SONYA CHUNG

The title of this essay is misleading.  I know this.  There is no one way to become a writer.  There are no “10 Easy Steps” to becoming a writer.  But lately, the question is on my mind, or, rather, seems to be on the minds of people around me—my creative writing students, for example (mid-career adults, mostly); and anyone who is reading Mark McGurl’s new book The Program Era, which is about the rapid rise of creative writing programs—i.e. the institutionalization of the writer’s profession—and the effect of this boom on American fiction; or anyone who read Louis Menand’s recent article in The New Yorker on creative writing programs, prompted (it would seem) by the publication of McGurl’s book.

Many people want to be writers.  I have become very aware of this as I’ve done more teaching.  Most of the adults out there who want to be writers are currently engaged in a profession or occupation that has nothing to do with creative writing.  These people have spent a good part of their adult lives — usually, though not always, in pursuit of financial and other kinds of stability— working at something that gives them little joy at the soul level, and increasingly less challenge at the intellectual level.  Over the years, the restlessness of their creative energy has become stronger than their need or desire for stability.  For whatever reasons or convergence of circumstances, they’ve decided now to devote some time and energy to writing.  So they sign up for a class. Some students are clear that they just want to write a little, as an “outlet,” not make a major life change.  But others are more serious; they think, maybe I can become a writer.

I am one individual who has become a writer, and I’ve been thinking lately about how this happened.  It’s a good story, I think.  And maybe a good time to try to tell it.

I started writing as an adult, as well.  I always knew I had a facility with words, even when I was a child and a teenager, but it never occurred to me that I might be able to make a life out of them.  My family was not a literary family, nor engaged in or encouraging of creative pursuits; there was no context for me to imagine a future that did not involve a regular job, in some sort of office, living in a house, with some sort of family of my own. (To this day, my family-of-origin seems somewhat puzzled, and even a bit concerned, about what sort of life I lead, what it is I actually do, and who, as a result, I am becoming.)

I ventured into adult life thinking I might be some sort of do-gooder.  Social change, justice causes, that sort of thing.  Quickly, it became apparent that to make a difference and succeed in this sort of work, you had to love being surrounded by people, day in and day out; you had to be gifted in working with and inspiring clients, donors, colleagues, audiences, communities.  I did not have this gift.  I was good at writing.  So I started writing grant proposals to raise money for others who were gifted in working with and inspiring people.

I did not enjoy this work.  The causes for which I raised money were good ones, important ones.  The people for whom I raised money—the do-gooders—were inspiring and talented.  But I had begun to become invisible, even to myself. Other people were doing what they were made to do, and I was helping them do it; but I wasn’t doing what I was made to do, I knew this.  Still, not knowing what else to do or how else to support myself, I did this work for a long time.

At some point, I started writing stuff.  Bad stuff.  Semi-autobiographical stuff that had no real substance or direction, and even less craft.  I didn’t know any writers and even fewer artists. Back then, I did not read books much, either. I had no idea how to become a writer, but I started to think that I wanted to.  So I did what was familiar to me, I started looking for a school.  School I could do, school had always been easy for me.  Apparently one could go to school and become a writer.  So I researched creative writing programs, and kept on with the bad semi-autobiographical writing until I had the required 60 pages for a writing program application; and then sent off my packages to a few universities.

One of those programs accepted me.  “You have a good ear for language,” the kind writer-professor said to me on the phone when he called one Saturday evening to tell me the good news.  I would be one of twelve incoming fiction students that fall.  We were chosen out of over 600 applicants.  Twelve out of 600, I thought.  Hey, that’s pretty good.

I “studied” writing for two years.  Really, what I did, what the twelve of us did, was we read a lot and wrote a little.  My classmates were all very well read, sophisticated in their literary and aesthetic passions.  I probably had never used the word “aesthetic” before in my life.  My classmates, however, were not snobs; they were very kind toward me, encouraging, and never hesitated to recommend authors they thought I might like or learn from.  I really shouldn’t speak for the others, it’s possible that they were much more prolific than I, beyond what they shared in workshops; but when I think of those years, I really do think: I wrote a little, much of it bad, nothing I’d ever want to show to anyone; and I read like crazy. I learned to read, I learned that literature is alive. I learned why read a book at all, which is what you must learn in order to grasp why devote yourself to writing a book.  And I started to realize that, yes, this pull, this tug I’ve had for most of my life, it’s here, in literature, in words, in stories and fictional worlds. Truth is here, beauty is here, complexity and depth are here.  I want to do this, I want to make living things out of words the way all these writers I’m reading are making living things out of words.  This is what I am meant to do.  This is where I see myself.

[Here is a part of my story that confounds me still, that I am always trying to work out and understand: I am a graduate of an elite prep school and an ivy league college.  And yet the notion of a literary life had never before presented itself, certainly never sunk in.  Most shockingly, I had never really read before.  Most of my classmates in the writing program—whom I consider to be the smartest people I’ve ever known, before or after—were graduates of public high schools and colleges.  They taught me how to read, and how to think, by sharing with me how they read and how they thought.  They gave me: Evelyn Waugh, JM Coetzee, Robert Coover, Joanna Scott, Milan Kundera, Lorrie Moore, Willa Cather, Hemingway, Carole Maso, Denise Levertov, George Eliot, EL Doctorow, Somerset Maugham, William Carlos Williams, Edith Wharton, Garcia Marquez, Mary Robison, Don Delillo, Mikhail Bulgakov, Proust… with the exception of Hemingway, I had never heard of any of these writers before.  Don’t ask me how I could go through eight years of elite education, studying the humanities, without ever hearing of them, but I could, and I did; embarrassingly, but truly, I really did.]

During and after the writing program, I began making myself at home in (used) bookstores and libraries.  I had a lot of catching up to do.  I did it with gusto.  I learned that to read books with your whole self is to become a real human being, and, possibly (when reading books actually becomes more real than life to you), an artist. Over the last 13 years or so, I’ve read widely, hungrily, obsessively.  When I am reading a book as deeply as one should read a book—that is, when reading a book is literally more nourishing than eating food—everything is colored by what that book is doing to me, how it is changing the way I think and feel; and everyone around me needs to brace themselves, because the book I am reading is everything about who I am and what I care about for a time.  “How are  you?” might as well be “What are you reading?”

When someone I am getting to know says to me, “Wow, you read a lot, you are well-read,” I have to laugh.  And when a student asks me how to become a writer—not in those words, of course, but by showing up to class, they are essentially asking me this—I say: read.  Read good books.  Read them all.  (This is the most worthwhile impossible goal you can set for yourself.)  And read them with your whole self.  If you do not read, and with your whole self, you will not become a writer; you will never ever ever become a writer. Not a real one.  Not a good one.

The bad stories I wrote in graduate school mostly no longer exist; that’s how bad they were, I didn’t even save them.  For three or four years after, I wrote a few new stories a year, even published some in both small and well-known journals.  Then I stopped writing for almost three years—because my personal life took a nose-dive, and I couldn’t do anything productive—but I kept reading.  I went back to grant writing and fundraising, which I would end up doing for another eight years. Soon, that invisible-to-myself feeling came back again. I fended it off as much as I could with reading, but it was still there.  I was very depressed.

In 2003, I started making notes for something that seemed to want to be written.  The notes kept coming.  My personal life started to even out.  I made an important, willful decision, which was to keep a notebook, and to keep it faithfully.  Whatever it was I was scribbling about, it was clearly bigger than a story.  I kept scribbling, and I kept reading.

Three years later, I had two-thirds of a draft for a novel.  But I was stuck.  It wasn’t getting better, it wasn’t getting anywhere.  I needed time, I needed mental space. I applied for a writers’ colony fellowship but was wait-listed (permanently, it turned out).  I still disliked fundraising, but I was still doing it.  It was draining and demoralizing to be invisible to myself.  Finally, I made a second important decision: I quit my full-time job.

A year later, I had a full draft.  Three major (read: painful) revisions later, I had a good draft.  I was exhausted, and lonely, and very stressed out about money (accruing credit card debt for the first time in my life, with no real plan of how to get out of it), and I wondered a lot about what the hell I’d done to my life.  People around me were getting married and having children and building up their 401(k)s and establishing professional prowess.  They were becoming, by all familiar standards, grown-ups with real lives.  All I had was a good draft.  But, I was no longer invisible to myself.  I was reading and I was writing, which meant that, for the first time in my adult life, I really existed.

I set myself to finding an agent.  It took some time, and I received several rejections along the way.  Rejection sucks.  Some people can get right back up on the horse and even spout zippy sayings about that which is not killing us making us stronger. Not me. I have paper-thin skin. It would take me months to get over each one.

But I managed to persist. A couple of trusted friends with good literary sense encouraged me just when I needed it.  And I did find an agent.  And my agent sold my book to a major publisher.  And now, in addition to being visible to myself, I will soon be visible to a few, maybe even a handful, of others.

It has been almost nine months now since I’ve done anything resembling grant writing or fundraising. I am about two-thirds into my second novel, which I work on most days.  The jacket cover for my first novel is done, and we’ll have galleys soon.  I am teaching here, there, everywhere, allowing university departments to exploit my adjunct ass.  It feels pretty good.  Like I’m on the wagon.  I am still paying off credit card debt, and I live month-to-month. I have no contract for my second novel, so I may or may not sell it; these days, it’s tougher and tougher to sell that second literary novel. I have a house, but it’s decreased in value since I bought it (and the foundation seems to be sinking). Still, when you’ve been off the wagon, when you’ve been invisible to yourself for a long time; on the wagon and month-to-month in a sinking house is much much better.  I think so, anyway.

So I am a writer.  I became a writer.  How many steps was it?  It was many steps.  Some of them very large, many of them tiny.  Every book I’ve read has been a significant step.  Leaving stability behind in favor of self-visibility was a significant step.  My students sometimes say that “it’s hard to find time to write,” and often the word “discipline” gets thrown in there.  For me, “discipline” doesn’t come into it, not anymore.  If I had a life full of other things—comfortable, tempting things or other primary demands on my time—if I had many options for how to spend my time more preferably or productively (or if I had, say, a prestigious full-time teaching appointment in an elite institutional writing program); then I suppose, yes, I might have to be “disciplined” to write.  But I am a writer, I became a writer.  And if you are thinking about how to become a writer, then I suppose my story, which I still think is a pretty good story, might show you a few things:  that yes, you can become a writer, even if you were not at all a writer to start with.  That elite education has little or nothing to do with becoming a writer.  That writing programs—any of them, it really doesn’t matter which one, as long as the people in them are people who read with their whole selves—can be fruitful, particularly if you go into them hungry and ignorant like I was.

But my story also shows, I think, that to be a writer, there are many other things you cannot be, or do, or have.  To read a book, for instance, means, decidedly, to not do something else.  Those are many many something else’s you won’t be doing, including spending time with other human beings.  Here is a part of my story which may or may not mean something: five writers from my writing program, myself one of them, divorced within a few years of finishing the program.

Of all the people I’ve known who tried to become writers, many have not become writers.  What I suppose my story is also meant to say is that most people don’t fail to become writers because they can’t become writers; rather, at some point, it becomes clear all the things you cannot be (or have or do) if you become a writer. And so a choice is made, or a series of choices, whether or not the person thinks it was a matter of choice (it was).  Some of the people who have not become writers are living full and happy lives; some are not.

This is not meant to sound doomful or discouraging; like I said, for me, it feels pretty good.  Sometimes even great.  I am a writer. I became a writer. There are many things I am not.  Some people may be very good at being more than one thing, and so my story may not speak to those people.  Some people might read my story and cringe and vow never to read or write again.  And some, maybe just a few, will think hey, that sounds like me, that’s what I want to do; and I’m here to say, you can do it.

Other Writing

Value of using bilingual books for language learning

Published in January 2024

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