Love's Success

The simplest writing advice I could give someone is to write the book he or she would most love to read. Not like to read, but love to read. Nothing brings you back to the desk like love, nothing holds you at the page until you find the best word like love, and nothing brings you home when you have wandered out into the midnight of self-doubt like love. It’s good advice because writers always need their own private source of motivation. Somewhere in all our minds is the knowledge that, even with a contract in hand, we could still choose to chuck it all and the world would continue to spin perfectly well without our finished book. Writers need a daily answer to the question, “Why am I doing this?” and the best answer is always love.

This can be a disorienting answer for a goal-oriented fellow like myself. For instance, when I think of the love I feel for my wife, that love has no goal other than expression. It doesn’t care about marriage or sex or conversation or who’s right or who’s wrong, it only wants expression. When I express it, I am comfortable; when I withhold it, deny it, avoid it or reject it, I am uncomfortable. When I express it, the world feels correct; when I do not, the world feels incorrect.

So too, I have to admit, for the books I write. My busy, ambitious mind is filled with goals – I will write this number of pages, I will publish this book, I will sell this number of copies and speak here and teach there – yet the love upon which I must draw to achieve all these supposed goals, the love without which I could never finish a single essay, doesn’t give one wit for what I think ought to happen with what I’ve written. Love clearly has its own idea of success, and no matter how much I plan, project, complain, or criticize, it remains the only success I will ever really know.