On those late-night, 3am conversations with friends, when the guard drops and truer things start to surface, we’ve all been asked some version of this question:
“In an ideal world, with all the money you needed and no responsibilities or limitations holding you back, what would you do with your life?”
I have always romanticized the idea of a solitary writer—a remote island with no wifi, just me and my thoughts, with all the time in the world to write.
Upon deeper reflection on this fantasy, I have come to realize that this comes from an ingrained belief. The belief that the daily stuff of life—my work, responsibilities, commitments to people—is standing between me and the writing I’m actually supposed to be doing.
If only all of that would just get out of the way, I’d finally be writing my novel or play or film script.
The playwright Tennessee Williams offers some insight here.
After his play ‘The Glass Menagerie’ made him rich and famous almost overnight, he wrote about what happened next in an essay called, fittingly, The Catastrophe of Success.
Success pulled him out of a life of struggle and into a first-class hotel suite. He had all the luxury money could buy. Room service. People who would take care of everything for him. And instead of the freedom he expected, he found himself going numb—suspicious of his friends, indifferent to people, and disconnected even from the play that had made him famous.
He writes:
“Security is a kind of death, I think, and it can come to you in a storm of royalty checks beside a kidney-shaped pool in Beverly Hills or anywhere at all that is removed from the conditions that made you an artist.”
He takes the idea further. A person’s heart, body, and mind, he says, are forged in a white-hot furnace of conflict, and once that struggle is gone, he becomes a ‘sword cutting daisies’. Sharp, but with nothing left to cut.
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The frustrations, the constraints, and the inconveniences of everyday life serve an important purpose in our writing lives.
Getting stuck in traffic on the one day you couldn’t afford to be late, a heated argument with a close friend that might cost you the friendship, the mounting weight of your parents’ demands as they age, a job that’s wearing you down, a health scare for a loved one—all of this friction is what the human experience, in all its messiness, consists of. This is how ordinary people move through life.
Take away this friction, and you lose the texture of what it means to be human.
Author Ryan Holiday, on his podcast The Daily Stoic, reflecting on this idea, says:
“People are concerned that getting married or having kids will tie you down. And it does. It objectively does. But it ties you down to reality. It tethers you to the earth. It keeps you from spinning off the planet.”
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Philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote about a dove who might feel that its movement would be freer and faster without the resistance of air. In truth, it’s the very air pushing against it that enables its flight.
The same is true for writing. It’s the limitations and constraints that give it its richness. Without them, we’re just writing into a void, disconnected from anything real.
Makes sense!!! Makes sense 😁
If you don't live, it's hard to write. Time and experience are the fuel. But the dove still needs something to eat.