Growing up, I can’t say I ever really cared about being great at anything. I started skateboarding around 12 years old and continued until I was in my 30s, and I don’t recall ever thinking, "I want to be great at this." I just wanted to practice tricks over and over until I got really good.
In my mind, you were either naturally good at skating or, like me, you were just OK at it. The skateboarders I knew that were actually good probably practiced quite a bit, but I never saw that. I just saw them landing rad tricks.
When I was 15 I picked up the bass guitar and started playing in little dinky punk, new wave, and metal-ish bands. I played at some parties and recorded some stuff, but mostly, I just played with friends in any space we could find with no parents around. And playing with those friends was fun as shit. There were hours and hours of good times “jamming,” but again, I never considered practicing the bass to get good at it. I just wanted to play with my buddies and have fun.
In my early 20s, I was playing drums for a band, and one of my best friends had to tell me that the other members of the band didn’t want me in it anymore because I basically played the same beat over and over. I mean, I enjoyed playing drums, but never did it occur to me to sit down daily and practice as a means of learning more than one beat.
After I’d gotten sober and quit smoking in my late 20s, I ran a few ultramarathons and started racing long-distance mountain bike events. In order to be able to complete races like this, you have to train your ass off and put in lots of hours, which I did. Here again, though, I never finished near the top. I was a mid-pack finisher and would occasionally wonder if I should be more upset about being so average, but I just wasn’t.
I just didn’t seem to have that next gear that made me want to train hard or practice longer. In all of these examples, I was always more interested in doing these things with my friends than attaining some degree of mastery.
Then, when I was in my mid-40s, that changed. After I’d left a company I’d co-founded, I sat down to write my first novel … and it was objectively bad.
Actually, let me rewind briefly. When I was 22, my uncle gifted me a copy of Larry Brown’s Joe, a book that changed my life. It was the first time I’d read something and thought, I wanna write a book like that. I can totally write a book like that.
Naive hubris, I know. But, it was the first real aspiration to be great at something I can ever remember having. Now, as you may have noticed, I had this inclination to write something for the first time at 22, but didn’t actually start writing for 20+ years. I guess it takes what it takes. Also, if I’d tried to write anything with depth and honesty as a 22-year-old active alcoholic, I’m pretty sure I would’ve missed the mark. It would’ve been performative copycat bullshit at best.
That brings us up to date. Here I am at 51, working to find an agent for my first novel and simultaneously working on novels 2 and 3. The core challenge now is that I have a lot of room for improvement. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from seasoned writers, it’s that progress comes down to time and repetition. I have to put in the hours of writing (and reading) in order to improve and become the great writer I want to be.
I am not unique. This seems to be the experience of most writers—especially those of us who are getting what Chuck Palahniuk calls the kitchen table MFA. We have no undergrad experience with creative writing classes or English lit classes. We were not students at the Iowa Writers Workshop, and we do not teach at universities. We have chosen a different path of piecing our craft together from what is available at the local library. This is certainly how Larry Brown did it. Not to mention Hemingway, Stephen King, and thousands of others.
Becoming a novelist is hard work. Maybe the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Getting an agent is laborious, and getting published is something I know nothing about, but I’m assuming it’s no cakewalk either (at least not for the kind of books I want to write). So it gladdens me to observe that in the face of the difficulty of becoming a great writer, I’m sticking with it. I’ve watched other aspiring authors get started, experience the adversity, then retreat to some other hobby. But I’m still here. And I’m excited to be sitting in this chair doing the hardest work I’ve ever done and wanting badly to be good at it - but clearly seeing that I’m not there yet.
Problematically, I also have to earn a living, which takes lots of my time. I also have a rich, full life. I’m married to someone I love spending time with, I have a dog who requires lots of walking, I’m active in recovery and attend several meetings a week, and I work with sponsees regularly. I’m climbing or riding the bike or working out 6 days a week, and I engage in practices like meditation and journaling every day. As you can see, this doesn’t leave a TON of time to become a great writer.
Hell, even sitting here typing this thing out could be precious time spent working on a novel, but I find immense value in this writing too!
Time and energy seem to be these very finite resources we can’t get more of. There is an allotment that everyone gets and nothing more! I can try to fine-tune resources and use them as wisely as possible, but that’s similar to swearing off Starbucks when you have $4M in debt to pay off. It’s not really making a dent.
The only thing I know to do is to ruthlessly cut something from my life. One of the following areas that currently occupies a significant portion of my time has to go.
What’s it gonna be y’all?
- My marriage? Hell no.
- My recovery? Probably not a good idea.
- My fitness? I could shave this one down some. That feels scary to me though.
- My work? I could also scale this back and be ok with less income.
Honestly, I’m a little embarrassed to even write about this stuff. I have this story in my head of what a “real writer” would do. A real writer wouldn’t talk about this at all, they would just sit the fuck down and write and damn everything else to hell!
Of course, all these “real writers” in my head are all dead from alcoholism, suicide, heart attacks, or have been murdered by their significant other. I’m willing to trade my time and energy and attention to be a good writer. I am not willing to trade my emotional, mental, or physical health to be good.
This is not an easy decision. These are all things I’ve worked hard to build and cultivate over many years and are, in varying degrees, precious to me.
I will tell you this though, the one that I am most willing to experiment with cutting back first is my work. It is most likely the area with the most time bloat, and I could get better about containing the hours I am available to clients to specific windows. This could potentially leave 1.5-2 hours a day + 4-hour chunks on the weekend to dedicate to being a better writer.
There are a few reasons I’m choosing work as the thing that feels most flexible/expendable:
- I can scale up or down the number of clients I work with.
- I can control my availability with my clients more easily than other areas.
- Working with clients is (obviously) serving others. Marriage, recovery, health/fitness are serving me. Without paying close attention to those areas, everything else falls apart. It is the equivalent of placing the mask on myself before placing a mask on others.
This prototype starts immediately, and I’ll report back later. Or I’ll become a super-wealthy author and just disappear from the internet and live in the woods.
As I wrap this one up, there are two things worth pointing out:
I was in my 40s before I found something I really wanted to be good at. And I may be in my 50’s, 60’s, or 70’s before I feel good about what I’m writing. But I know there are lots of us out there who feel like we don’t know what our “passion” is or don’t know what we want to do for a living. I just wanna say that’s ok. It’s totally ok. I’m fairly good at lots of things, but I was in my 50s before I started actively trying to be great at the one thing I care most about.
In order to get good at something, we don’t just cut out the bad stuff in our lives in order to make time for our thing. Of course, we can start there, but we also have to sacrifice some of the good shit as well. I’m not just giving up hours on the couch watching garbage TV to make time to write. I will have to sacrifice revenue, time with my buddies, or climbing trips. In order to be a good writer, I’ll have to pass up some really fun times as well…and I already know that even if I never published a thing, it will have been worth it.