Writer’s Ask: Is writing irrelevant?

I had coffee with a writer pal of mine this past weekend. It’s been a minute since I’ve had coffee with this particular friend, because, you know, the pandemic. I love coffee with this fellow writer because here’s what always happens when we meet up: time stops. We blink and the coffee is cold and it’s three hours past and we never noticed because we were having too much fun talking about stuff that actually mattered.

That was a big topic of conversation: what actually matters in writing? Specifically, what is it about the whole act of writing that matters? The editing, the submitting, the contracts, the promoting of accepted work in journals and publications that are just a drip in the daily deluge of written content… After all, both of our day jobs (which are both in helping professions) felt themselves like drips of compassion in the daily deluge of suffering and pain. Compared to the state of the world, writing felt like an overly indulgent and increasingly selfish refuge.

I’m currently reading Joan Didion’s collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem and was thrilled to see that she too asks this same question in the very prologue of the book. Or specifically, she says she had not been able to work in months because she “had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act.”

Three cheers for writer angst! You can be one of the most widely-read journalists publishing in some of the most widely-read publications and still feel like none of it matters in a world overflowing with extreme anguish. Didion goes on to say, “If I was to work again at all, it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder.”

Disorder is the water we’re swimming in. Of course, disorder is the water we’ve always swam in—which brings me back to my last newsletter where I spoke of ditching numbers. Numbers were the way my friend and I came to terms with the disorder of our own worlds. Sending ten pitches a month would surely protect against the feeling of not being enough. Writing five new pieces in a year would surely prove that we were real people.

We hadn’t felt real in some time. In fact, we felt terribly lonely. The Zooms, the virtual programs, the isolated work from home. The quiet. All of it lacking in reality. No amount of submissions or publications were going to cure it.

After all, the holy grail of writing isn’t the publication of the piece—it’s the response to it. It’s someone reading the work, seeing themselves reflected in it, and telling us that yes, they were down in the shit ditch with us too. Welcome. We sipped our coffees, fully realizing that if there was a shit ditch, then we were both in it, and at least we were in it together.

Perhaps writing is an irrelevant act. But isn’t everything irrelevant in the face of disorder? Little sparks of meaning still flash here and there, like fireflies in the grass, easily missed if we hadn’t had the luck to catch their light. You want to grab a cup of coffee and talk about what actually matters? No time like the present.

So welcome to the shit ditch. Pull up a chair. Grab a cup of coffee.