Karl Whitney: When the journey of a writer hits a wall, it’s the perfect time to reflect

While writers ply their trade due to their love of the medium, waiting to reach the next stage in a writer’s career is a unique creative challenge

Breakthroughs come and breakthroughs go, as Paul Simon once sang, but the space between breakthroughs can be arduous the longer they draw on.

Writing can seem a thankless task. You grind away at your work in isolation, perhaps accompanied by the scepticism of family and friends.

You do your best but it’s only natural sometimes to feel that you’re operating in a vacuum — that no one is reading or listening. Perhaps it’s easier to give up?

Except it isn’t, really. You’ll regret it if you do. 

You didn’t start writing in the search of a breakthrough, although perhaps you hope, logically enough, for it to happen. 

You yearn for an external sign that you’ve chosen the right path.

But the reality is that you don’t do it for applause; you do it because you were interested in writing, because something in you wanted to see if you could write. 

Eventually, writing became part of who you are.

And, even if a breakthrough comes along — an editor shows an interest; a book is commissioned and published, perhaps to a smattering of polite applause — you’re still, eventually, going to find yourself back at the laptop again, dealing with the silence.

Breakthroughs come and breakthroughs go, as Paul Simon once sang. 

Or maybe they don’t come at all, and, in those circumstances, you need to build up even greater self-sufficiency. 

Sometimes a handful of people believing in you is enough, sometimes just one other person, and sometimes it comes down to you alone. 

There can be quiet days, months and even years.

Speaking objectively, the best combination of factors for anyone seeking a breakthrough is a mix of ambition and desperation. 

But this combination isn’t particularly great if you want to achieve a happy, balanced life.

Perhaps, instead, a satisfying career is one made up of a series of small breakthroughs that happen over time? Maybe. No one really tells you.

I’ve come to think that each writer’s career is distinctive — even if comparisons are drawn between writers, one writer doesn’t necessarily resemble another. 

There can be gaps between books with some, while others can crank out a book a year. 

The rewards that help to keep you going can be scattered across decades.

Recently a friend who’s a writer got some good news after having a tough time of it — a breakthrough after a long and psychologically punishing slog. 

Such moments deserve to be celebrated, because they’re often hard-earned and one never knows when they’ll come around again (but hopefully soon!). 

It got me thinking about the nature of writing, and how we’re essentially in our own lanes. 

Often our challenges and triumphs are personal, known only to those closest to us. We might know other writers and compare ourselves to them. 

We might want to do better than these other writers, but how does one actually do that? Better reviews, better sales, better sentences? 

It all gets a bit silly and, eventually, risks being self-defeating.

Karl Whitney: 'Even if a breakthrough comes along, you’re still going to find yourself back at the laptop again, dealing with the silence.'

The business of writing entails a competition for space: space on the shelves, space in the reviews section, and, hopefully, a degree of attention. 

Not necessarily the best conditions for forming a degree of solidarity with other writers.

I’ve found, during my lowest points, that I spent time comparing my work to others. But when I’m busy other people’s writing barely registers at all.

Ultimately you need to live with yourself and create an environment in which you can best do your own work, which might involve controlling the sense of inferiority that can kick in when you’re not feeling great.

Distraction is preferable to coruscating self-criticism. 

Doing something else doesn’t have to be useful to be beneficial: do anything you want, including but not limited to eating ice cream, going to see a film, or playing with a cat.

Sometimes I wonder if I’ve mellowed too much. But then I think back to the mixture of ambition and desperation that pushed me on in the past. 

Was that the healthiest approach? Perhaps not, but it was reasonably effective. 

I was keen to string together breakthroughs and nothing else, to prove something to myself. 

Now I’m more interested in the possibilities of doing things on my own terms.

Call it getting older; perhaps it’s wisdom. I’m not sure.

I’m surprised by how this shift in the way I think about what I do has made me more generous in the way I approach other people’s work. 

I’ll read a book and sit up in admiration of what they’ve achieved in, for example, skilfully rendering a moment of conversation or when they refuse to overmilk a moment of pathos.

It doesn’t have to be a piece of superhuman brilliance — just a subtle bit of writing that catches my attention. 

When I encounter it now, I’m less likely to feel inadequate and begrudge that writer a little moment of excellence. Instead, it gives me a sense of joy.

Surely, as readers, we’re in search of these moments of joy being communicated to us by the writer? 

We don’t necessarily expect them, because life is not a wholly joyful experience and, in many ways, art reflects life. But when they happen, we need to be open to them and cherish them.

Perhaps those moments that we encounter in another writer’s work reflect small breakthroughs in the writing process that communicate the joy of that moment from them to us. 

I certainly like to think so when I read something I particularly like.

But, of course, I’m not just enjoying those moments as an admiring reader. Part of me is also operating as a writer, no matter how much I surrender myself to another person’s writing. 

When I encounter these moments, they spark something in me. I think: oh, that’s why I write! 

Communicating the joy of the writing process increasingly seems to me to be an essential part of the writer’s work.

These breakthroughs may be less publicly visible than the big ones, but they make themselves known in a way that is, I think, more meaningful: they’re delivered directly to the reader.

Essay by critic Manny Farber

The critic Manny Farber wrote an essay called ‘White Elephant Art vs Termite Art’, published first in 1962. I think of the essay a lot. 

His idea was that unpretentious, industrious films typified by the so-called B-movie were invariably superior in terms of artistic expression to much-lauded blockbusters, which tended to hammer home big, universal themes at the expense of the nitty-gritty of bustling, purposeful activity on screen.

Think of all the vapid Oscar-fodder you’ve sat through over the years. Big yawn. 

Then think of a smart little film you might have seen that has no ambition beyond exploring the possibilities of situations and characters in an entertaining manner. More interesting.

Farber’s emphasis on this kind of endeavour chimes with me. 

What I’d argue is that the most meaningful engagement, for writers and readers alike, is with the text. 

Only here is true surprise and even joy possible. And once you’re open to that possibility things become interesting.

That’s not to say you need to clap your hands at every safely landed paragraph, but that one needs to learn to be sceptical about the wider noise about a book and instead dig into it yourself to see what you think.

And as a writer it’s important to not lose sight of the need to communicate the joy and excitement you feel when you make a personal, artistic breakthrough — one that you want to share with the world.

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