Are Writers Selfish?

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The Children's Society creative writing competition

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Paul Whybrow

Full Member
Jun 20, 2015
Cornwall, UK
I've previously pondered whether writers are paranoid and envious, but it's plainly true, that to get a book written, an author has to be selfish.

We have to make the time to be alone in our creative space, to open the channels into the fictional world we command. That's one of the joys of writing, for however confused we get, we authors are at least able to decide how our stories will play out—unlike real life!

Not that it's always pleasant to be confronted with a blank page. Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe compared writing a novel to being imprisoned:

It is like wrestling; you are wrestling with ideas and with the story. There is a lot of energy required. At the same time, it is exciting. So it is both difficult and easy. What you must accept is that your life is not going to be the same while you are writing. I have said in the kind of exaggerated manner of writers and prophets that writing, for me, is like receiving a term of imprisonment — you know that’s what you’re in for, for whatever time it takes.

Prisoners are occasionally visited by family and friends, and like a prisoner the writer needs to make a conscious effort to shake off the hidden world that occupies their thoughts while in their cell, attempting to return to the reality of everyday living to interact with normal people.

That's not to say, that a writer constantly takes pleasure in excluding loved ones, and even strangers, for sitting alone working, tussling with your imagination and confronting your own humanity has a way of throwing you back on yourself. Solitude may help creativity, but it helps to be happy in your own skin.

The commitment we need to write a book, is assailed by doubts about its lack of commercial worth. We've created something, but if it doesn't interest anyone and fails to sell itself, we're effectively non-productive. It helps to have admirers among your relatives and friends, to buoy up your ego.

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.”

George Orwell, from Why I Write.

In 2016, Irish novelist John Banville stirred up a hornets' nest of recriminations, after declaring that writers are bad fathers:

Do writers make bad parents? Few agree with John Banville

It's undeniable, that the 20th-century's best-selling children's author, Enid Blyton, was a terrible mother, bringing misery to her daughters. Her writing came first, and she preferred the idea of happy families, rather than making one herself:

Enid Blyton the nightmare mother

We have to be self-centred as writers, but does that make us selfish?

I live a solitary existence, happy to be reclusive. I don't have a family, and no friends who live locally. In 2009, I made a deliberate decision to leave a town where I'd lived for 15 years, to move to an area new to me, so that I could write without distractions. I haven't dated for the last eight years, for though I love being in love, I think that I'd resent losing writing time to romancing. This could be seen as selfish or self-centred or devoted to my craft.

I'm in regular contact with half-a-dozen friends, in the U.K., New Zealand and the U.S.A., and three have graciously acted as readers for me. As I'm happier than I've been in years, they don't worry about me being stupidly selfish by doing something that's frivolous and potentially harmful. I like the devotion and discipline required to be a writer, and freely admit that it's addictive...but, it's an addiction that enhances me, and which may benefit readers, if they ever discover my stories! ;)

Do you ever worry about being selfish?

What have you given up, to be a writer?

momwriters.png
 
I don't put it first, not at the expense of people I live with but maybe I should, and they'd be just fine, whatever. They're all grown up now. No family member would dream of barging in while I'm tutoring or doing readings, but I leave the door open while I'm writing, don't I?
 
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Writing can be both professional and personal. for me, I try my best to keep them both separate because when I write I have to become very introvert and its not fair to my family and friends, but I do give them plenty of warning.
Because for me to write and write well. (Thats very debatable atm lol) I have to become a director while the film plays in my head as I write if that makes any sense, its really hard and I have to really concentrate on where I point my camera. Nothing in reality can be interfering, what I see, what I smell, what I hear, what I feel is the story and the story alone I'm writing, nothing else. Does that make me selfish?
Yesterday I hammered my prologue and synopsis and I found it took me much longer to wind down when I finished (Hence my current silly sleep patterns, thankfully I'm off work atm. Otherwise I wouldn't be up all hours.)
I woke up this morning with my head pestering me again with a new scene to go in between my chapter 2 and 3. I invested a lot of my time writing yesterday. So it will have to wait for now, I'll write it down in my notebook, give it a day or two play it in my head several different ways
and If something sticks I'll use it. Plus I have plans today, you'll be pleased to know social ones so no writing today I'm afraid :)
 
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Paul, a nice article. My partner always says I'm in a different head space when I write, and that can go on for months at a time. Our kids are grown and gone, and to have found someone who is understanding is an amazing discovery after a lifetime of battling kids, full time job and the intense desire to be able to engross myself in my true vocation and not being given the space in which to do it justice.
 
Selfish? Or not selfish? ... Hmmm. I guess that depends on the view point. I'm more than dedicated to my writing, and I have in the past become a tad obsessive to the point that I could quite easily have been called selfish (or nuts). But every time I reach this point of obsession, I take a step back. Not necessarily for sake of peace and harmony, but for my own sanity. I'm not sure how effective a writer I really am if I'm so deeply involved. I strongly believe we need an outside world to keep the perspective, to find inspiration, hence time away spent with loved ones, doing a day job, going to buy carrots is necessary in order to stay healthy and whole.

Here's a thought:

Imagine I'm sat at my keyboard, writing away on my novel, refusing to look up and acknowledge the world beyond giving a grumpy grunt. People might call me selfish.

But were I to earn tons of money from said novel, would they then suddenly call me dedicated?

We can only be considered selfish by someone, if that someone has expectations on us. But that might a be a bit too Buddha-esque.
 
In my case then yes. It is perhaps the single area of my life that is just for me. I don't believe I have ever inconvenienced my love ones and I don't believe I have negatively impacted on their lives through my writing but it is also something that I jealously guard in that I only write for myself. I write what I would like to read and have no issues around the fact that I effectively exist in a genre of one.

Were I to make some money from it, then beyond some fripperies ( a new lap-top every now again and perhaps, in the case of making some serious money, treating myself to a new pair of flip-flops every 6 months, even if the current ones were still good to go), every penny would go directly to my wife along with all the deeds to the various homes and so on. My only financial ambition now is to die with a bill from the Inland Revenue tucked into my coffin with me but other than that, much the same as now.

Should my loves one ever moan about my time writing then perhaps I might have second thoughts but so far its only been encouragement. Books in the loo is about as far as their griping goes with me.
 
Do you ever worry about being selfish?

Not so much anymore, I used to. My son is grown now. He's the one I worried most about not being able to give enough to.

What have you given up, to be a writer?

Nothing I can think of -- money?
 
It is probably true however, that living with a writer in full on mode, as in, the writer driven by the daemon, would feel like living with a fascinating but selfish monster. Byron, Dylan et al. And in genre, Stephen King. That writing daemon demands great things. It is notoriously a slave driving tyrant.

The corollary, the sting there being, what heights the more moderate person can achieve, unless they plunge a matching depth, because mountains, for the purposes of this discussion anyway, have definitely got roots.
 
I've previously pondered whether writers are paranoid and envious, but it's plainly true, that to get a book written, an author has to be selfish.

We have to make the time to be alone in our creative space, to open the channels into the fictional world we command. That's one of the joys of writing, for however confused we get, we authors are at least able to decide how our stories will play out—unlike real life!

Not that it's always pleasant to be confronted with a blank page. Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe compared writing a novel to being imprisoned:

It is like wrestling; you are wrestling with ideas and with the story. There is a lot of energy required. At the same time, it is exciting. So it is both difficult and easy. What you must accept is that your life is not going to be the same while you are writing. I have said in the kind of exaggerated manner of writers and prophets that writing, for me, is like receiving a term of imprisonment — you know that’s what you’re in for, for whatever time it takes.

Prisoners are occasionally visited by family and friends, and like a prisoner the writer needs to make a conscious effort to shake off the hidden world that occupies their thoughts while in their cell, attempting to return to the reality of everyday living to interact with normal people.

That's not to say, that a writer constantly takes pleasure in excluding loved ones, and even strangers, for sitting alone working, tussling with your imagination and confronting your own humanity has a way of throwing you back on yourself. Solitude may help creativity, but it helps to be happy in your own skin.

The commitment we need to write a book, is assailed by doubts about its lack of commercial worth. We've created something, but if it doesn't interest anyone and fails to sell itself, we're effectively non-productive. It helps to have admirers among your relatives and friends, to buoy up your ego.

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.”

George Orwell, from Why I Write.

In 2016, Irish novelist John Banville stirred up a hornets' nest of recriminations, after declaring that writers are bad fathers:

Do writers make bad parents? Few agree with John Banville

It's undeniable, that the 20th-century's best-selling children's author, Enid Blyton, was a terrible mother, bringing misery to her daughters. Her writing came first, and she preferred the idea of happy families, rather than making one herself:

Enid Blyton the nightmare mother

We have to be self-centred as writers, but does that make us selfish?

I live a solitary existence, happy to be reclusive. I don't have a family, and no friends who live locally. In 2009, I made a deliberate decision to leave a town where I'd lived for 15 years, to move to an area new to me, so that I could write without distractions. I haven't dated for the last eight years, for though I love being in love, I think that I'd resent losing writing time to romancing. This could be seen as selfish or self-centred or devoted to my craft.

I'm in regular contact with half-a-dozen friends, in the U.K., New Zealand and the U.S.A., and three have graciously acted as readers for me. As I'm happier than I've been in years, they don't worry about me being stupidly selfish by doing something that's frivolous and potentially harmful. I like the devotion and discipline required to be a writer, and freely admit that it's addictive...but, it's an addiction that enhances me, and which may benefit readers, if they ever discover my stories! ;)

Do you ever worry about being selfish?

What have you given up, to be a writer?

momwriters.png
Fascinating writing here, Paul, and thanks for it. As a poet, no, I don't worry about my writing being selfish. I am dealing with a page or two of text at a time. It might take me WEEKS to edit, revise, edit, revise... those two pages. (How do novelists do it!?) I have novelist friends and colleagues who have children and they get up at 2-3 AM to write--so they give up sleep. And I think many writers give up money. At least here in the US, you need a "regular" job for insurance. But that's another story--something worth writing about: how losing a job can cost you your life.

Interesting discussion.
 
I've found that of all the forms of writing, poetry encourages/ demands/ entices editing out of me; it takes a very long time for a poem to be just right—it's not just the word choice, but how it sounds, how it affects the rhythm of reading it, whether it's memorable.

As for editing novels, peculiar phenomena appear, the strangest of which, for me anyway, is not seeing missing words. Somehow, my brain inserts a phantom 'and' I've omitted. I made a beginner's mistake writing my first novel, in that it was 100,000 words too long for the Crime genre, at 180,000 words. I edited it down to 130,000 words, spending five solid months on the process. I literally made 500 passes through the manuscript (I counted them) and still I missed things, which I found re-reading the story recently. With subsequent novels, I've edited as I've gone along, which makes the final edit less like climbing a mountain stark naked while people throw rocks at me! :eek:

http://manuscriptagency.com.au/word-count-by-genre-how-long-should-my-book-be/
 
I prefer the words focused, committed or devoted.

I don't demand sacrifices of others so that I can write. I quit the keyboard when other duty calls, I always have and it has no doubt hugely slowed my productivity. Now though, as with Amber and no doubt others too, I'm 55, my children have left the nest, and just as I accord others the space to do what they want so far as I practically can while stuck in a wheelchair, I'm not going to beat myself up for the attention I give to writing, reading and Litopia.

I feel I will place the finished novel one day and at least one other book, and only time will tell, but we're writing for it to be read, aren't we? We're doing it because we have something we want to share, even though we might not be able to say exactly what that is, so we hang a story on it, like a sheet on a clothes horse.

And the hourly rate for these tens of thousands of hours spent hanging this sheet on the clothes horse might easily translate into way less than a penny an hour on publication, even with a large publisher.

So, devoted, or possibly somewhat deluded, but an old friend likes to joke it keeps me out of trouble and off the streets. bad gold star.jpg
 
I've six kids (from 4-20) and have spent years feeling guilty and selfish when I took the time to be creative (I'm a visual artist too). But I don't anymore and have consciously become more selfish in the past couple of years because otherwise, the utter, desolate frustration at not having an outlet to be creative meant I was a shitty mother who wanted to run away all the time. We also home-ed our kids so any child-free time is extra precious and utilised with extreme creativity and productivity!!

I've sacrificed TV, most social outings, alcohol and much sleep in order to write... and I wouldn't change a bit of it! @Paul Whybrow I'm not sure I could be so dedicated as you are, but boy would I love at least one day a week where I saw or talked to no-one for about eight hours at a time :)
 
Paul, the question should be are people selfish. My answer on that is - we can be but don't have to be. When I'm wood-working, family time diminishes. When I go on geological expeditions, family time can be compromised. When a new story pesters to get onto paper, the real world vanishes as the story unfolds and family time vaporizes. Of all of the above activities, stopping the flow of a story to re-enter the real world is the toughest. So I agree, writers can be selfish. They don't have to be but in my case, like a drug, writing a story is addictive.
 
@Kirsten I also crave silence and dream of joining an enclosed order of nuns...! And on that point,over the weekend I took myself off to a monastery over here (Ireland) that have a guesthouse where you come and spend your time just "being" in silence (if you choose). It was glorious, really perfect, but I needed more than one night (next time).
 
Being an unpaid household servant sucks! I should quit this crappy job and get one that pays - I could be a quant or an analyst of some sort.. but I started this mom job and I have to finish it.. and working for *the man* while merging my mind with some database would suck in a different way. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

@Kirsten. 'Light at the end of the tunnel?' This is depression talking and you are still young. The choice does not have to be between a situation that sucks, and another that sucks equally, just differently. You can do the mom job perfectly well and find a job that interests you and is worthy of your undoubted abilities.

A job need not necessarily be full time, but you are expressing a clear need to be out of the house. You need that paying job. The extra bacon gets brought in and slapped on the communal table, and your husband picks up his clothes after himself, but you need that job for yourself, and people kick at change but it would not deprive your family of you. It would only let them know you better. It's good for the children, damn good for them, healthy and instructive, to witness you not always there, engaged elsewhere with the big wide world outside the house. It adds to their own stores of courage to face their own future uncertainties of fledging, to see in how many different ways it can be done, this earning thing. Many couples, both MUST work, and the children are absolutely not neglected. They get less individual attention, yes, but they get more space. You are brilliant. You could do so many things tomorrow that a suitable employer would snap up yesterday if they had half a brain.
 
Kristen, you might get something out of the Moodscope site, which has a newsletter and a daily test to assess your mood by a percentage score:

Moodscope - Lift your mood with a little help from your friends

Top Tip: if you do the test, don't do it every day, as should you be feeling depressed and getting a low score, you'll feel even worse that you're not improving; instead, do it once a week.
 
I am not saying for one moment you're in denial. That wretched river, De Nile. I'm not thinking it either. Sorry, Kirsten. It was a response not a diagnosis, not loaded, no criticism or judgement implied whatsoever. NONE WHATSOEVER. I understand depression, not necessarily as pain, more as as a kind of a deep fatigue after some long haul that has depleted the batteries. That was what your comments conveyed to me.

I started working full time when my first was six months old. It was that or lose the roof over my head. Later, yes the part time gig, as mobility started going to the wall, and then not working at all, and then working again but from home. Major pros and cons with each. The writing lay in deep freeze for a long, long time. I felt like it wasn't there at all for many years. Gone, presumed dead. Crawled off somewhere to die quietly. But no it hadn't. It was only hibernating. And you are a writer. No question about it.
 
Hmph. So you are convinced that I am in denial about being depressed. I'm really not! and I would feel strange about giving a mood tracker my address and phone number! Who was that author that wrote: "If you are worried that you might be depressed, first take a good look around and make sure that you are not surrounded by assholes." Now, I love my children, but kids are still learning about how not to be little egoists. Some people never learn! My inlaws once told me at my kitchen table that "Americans stem from the scum of Europe. The absolute scum." and we weren't even fighting about anything. ( I had a hard time not mentioning Nazis in my reply.)There are just some lovely people in this world and being annoyed by them doesn't mean that you are depressed. Believe me, I'm pretty darn unsinkable.

Yeah. You might have run into an asshole.

I totally would have mentioned Nazis. It sounds like they were up for a discussion.

If you say you're not depressed, you're not depressed. Geesshhh.

Speaking as someone who has experienced varying degrees of depression, the worst, most pervasive type of depression was painful. That's all it was. Emotional pain all day long. It was so pervasive, there weren't words for it until it started to go away.

Also, speaking as someone who knows something about mental health, not only in terms of my education but as a patient, getting help almost always should be self-directed. There are obvious exceptions. But one of the things that happens in a society where technically we're not allowed to legislate morality, is that psychology is termed a science, takes the place of religion, and then morality can be enforced in that way. It's important to note that psychologists know very little and the science is very soft. Here in the United States, each state has different licensing requirements. But in Texas, someone can become an LPC with a Bachelors degree and time spent in the trenches--where "the trenches" really amounts to little more than being a camp counselor. Also, the scientific research often depends on statistics practitioners hardly ever take the time to understand.

Besides. Being sad is okay. No one promised any of us a rose garden. Let yourself be sad I say. It will pass. Most of the time. Sadness is underrated.
 
Sojourns in Hades. Things can rise while you're alone down there that might never have arisen to make themselves known to you, had things come easier. Valuable things, though the price may be higher than you'd have volunteered for, had there been that option. But that's OK.
 
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