When you work at a college and travel in academic circles you come across quite a few people for whom teaching is a distant plan B from plan A (writing), some of whom—not many, thankfully—make perfectly clear that their fondness for plan B is no greater than plan Q.  I find this genuinely sad.  While storytelling is my prime passion and writing my medium for expression, and I consider these my profession, in many ways the opportunities I have to teach are just as important to me.  In some ways, certainly more important. 

Thursday night I was reminded of this when I spoke to a chapter of the League of Utah Writers.  I talked about networking, and people participated by asking questions, sharing stories, and making comments and recommendations.  Like just about every instructional event I do, it was constructive and fun for me, as I hope it was others.  I don’t have to try very hard to hope that, though, because of the expressions of appreciation and gratitude that followed the presentation, that night, here on my blog, and elsewhere.  It’s very easy to convince yourself you’ve done something helpful when other people tell you so.  And I can’t recall a single workshop or panel I’ve ever participated in that people haven’t thanked me for.  I share this not merely to acknowledge the many kind people I get to meet, but to admit I’m just beginning to see how important this all is to my advancement as a writer.  I don’t mean by broadening my name recognition and interest in my writing, though that is certainly true as well; for me, teaching others is a large part of what makes the writer’s life—my life—happy.

There are pitfalls for writers, like any artist, some darker and deeper than others.  Addiction to self-destructive vehicles of distraction is always nearer than we think.  Every good story goes places that no healthy person would ever want to travel emotionally; to get the story there, the writer has to go  as well, if only in their mind.  It’s no wonder that individuals who emotionally confront the darker aspects of human experience rather than retreat from them sometimes cope unhealthily.  But not every pit is so insidious.  Some, like feelings of rejection and loneliness, are common to all humans.  It’s just that, for writers, these pits are so broad it’s incredibly difficult—if not impossible—to avoid them for much of your life. 

Writing is, mostly, a solitary art.  So is the contemplation it involves, the ruminating and daydreaming and asking yourself innumerable questions to which you have no answers.  Success doesn’t change that.  In a way, it only makes it worse.  There is a special kind of loneliness in fame (a supposition of mine, as I’m as far from famous as one can get); in being marked and noted by mobs of people, none of whom know you at all beyond the brand you’ve come to embody.  There is no escape, not completely.  When you decide to become a writer, to do it full-hearted and regardless of cost or condition, you reconcile yourself to being a lonesome kind of person.  Rejection is just as inescapable.  In a flux so great as that of written story, where every person has the potent birthrights of language and narrative affinity; where these potentials tie together into a unique, subjective, and lovely snarl that we call a person;  where mastery is so impossible you may write your whole life and send your skill not a jot higher but only sideways—in such a place, how can any of us expect to write and not be rejected, under appreciated, and misunderstood?  It’s a great and terrible truth that every person is a mystery, even to one’s self.  When we bump against each other in passing there is zero chance that our rough edges will always fit together.  The best work we will ever do—could ever do—will not please all people.  Sometimes when it does not, we will hear about it.  We will hear. 

Agents, editors, those who publish our work to world, they don’t want to reject us.  But they will.  Many, many times, they will.  

We don’t desire to be away from people, alone and apart, to make our stories breathe.  But we will be.  For too much of our lives, we will be.

We can’t help but feel these things.  I certainly can’t.  Which is why, as much as any other reason, I love to teach.  It fills my writer’s life with those things it so desperately lacks: society instead of solitude; mutual edification rather than private refinement; gratitude and immediate returns rather than form letters, criticisms, and the hollow ticking of the clock.  If you are like me, a writer and storyteller for better and worse, then I offer one heartfelt suggestion: share that.  Teach.  Find something you know and do well and help others to know and do it too, still their way, only a little better than before.  I have no doubts that your career, your quality of life, and your entirety of person will all improve if you do.