I keep coming back to an old Kurt Vonnegut quote about writing. He was speaking in the 1970s, having seen that reading, as a form of entertainment, had become largely obsolete. Television had replaced the story magazines he’d made a living by, and they were folding left, right and centre. Thus, he likened writing to a beautiful, antique instrument that takes ages to learn, but for which there was no call any more. Yet, half a century later, we diehards persist in trying to prove him wrong. Certainly, there’s no longer the opportunity to make any significant money from it. The magazines that once paid good money have all vanished. The few remaining either pay next to nothing or are so highfalutin the odds of acceptance are negligible, even with a knockout manuscript.
The latter-day has seen a proliferation of flimsy e-pubs of course, but they’re a strange breed – quirky titles with hardly any circulation and, again, paying nothing. I could start one myself, call it something viby, like Lorem Ipsum. I’d run it for a few years, let millions of hopefuls shower me with their work, then melt quietly into the woodwork, cursed by contributors as a charlatan. It would grant me some kudos, if I were building a CV for floating myself in literary circles, but little else. Otherwise, is it worth the trouble? Is pitching your material into this opaque void they call “the market” any better than self-publishing on WordPress or Substack? And I keep coming back to the same answer: no.
As writers, we’re always at risk of massaging our own egos; as an editor, the same. Unless we’re anticipating thousands of clicks from that quirky e-pub, our own blog, our own Substack, is still the best curated space for our work. We writers are a curious breed: huffy and puffy, yet craving the affirmation our lonely thoughts are worth a second glance. Dare I say we still court fame, even as we sneer at it?
If you dislike the sound of this then stop writing, but the chances are, you can’t. And why should you? Those thoughts of yours? They’re worth it in more ways than you can imagine, but no one’s ever going to tell you that. The affirmation you crave – it does not exist.
Language is built into us from an early age. It’s how we express ourselves, how we establish relationships with others, and the world around us. Writing takes this a stage further: it builds in the time to contemplate, to ruminate, to construct a story, an argument, a myth. So yes, a beautiful, antique form, for which there is no call any more, at least not in the media as we’ve made it. But if we’re saying there’s nothing tangible to gain from our writing these days – not a living and no celebrity, what else is there? Why can we not stop when materially, rationally, all the signs are that we should? This latter lesson of course might take a lifetime to learn, but it comes eventually, and then question: what the do we think we’re doing, wasting our lives this way?
But there also arises the suspicion something else is going on beneath the surface, that while writing may not be viable as a profession any more, it retains a core fascination for the writers among us, though in a way that is closer to alchemy. And alchemy was never a performing art.
The alchemists were mocked of course, accused of wasting their lives trying to turn lead into gold. But the deeper tradition tells us the materials involved were never merely physical. They were the substance of the unrefined self – a mess of impressions, memories, fears, and desires carried deep in the psyche. The “gold” was something to be aimed at: a clarified consciousness.
Writing begins with the same basic material – a handful of images and a mind that will not settle on anything for more than five seconds. Yet underneath all of this, many of us are also aware of that question refusing to go away. So we sit down with these fragments of psyche, and begin shaping them into words. Often we do not know what we mean until the sentence appears. The act of writing reveals the thought, the writing clarifies what it is we think.
In that sense then, a piece of work becomes the alchemical vessel to which heat is applied. The raw matter of experience goes in and, through the slow work of reflection, of draft and redraft, something else begins to emerge – a story, perhaps, or an argument, or simply a clearer sense of what it was we were feeling all along. And often what we end up with is nothing like what we thought we were setting out to create.
No one pays for that process. No quirkily titled magazine will ever commission it. Books do not shoot up the best seller lists on account of it. Yet it remains one of the oldest forms of inner work available to us. And perhaps that is why the impulse to write never goes away. Even when the market collapses, when the audience shrinks to a handful of sympathetic readers, the process itself still exerts its pull. So yes, Vonnegut is still right, it is like a beautiful old instrument that takes a long time to learn. But the call for it is still there. It’s still impotant, just internalised, and worth the effort learning, if you feel called to it.
But the reason you’re called may not be the reason you’re thinking. Because somewhere along the way the writer realizes the gold was never the readership or a million likes and subscribers, nor a fawning editor. The gold is the transformation that happens in you while the words are forming on the page.
The Rivendale Review 
