The Joy Is In The Struggle: Accepting Where You Are At

by Darren Greer

I’m one of those people who is never satisfied with anything. Give me one good thing, I want another -- the next good thing in line. I choose from a menu and I always wonder what the other dishes I didn’t order taste like. I pick one section of the beach and suddenly I’m certain that the other side away from the children and closer to the volleyball courts would have been better, only to get there and wonder if I wasn’t better off where I was in the first place.

My writing career has been no different.

When I first realized that one could do more than put words down on paper - that, in fact, one could actually get them published - this is what I wanted. Then when I got published (for free) I wanted money. When I got that I wanted more money. More recognition. More requests to speak at high schools and writers’ conferences. When I got my first book publishing deal I was disappointed the publisher wasn’t bigger. When I got my second publisher I wanted more advance money and bigger deals. When I got that I wanted even more. God only knows where it will all end. We can’t all be Pulitzer Prize winners, though if I were I’m certain I would immediately set my sights on the Nobel.

For sure, there is nothing wrong with having goals. And there is nothing wrong with setting new, more difficult-to-achieve goals once your initial goals are met; I suspect that all successful writing careers are built on some form of this basic principle. But it is when you start ignoring your achievements the minute you actually achieve them, constantly berating yourself for what you don’t have instead of acknowledging just for a second what you do, that the trouble starts. If this pattern goes on long enough, as it has a time or two in my life, it can actually start to interfere with the writing itself. And any motivating system that interferes with activity it is supposed to motivate you to do is, in my opinion, a bad system. After all -- issues of respect and money and publication aside -- it is, or should be, all about the work.

***

Another thing I’ve noticed about myself. The older I get the more didactic I get. This article, for example, is terribly teachy, even preachy, in places. I know that it won’t do any good to tell a very young writer to respect where he or she is at in the writing process and enjoy it. I know it won’t do any good to tell a young writer this because they won’t listen, just as I wouldn’t listen when I was twenty and wanting, dying, to get in print. But, because I am a writer, and an annoyingly self-righteous one at that, I’m going to try anyway.

Let me start by giving an example of how we’re never satisfied. Once, shortly after my first novel was published, I was visiting a friend of mine who owned a second-hand bookstore in a small town outside of the Canadian city of Ottawa, where I lived then. We were, as usual, talking books (the Modern Library had just published its top one hundred English books of the century and we were both checking off those we had read) when into the bookstore wanders a dejected young man. He was a would-be writer, unpublished, still living with his parents and working in their antique shop next door. My friend introduced me, showed him my book, and we had a short but animated conversation about writing and the writing life.

At the time, this young man was in the process, thanks to my friend, of reading books from the Modern Library list as well. In fact, he was reading everything he could get his hands on in his attempt to transform himself into his idea of what a young writer should be. And yet, he hated the small town he was in, his unpublished status, his work at the antique store. In short, he hated his life and pretty much said aloud that he envied mine. And although I didn’t realize it until later, I found that I envied his in turn. I was thirty-three then, and the kind of passion he felt -- about books, about writing, about life (even if it was a negative passion) -- I hadn’t felt since I was his age, some dozen years before. I wanted, for the briefest of seconds, to go back to that place, when I was both angry at the shitty cards life had dealt me and gravely determined to do something about them. Around every corner in those days it seemed some new self discovery awaited, some new book to be read ( I had yet to slog my way through a quarter of the books on the Modern Library list.) I was fully and unconsciously engaged in life in a way that becomes almost impossible as you get older, when, along with the ability to make better choices, you are forced to develop from the swirling vortex of your own experience a certain self-preserving, almost cynical, detachment. There was enough of this very detachment in me even then to laugh at myself -- envying this young man when he so clearly envied my position in life and despised his own. And yet, what I was also understanding, for the first time in my career, was the value of a position that seemed, on first glance, less successful in mine. I was even jealous of his job - free behind the counter of the antique shop from contracts and returns and bad reviews and the Great God of Remainders, and with all that extra time to read. I was beginning to learn the lesson that I attempt to communicate here, that all position in life - published, unpublished, or somewhere in between (read self-published) - are of equal value if we take the time to appreciate what we have and where we are at with it.

***

I’m not certain whatever happened to that young man, if he ever became the writer he so desperately desired to be. If he didn’t, I can almost bet he gave up under the pressure that we are all so familiar with - that kind of existential longing to be something that we perceive we are not. And this is the sole reason why all writers should, if possible, learn to accept where they are at without losing the ambition to achieve more. Because the constant striving, with gratification endlessly delayed, is, in the end, what can kill us, or at least kill our desire to write.

The balance is a tricky one, but necessary to maintaining the will to write: cherish where you are at, while at the same time continuing to set goals and striving to reach them. Even if no one listens to the message I so gratuitously give, you may remember it when the first book gets published, or the first play gets produced, and you find yourself as unsatisfied and restless as you ever were. In all stages of life, as in all stages of a writing career, challenges and difficulties exist. In each stage, you simply trade one set of problems for another. To help deal with this, it may help to keep in mind the old African proverb: the joy is in the struggle. At least I can see, looking back, that here is where the joy has been, and will continue to be, for me.

Darren Greer is the author of the novels Tyler’s Cape and Still Life with June, both available in Canada from Cormorant Books. Still Life With June was nominated for a Pearson Canada Reader’s Choice Book Award in 2003. A book of essays, entitled Strange Ghosts: Essays On Art and Life, will appear in Canada in the fall of 2004. The U.S. edition of Still Life with June will be available from St. Martin’s Press in the spring of 2005. Darren lives in Toronto. Visit his website at www.darrengreer.com