[Excerpt from Commencement Address to MFA Graduates -Hamline University – July 15, 2018]
Writing without anxiety, requires the delicate creation of what I call a bubble of faith. This very fragile and flimsy bubble contains within it the conviction that the effort is worth doing regardless of the results. In that bubble there lies the original impulse to create and my joyful response to it. In that bubble lies the meaning that the effort has for my life. In that bubble there is the confidence given by hours and hours of practice. In the bubble lies the preservation of the original call to create and the why of why I write. And even though the bubble of faith involves a certain necessary separation from what the world calls success, the bubble of faith contains an intention to give. Its creation, and the will that maintains it, is an act of generosity. It is a pure gift, like those rare times when we give our love without asking or expecting to be loved in return. Even in the necessary separation from others that is created by the bubble, others are always there. The presence of another is always there.
I have to tell you that it is not easy. All it takes is a tiny touch by the finger of anxiety to pop it. We seem to hunger for the admiration of others and we live in an age when there is no shame in asking for it, demanding it even, insisting upon it and feeling the inevitable sense of failure when it doesn’t come or when it comes all too briefly and then goes away as it always does. There is something about our ambition for admiration and recognition, for success as the world sees it, that is inimical to maintaining the bubble of faith that protects our work from anxiety. And yet, paradoxically, writing within that bubble of faith, focused on enjoyment, personal meaning and generosity, is what will bring whatever success the world has to offer you. The work created from that faith will contain the unique voice that all good readers (and editors) yearn to find in the books they read.
If you look at it carefully, you will see that the energy behind our ambition for success is an energy of getting, of obtaining, whereas the impulse to create that happens within the bubble of faith is essentially a giving. The energy behind the wanting to succeed, however, is still a valuable energy and we ought to find a way to use it. The best way that I have found to use the energy and still preserve the wholeness of the bubble of faith is to direct the energy of getting to the highest possible goal. When I write, I want to create a book that lasts forever, a book that is out there every year on the bookstore table for recommended summer reading. I would like my book to touch spines with Don Quixote and Crime and Punishment and Franny and Zooey. Knowing that this will never happen does not take away the energy that the goal gives me, and I find that this impossibly ambitious goal fits quite comfortably within the anxiety protecting bubble of my faith in the meaning and worth of the effort. As I write the energy of that goal fills me and it directs my writing decisions on plot and character by aligning my work with the values that have kept those great books alive for us throughout time. For my faith is not in the outcome but in the value of the effort. Before I start to write a book, I envision a classic, a thing of beauty and truth. As I start writing, I very quickly encounter an overwhelming sense of poverty — the poverty that measures the distance between the ideal and the real. So, I begin the brick by brick process of creating the faith required to do this book, the faith that this is a book that I can do, and only I can do, and for some reason I am being called to do. Instead of thinking about it, I start to see, I see the images of the story, and I guide the images in the direction of a question that is unanswerable perhaps but important to my life and when there is doubt about whether to go one way or another, I follow an inner sense of giving instead of the desire to get. That is what it means to me to work with faith. Faith is the conviction that what you are doing is worth doing.
