct points.
#1
The absurd paradox of writing is this: We write because we fear death, but spend all of the days we live writing. Of course this is a “paradox” only to those who do not write, for writers have a definition of life and death that is different than how others normally understand both of those things. You see, it’s not that writers are afraid of ceasing to exist because they fear the inevitable loss of their consciousness, but rather they fear ceasing to exist in the consciousness of others. Writers know that the corpses of Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, Upton Sinclair, and the neck-down of Ernest Hemingway long ago decomposed and that they are now nothing but bones in a box. And yet all of them are still very much alive, perhaps even more so now than during the time they were actually alive.
How can this be?
In much the same way as a romantic partner. Before you met your romantic partner their existence meant nothing to you. You could care less about the way in which they lived their life, the things they did, or what happened to them, because you were completely unaware they even shared the same planet as you. But once they entered your consciousness, then they came alive and were of infinite importance to you. They were breathing long before you ever met them, and you were breathing long before they ever met you, but both of you felt the filling of a void you never knew was there when you both entered into each other’s minds. To both of you, one came alive to the other in that moment. But let’s imagine your romantic partner then died a month after you met them. Their voice still echoes in your mind. You are reminded of their personality every time a certain song is played, or a scene in a movie comes up. The way they smelled takes you suddenly as you walk into a perfume store or a shoe store or a clothing store. “But they’re still dead.” Yes they are, but they could have died before you met them... so what’s different? Memories. They’re not dead to you. For you, they will now always exist, unlike before, when they had not entered your consciousness. In a way, they were more dead during the time when they were alive and you did not know them, than when they passed on but still continued in your memory.
And that’s what writers aim for.
We are not terrified of death itself but of being dead to people. Granted everybody is terrified of this, but we writers take our fear further: As writers, we write so that our lives do not only continue as long as those we know remember us, but we write in the hopes that our writings will cause our personalities and inner thoughts to be introduced into the consciousness of countless people over many centuries who never knew us, so as to achieve perpetual life even while we rot.
Charles Dickens is not dead. Alexander Dumas is not dead. Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allen Poe, and Jane Austen are not dead. They are, but they never will be. And that’s what every writer wants to accomplish.
#2
Make no mistake: There is no difference between a man in a psych ward who talks to himself and enjoys the company, and a writer who writes knowing that they have no readership and gladly spend hours writing anyway. In fact, writers who write with a readership are still just as insane, because when they began they did so without one and persisted.
We’re all mad as hatters, we really are. Normal people don’t write. At least not well.
Think about what kind of mind it takes to write. You have to constantly be living in a fantasy world. While you’re at work, while you’re at home, while you’re eating, while you’re laying in bed, your mind is constantly wandering “realities” that are not real at all (or were real a long time ago but which you did not witness). You must do this in order to create. And then people wonder why writers are so eccentric/sex-crazed/mentally ill/“mood swingy”/anti-sobriety/social outcasts. It’s because we live primarily in our own heads, and a very thin line exists between the reality our brain has to translate and the “realities” we conjure for our own amusement. You can’t do that for any large stretch of time and not become prone to behaviors wider society considers odd.
And there is even more reason now, I think, for writers today to “live inside their own heads” in this manner. The modern capitalist world increasingly doesn’t have room for us. It likes us, sure, it loves us. But it doesn’t have use for us. Only the technical and administrative skills are valued. The words “self-reliant”, “independent”, “passion”, and “creativity” are used only to encourage entrepreneurship, not writing. If you’re a writer in the 21st century, the world might enjoy reading you, but it is also perfectly content with letting you starve. Aestheticism is dead. If it doesn’t have a use, it’s a “luxury” not a need. Perhaps this is the one failure of rationalism… allowing the impression that human beings require no deeper nourishment than nutrients for our bodies and logic for our heads. Souls and spirits do not exist, but surely we could use a word like “soul” or “spirit” to be a temporary label for the unknown place within us that very obviously needs art and beauty in order to live.
#3
We might be mad as hatters, but we would actually consider you insane for not writing. Ask yourself this: when you die, what will the people you love have left of you? Objects do not contain your “essence”, any money you leave will get spent, most of the words you speak will eventually be forgotten, and photographs present only a still image of you. None of these things quite do the trick of bringing you back to life for your loved ones once you are gone. But written words can keep you alive long after you’ve passed. Words can be read and reread, they can last for centuries, and—depending on what the words are—they can make a lasting impression on the people you’ve written them to.
Writers write books and articles about a lot of different topics. We love the idea of our children, grandchildren, and our grandchildren’s children going back and reading our stuff and getting a sense of who we were. But here’s the thing: you don’t have to be a “writer” in order to be remembered by those you love and those who come after them. Just write something. That’s why I find it so crazy when the occasional person asks me “Why do you write?” Are you kidding? Life and death, by themselves, are intrinsically meaningless. It’s up to us to make our lives and deaths meaningful, and I challenge you to find a better way of doing that than leaving words behind.
If only my great grandfather could know how many times me—and the rest of my family—have read the love letters he wrote during World War II to my great grandmother while fighting the Nazis in Italy. Thank god she kept them. My great grandfather died when dad was in the 9th grade. Those letters are all I have to know him by, and are the only items my father has to remember him with. Because of those letters, I’m able to picture Bernie near Venice in a bombed-out brick building, getting rained on and smoking a cigarette while he shivers and writes a letter home. My great grandfather wasn’t a writer. In fact, he went on to become a traveling salesman after the war. But the way those letters read, you would think he was goddamn Nicholas Sparks. Write something to the people you love. Do it now. You could get hit by a car tomorrow. Don’t live your life thinking you’ll have the luxury of a deathbed. My great grandfather didn’t. He died of a heart attack in his early sixties. But my great grandmother always had his letters, and now so do we.
_____
Like I said, this article was never meant to be about the nuts-and-bolts of writing. This was not supposed to be a piece wherein I insisted on the importance of the Oxford comma or boldly asserted that you can, in fact, start a sentence with coordinating conjunctions. Instead, I merely wanted to convince you of the value of writing, both for writer and reader alike, and I hope I’ve done that. Not many consider writing as a means to happiness in one’s own life, or as a means to immortality beyond it, but this should change.
