Benjamin Rosenbaum and I were talking to the Clarion students yesterday about the writing life and how to make it sustainable long-term — we told them our goal for ourselves, and hopefully for them, was “a sustainable praxis for yourself that makes your life good.”
We talked about other things too, like goal-setting, and how we think about what it is we really want out of writing. Sometimes I feel deeply frustrated because although I’ve kept my hand in for the last twenty years since drafting Bodies in Motion, I’ve mostly felt like I haven’t been able to write at full capacity (except, perhaps, for the summer when I was drafting Feast). I am wildly ambitious, and sometimes, frustrated ambition can get me down.
But then this morning, I woke up and made tea and finished reading a Pratchett novel I’d somehow missed, _The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents_, which was wonderful, and then I got breakfast and came out to the shed to maybe write a poem and probably read some more (Ruthanna Emrys Gordon‘s _A Half-Built Garden, which Ben and a student both recommended, and which I am already in love with, two chapters in — I mean, poly family AND first-contact, just go ahead and push ALL my buttons…)
…and I had to stop for a moment when I stepped out of the back door, because the back garden just looked so pretty in the morning light (native wine-cups and old-fashioned roses and burgeoning peppers and tomatoes). I felt this pang of absolute wonder and gratitude — “how am I so lucky that this is my life?”
Ambition is fine, but this is the heart of it. A quiet garden, time to think, time to write.
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I’m guessing the students are familiar already with “Ozymandias,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley, but just in case, I’ll give it to them today. I find it comforting when I’m racked with frustrated ambition. 
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
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Also this, when I’m frustrated by my own inadequacies as a writer:
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
– Ira Glass
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