Results and Writing: What if your words do not achieve anything?

An icy April dip in Lake Michigan

I know the title of this blog post is rather grim. But I stumbled across two bits of writing about writing that I thought were incredibly pertinent to The Point of spending hours and hours toiling away on books.

One is a poem by William Butler Yeats. Read it at least eight or twenty eight times. It's that good.

Where My Books go

All the words that I utter,

And all the words that I write,

Must spread out their wings untiring,

And never rest in their flight,

Till they come where your sad, sad heart is,

And sing to you in the night,

Beyond where the waters are moving,

Storm-darken’d or starry bright.

I think this poem solves the whole writing without results is worthless problem. This so captures the magnificent spirit of the Why We Write, there can be no more debate on the merits of toiling away at it for no alleged results.

Yes, publishing is a business. Books cost money to print, and thus they must sell to make money. And, to an extent, writing is a business too if you want to make money from it, which writers absolutely should. But, for a second, let's forget about that part. As much as writing is a business, it's also an imperative. Imagining a world without writing is simply too horrific. What books and poetry and plays have added to the world cannot be measured in some goofy ROI or consulting gibberish.

Having the ability to read what C.S. Lewis imagined we would find on Mars long before we knew, to see 1870s New York High Society from Edith Wharton's viewpoint, to journey with Peter Pan and the Darling children to Neverland. What is this worth? Who can calculate it?

I am under no illusions that I'm writing a masterpiece of any caliber akin to this, but it's certainly something I'm trying to remember every time I sit down to string words together.

The other quote I came across in a similar fashion is from Thomas Merton.

“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”

You can't depend on what you can't control. Maybe that is the biggest lesson on writing. The only thing you can control is the writing itself. So next time you're struggling to choose the precise right words for a sentence and wondering why you're wasting time doing it...don't. Spend hours on those sentences. Carefully select each word. It's worth it, and it's the answer to any of your writing woes.

Thanks for reading big thoughts on a Monday!

Sarah :)