As best I can tell, writing young = writing
from a place of uncertainty, immaturity, from inside the process of maturing; with
an abundance of sincerity; writing from inside experience rather than distanced
from it; with so much exuberant inquisitiveness; writing totally afraid that
you’ll never succeed yet somehow unafraid to fail—with that kind of
fuck-the-world swagger; openness; generosity; heart; writing with humility;
writing with hubris; embracing so many contradictions.
Lucas writes, “I do think that
immaturity, or at least the process of maturing, is a potentially riveting,
truly essayistic place to write from. After all, what is young adulthood but a
hybrid time of life, pushing toward and failing to live up to a set of
expectations? The very same can be said about the essay form. When we embrace
that tension, instead of fleeing from it, real, valuable work is done. We get
writers not only analyzing what has ended, but also sorting out how to begin.”
This does seem to be the place so many great essays come
from. But what really does this have to do with one’s age? Certainly not
everything.
“Young adulthood” as described here may as well be one’s
teens or late 20s, early 30s, middle age, 45-64, retirement, the nursing home
years… Seems like six one way, half a dozen the other. That sense of
uncertainty described above, that tension between success and failure, the
tension of impending endings and “sorting out how to begin”—we may as well call
this life. Or at least it resembles
my life. Possibly I’m behind the curve. More likely I am one of the multitudes smack in the middle of it, which is to say: This is probably the case for most of us.
When we embrace that
tension, instead of fleeing from it… Maybe writing young has less to do
with one’s age, and more to do with one’s ability to maintain that tensional
essayistic tenor. Of course here I wonder if maybe the quantitatively young are somehow better at maintaining that
tension, the tension that great essaying depends on. I suspect it has to do
with one’s place in life, which is certainly related to, though obviously not dependent
on how old one is. Writing young, I
think, has less to do with years, and more to do with simply being free—
It’s possible our pace slows a little as we round thirty.
Maybe that hungry striving drive just isn’t as hungry. Maybe we don’t push our
ideas as hard, or ourselves—because we know how much work shit takes and have
failed enough to second-guess the effort. Maybe we start to think we might
actually be as smart as our (thoroughly revised and revised) essays make us out
to be, and maybe there’s a pressure to not seem so…naïve, i.e young. Maybe one’s reputation suddenly
depends on credibility, on having figured shit out. Maybe it’s not as easy to
immerse oneself in a project because suddenly all kinds of people (bosses,
spouses, kids) are depending on you to keep the world turning, to pay the
bills, entertain a client, get to the dentist, iron your work shirts, clean the
bathroom, to be more available, and
you can write essays, fine, but only after everything else. With no time to
waste, there is no room for failure here. So write essays, fine, but be
practical. Keep your head down. Play it safe. Play it safe, though safe is almost
always boring.
—free to take risks. To open oneself completely. To fully commit
to a project. To go all in. And maybe this does become more difficult as we get
older. Or not so much as we get older, but as our roles in the world change,
which usually comes with getting older. If nothing else, being young seems to
lend itself to being, simply, productive.
Maybe this is why there are so many great young essayists.
And only a handful of older ones, and the older ones are so often cushioned by academia,
with ample salary and time and resources. Montaigne (still) may as well be the
model for the modern essaysist. (See also this
recent correspondence from Bonnie J. Rough.) What kind of fortune do we
have to draw from while we work? What kind of tower shields us from worldly
responsibilities? To whom are we beholden outside ourselves? Maybe this idea of
writing young really does expire at some age. Not because we outgrow our
youthfulness, per se, but because we grow into so many more pressing responsibilities.
A more rigid hierarchy of priorities.
Say I have three ideas a day for projects/essays. Each is
weighed against: time spent away from the job that pays the insane gas bill;
time away from my wife; time away from my son. Is seeing a great idea to
fruition worth, say, ten hours away from him, just now as he’s starting to pull
himself up and walk around? It almost never is. It never is, unless I convince
myself it might lead to something bigger (publication, award, fellowship, $$$ =
more time to write), which it never does, not really. And writing with some
lame goal in mind (publication, award, fellowship, $$$ = more time to write) will
sap the life out of any project. You’ve got to go all in, write an essay for
its own sake—or why bother?
I tend to be an all-in or all-out kind of guy. If I can’t
invest everything, I don’t want to give anything. If I can’t give 100%, well,
I’ll give my 100% to something else. If I can’t research and write and revise
an essay a week, well, fuck, fuck essays. Seriously, I don’t want to half-ass
this business. If I can’t go all in, then I’m done. Why bother writing at all?
Fuck writing. I’ll do something else. I’ll take up welding.
Deep, deep, dramatic SIGH.
Why bother at all?
I am 32, with a wife and son, and I spend my days in a
cubicle. I may never essay again. Not in any grand (read: meaningful) kind of
way. Not the way I essayed when I was 29.
This is obviously an unhelpful line of thinking, but I can’t
help myself. I seem to be experiencing a moment of despair. All I did was try
to get down some thoughts about writing
young. Tried to be sincere, inquisitive, honest, open. And somehow this is
where we’ve landed. That’s the genre for you. Fucking essays.
I’m off to take a pout break. Get some coffee. See you in a
minute.
Okay, I’m back. (Another effect of age: I’ve had to stop
with the caffeine, so I’m drinking decaf. It’s been 6 weeks. The first two days
I took a righteous pounding, and I miss that intensity my sixth cup of the good
stuff used to give me, and it’s more difficult to focus without it, but
whatever, doctor’s orders. I take my decaf with a quarter-inch of Hazelnut-flavored
creamer, one of my life’s newest pleasures, this coffee candy; it’s important
to adapt.)
Truth is, this live
free or die! mindset is itself a holdover from my youth, from those teenage
years of pushing against anything that might push back. Truth is, as I’ve
gotten older, I’ve come to recognize a more manageable way of doing things.
When I was seventeen I started doing pushups before school.
Three sets of 25. Then some crunches. Gradually I added reps, added exercises.
Two years later I was doing ten sets of 30 and 25 minutes of abs. Everyday. Every
day I would push myself as hard as I could, and as I got stronger and fitter
the problem I faced was that continuing to push myself so hard involved
constantly upping reps, doing more, investing more time and energy. It finally
got to be too much. I couldn’t keep it up. Had to stop. So I quit cold turkey,
and this led to all kinds of problems. Bouncing from one extreme to another
never works very well.
Eventually I realized: life is long. It just keeps going, long
after (like John Mellencamp says) you turn twenty, after twenty-five, after
thirty. Ideally it keeps going for a really, really long time. And when it
comes to doing pushups, unless you’re training for some event, you’re training
for life. Workouts should be tailored accordingly. None of this burning out in
two years. You’ve got to pace yourself for the long haul, for decades. The
trick is not to do something uber-intensely every day, but rather, simply, to
do something every day. Consistently. Sustainably. Three sets of 25 pushups
isn’t a lot, but 75 everyday for the rest of my life—that shit adds up. This is
a metaphor. This is wisdom, maybe. In any case, it has taken getting older to
get me here.
My 28-year-old self wants to write 100 essays this year or
none at all! But I am 32 now, and I know 100 isn’t in the cards. Three would be
a dream. Even two might be too many. But writing one essay this year probably
won’t kill me. Writing one essay a year—like, seventeen words a day, tossed out
between work emails—is doable. Anyway, this is a good place to begin. Rather,
this is a place to begin again, as we all begin again over and over. After all,
what is this but one more “hybrid time of life, pushing toward and failing to
live up to a set of expectations”? And “when we embrace that tension, instead
of fleeing from it, real, valuable work is done.”
Having surpassed my 20s (and 30s) I find that I kind of enjoy the reverse-ageism in which the essay wallows. In a country obsessed with--and let's just say dominated by--youth, it's nice to have something to do in which being over 30 doesn't mean we're relegated to the bench. I think you're right on about life freedom vs. just "youth." And I also think it is possible to write great work when we're young. But I do think the seasoning of age is important. When I was 25 I thought I was a great writer. Of course I thought many things that didn't hold up to the test of time. I can see the initial promise of that era, but also realize that what I wrote then can't hold a candle to what I did in my 30s.
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