The Impossible Weight of Being “Literary”
Some time ago when I was researching creative writing masters programmes to apply to, a friend asked me why I was bothering with all of that time and expense.
“Why not take six months off and live in a cabin in Siberia, and just write?” (We lived in Moscow at the time so the idea wasn’t entirely far-fetched.
I had already started two novels, one was set in a sock factory in Russia and the other followed a young woman navigating life as a cat litter marketing executive in NYC. I had my voice, it seemed, and I’d even published a few essays and travel pieces.
I replied to my friend that I needed to study the craft, be immersed in it, and anyway, what the hell would I do in Siberia for six months, all alone?
Well, write, as it turns out. A very lonely and solitary process. One that you can do without a fancy degree or a cohort of other writers. And you can even do it without your own room, desk or cabin in Siberia.
I dismissed his advice, what did he know? He wasn’t a writer. Off I went to my fancy degree in London, with my impossibly well-read co-writers and very very British professor. I abandoned my cat litter executive and Russian sock factory for the more salubrious (I learned that word on my fancy course!) world of literary fiction and then spent the next decade tying myself in knots over prose that wasn’t me, over a story that wasn’t mine, with suffocating expectations that I alone set for myself.
Yesterday a wise woman invited me to shrug that off. To lift the weight of the writer I was trying to be and replace it with something profound: me. Me and my words and my voice that is already formed. It is a strange and new idea. I’m still mulling it over but it is only 9 am and I’ve already written this and if you are still here, you’ve already read it so I guess there is something to this.
Fancy courses, writing retreats, fellowships, expensive degrees, cabins in Siberia. It can be good in certain doses at certain times. But you don’t HAVE to have it to be a writer.
