Craft

Tech had gotten to me. I’d finally caved.

After years of resisting — the hoorah of the all-hands, the slogans on the t-shirts and stickers and coasters, the language of unlocking and scaling and building toward — it’d gotten to me. I convinced myself this was the thing I was meant to do.

I’m thirty-three this year. That’s the age you start doing the math on what you have left — not in years, you don’t know that — but in the number of full attempts at one thing a person gets in a life. Two? Three? You’ve already burned one.

It wasn’t supposed to be tech. The plan was writing. The singular goal I’d had since fourth grade, Career Day, lugging my dad’s laptop and briefcase into the classroom and telling the whole class I’d be the next Stephen King.

The path back to writing was a windy one. Maybe the story for another article. Long swells of trying everything else first — apps, brands, side projects, podcasts, decks, courses, the dozen things you build because the building is what people who grew up like me were supposed to do. Most of them did something. None of them did the thing. None of them quieted the part of me that needed quieting.

Short fiction did. The first time, and every time after.

The body knew before the mind could name it. The way I’d come back to a story at midnight, and my shoulders would lower a quarter-inch, just from being there. The way the rest of the world thinned, a little. The verdict came in long before the argument did.

This is my craft.

It was around this same stretch that I re-found Frank O’Connor. I’d read him years before, but I came back to him this time with the right question.

His seminal book on the short story — The Lonely Voice — argues the novel couldn’t exist without the industrial complex. Without the usurping hierarchy of power and order. Without a class of people with the leisure to read three hundred pages and the certainty that the world is theirs.

The short story is something else. The short story, O’Connor says, is the tale of submerged populations. People writing about the small moments of life that make it life itself. The moments of exhilaration and defeat, without the hero’s journey, without the three or five acts. That stuck. That’s still stuck.

It is the perfect depiction of true life. Of how it is, down here. That was the form. That was the answer to why this one, and not another.

Such a wonderful art form to be a part of. Only thing is it, short fiction, doesn’t pay. Literary fiction especially. There are about twenty literary journals worth chasing, each with a small handful of slots a year. It’s like telling your mom you’re trying to make the NBA, except the paycheck at the finish line is a barista’s. Less, even.

And in those small pockets, you’re competing against Pulitzer winners on vacation in the Balkans while they’re in between projects. Someone who, at last night’s cocktail party in some strange ski town, had an interaction worth writing about the following morning at their typewriter.

Materially, there’s nothing in this. And it gets worse the closer you think.

I’m good at the corporate thing. That’s the part it took me a long time to admit. It’s tempting not to get distracted by that — particularly being a donated-church-food-to-get-us-by kind of kid. Bounced from landlord to landlord. Apartment to apartment. Moved out to California because things in Ohio got bad enough we spent a cold season or two without heat or electricity. It’s tempting not to lean fully into the building of things. Into spending every waking hour scraping and clawing to build the next big app, the next big thing, the next exit.

I threw in the towel on writing once to fully pursue the corporate thing, for all the reasons above. I came back to it anyway. I took all of it and wadded it up into a big ball of yarn. And two paths showed themselves.

One — dedicate your life to the pursuit of goals. Stuff. Attainment. The new title, the new round, the new house, the second guest bedroom no one stays in.

Two — dedicate your life to the pursuit of a single craft.

I’ve tried both. God knows there are pros and cons to each. Would I rather spend the rest of my life building things — inventions whose sole purpose is to solve problems I may or may not be manufacturing — or would I rather spend it inside the pursuit of one craft, alone, the same craft, for the rest of my life?

I landed on the second.

Can’t quite articulate the why. In my most quiet moments though — and I’ve paid attention to this — I respect the wrinkled hands of a master cigar roller more than I respect the scrappy entrepreneur of a fast food chain or a clothing brand the world doesn’t need.

That’s the cleanest way I can put it.

I don’t think one of life’s biggest challenges is finding what you’re good at. Or even finding what you like most. The challenge is finding something you love and respect so deeply you’re willing to give up the pursuit of everything else.

I sometimes mourn for everyone who’s ever made the choice. For the ideas, the businesses, the articles, the blog posts, the apps, the friendships that get left on the side of the road every time someone picks one thing and gives the rest of their life to it.

I wish you could put it all on a scale. Watch the golden plates sink or rise one way or another.

There just isn’t enough time to pick both.