Why write books?

My prolific summer slammed headfirst into a creatively blocked fall. I felt tired, scattered, not sure where to put my energy. Instead of producing more work, I set projects aside, like a poetry chapbook and a few flash pieces. And after puzzling over my novel—which I can best describe as like a custard that keeps breaking, no matter how much I stir and stir—I wondered if I needed to set my novel aside, too. Maybe I’d tried so many iterations of the plot, moving characters and plot points this way and that, that I’d lost the real heart of what drew me to the project in the first place. Maybe going back to re-outline the entire project (which is what I’m doing right now) was an exercise in throwing good money after bad.

Why try to write books at all? I don’t mean this book, this novel, but books, novels, chapbooks, story collections. Why bother?

Looking for some ideas to think with, I returned to Paul Graham’s essay “A Project of Your Own,” a classic in this genre:

Working on a project of your own is as different from ordinary work as skating is from walking… I wouldn’t exactly say that you’re happier. A better word would be excited, or engaged. You’re happy when things are going well, but often they’re not. So why do it at all? Because to the kind of people who like working this way, nothing else feels as right. You feel as if you’re an animal in its natural habitat, doing what you were meant to do—not always happy, maybe, but awake and alive.

Novel writing satisfies Graham’s criteria for a “project of your own”: it’s a project you decide to do, and it’s a project you do alone. Novels are wonderful puzzles. I’ve re-outlined my novel several times now, and each time, I hope it’s the last one. Some days I get frustrated at the thought of re-outlining again, the fact that I still have to go back to the drawing board. But the act of it, the act of sitting down on the floor with a giant piece of paper, sketching out new plot arcs with crayons and markers, never feels like the wrong thing to do.

Then I remembered an old article by Katie Roiphe in Slate, “Thesis Defense,” which makes a case for the humanities PhD as a way of developing intellectual independence.

The universe will find many opportunities to tell you that what you are thinking doesn’t matter, is wrong, or irrelevant, and that brief, blissful time cultivating your Idea is actually encouraging a useful habit of mind. It gives you independence from the marketplace, it fosters some animating arrogance, some mad far-reaching ambition, a nurturing faith in your private preoccupations, a creative desire that is detached from questions of what other people care about, what other people think, what matters at dinner parties. It gives you a habit of intellectual isolation that is well, useful, bracing, that gives you strength and originality.

I think those weird years spent fostering your Idea actually develop an important stubbornness or commitment, which is otherwise fairly hard to come by. Graduate students are odd, singular, obsessed, and the courage of your oddness is not a bad thing to retain a little of in adulthood, to carry into whatever your future is.

I finished a history PhD about four years ago. The marketplace is everywhere in modern higher education. If the dissertation is a commitment to intellectual independence, it’s made on the margins of the all-consuming imperative to “professionalize,” to navigate “the job market,” to translate that work into the language of corporatized higher education, to eventually produce a return on both the student’s and the university’s investment in the credential (the degree, not the intellectual development). But you finish the PhD and you leave academia and you really do have to get a job. The university does expect investment (my old university tracked the rates at which students got jobs and then used that to allocate funding to different departments). Whatever material realities you ignore in pursuit of “cultivating your Idea,” cannot be ignored, in the end.

My novel, too, is my “private preoccupation,” borne only from my desire and delusion. Like my dissertation, I write it because I have questions I need to answer, and no one else can answer them. I write it on the margins of my corporate day job, and it is indeed marginal. There is no credential to be had here, no remuneration; barely anyone knows I write. But perhaps the point of my novel is its marginality. When I finish the novel, I don’t have to get a job with it. I don’t have to sell it. It's an interesting dynamic. For all the frustration my corporate job causes me, it means that my writing doesn’t have to pay the bills; yet when 8 hours of my day are spent thinking and writing for other people, it makes me more determined than ever to create time for thinking and writing that has no market value and answers to no one.

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