Not long ago, a friend of mind pointed out that I seem to enjoy giving advice to smart and/or creative people who need an emotional nudge toward feeling better about doing the things they love. I did a little digging, and maybe he’s right:
I also enjoyed helping student writers when I taught, offering my idiosyncratic advice on how to actually write, sure, but also on how to be the kind of person who can at least endure and maybe even thrive in a creative life.
So I decided to create a new blog called Might As Well Write where, like Cheryl Strayed in her Dear Sugar columns, I accept questions from creative people on subjects ranging from day jobs to detail and answer them with the homespun country wisdom I learned at my pappy’s knee.
Or at least the wisdom I learned by wringing tepid success from a lifetime of possibility.
The title comes from the idea that many creative people seem to have about whether it’s “worth” writing, whether all the time is justified by fame or sales or appreciation. I used to wonder that, too, until I eventually confessed a simple truth to myself:
What the hell else am I doing? Is writing for ninety minutes a night taking time away from drilling clean wells in Bangladesh? Of course not. I might as well write, tinkering and fishing my way to a readers perhaps one at a time.
So Might As Well Write isn’t a blog about finding instant fame or going viral. It isn’t about eleven sure-fire story structures that jack directly into our primitive brains. It isn’t about
It’s about treating our creative selves well so that we can persist and grow little by little into people pursuing something like art.
So drop on by subscribe to the Twitter feed, and maybe even ask a question!
