How to Write in a World Where Beloved Has Already Been Written

A couple of days ago, when I was almost done reading Beloved, I made the following post to Facebook and Twitter: “The problem with being a writer is that I live in a world where books like Beloved have already been written. Earth-2 or bust!”

A Facebook friend of mine replied: “I hear ya. You think, why should I even bother?”

My reply to my friend: “Exactly. Yet for some reason, I bother.”

One day in the not-too-distant future I will write a longish blog post about why I write, i.e., what drives me to it, what the motivations are, what the reasons are. I’ve finally figured all that out. It was a question that bedeviled me for many years. I had a hard time answering it because I was using my writing to serve a number of different ends, some of which I was unaware of; some of which contradicted each other; and some of which represented goals that writing cannot accomplish. But today I want to talk about how I can even bring myself to write in a world where Beloved has already been written.

Beloved, in case you didn’t know, is a novel by American author Toni Morrison. It won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and deservedly so, in my opinion. It’s set in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1873, and it’s all about how slavery deformed people in this country — the enslaved and the enslavers. I just finished the book and I feel very full with it. I’ll be digesting this one for days, like a python that has devoured a dog. It wasn’t a perfect book, but that’s true of every novel. Some famous writer, I can’t remember who, once defined the word “novel” as “a narrative of a certain length that has something wrong with it.” Amen to that. Still, I feel so enriched by this book — enlarged by it.

I also feel intimidated by it. As a writer, I have to ask myself: Is my novel on this level? The answer, of course, is Certainly not. So then I have to wonder, well, why am I even writing? We’ve already got books that are far better than the one I’m writing. Why should I continue? As my friend said, why should I even bother?

It helps to remember that when Toni Morrison sat down to write Beloved, she had to do so in a world where For Whom the Bell Tolls had already been written. And when Hemingway sat down to write that one, he had to do it in a world where Absalom, Absalom! had already been written. And when Faulkner sat down to write that one, he had to do it in a world where The Great Gatsby had already been written. And Fitzgerald worked in the shadow of Henry James, and Henry James worked in the shadow of Jane Austen, and all the novelists have worked in the shadow of Cervantes. Cervantes himself worked in the shadow of Shakespeare. The regression keeps going backward as far as you want to look.

All great novels — and all the mediocre ones, and all the shitty ones — have been written in worlds where masterpieces already existed. Thank goodness Cervantes didn’t let the fact of Macbeth stop him from making his own run at the prize. And thank goodness that Morrison didn’t let the fact of For Whom the Bell Tolls stop her from giving us Beloved.

If you want to write, the proper response to greatness isn’t to say, Why bother? The proper response to greatness is described in the sage advice of author Richard Bausch, in his “Letter to a Young Writer”:

Say to yourself, “I accept failure as the condition of this life, this work. I freely accept it as my destiny.” Then go on and do the work. Never ask yourself anything beyond “Did I work today?” If the answer to that question is “yes,” then no other question is allowed.

My novel is no Beloved, but fortunately, it doesn’t have to be. Did I work today? Yes.

Less Aspiring, More Writing

I watch very, very, very little TV. Some people find this troubling. I’m not sure why. My mom once said about my paucity of TV watching: “Is this an elitist thing?” I said, “Well, if it was, I wouldn’t say ‘yes,’ because an elitist doesn’t think he’s elitist. He just thinks the way he lives is the way to live.”

Mom said, “Yes, but is this an elitist thing?”

I do keep up faithfully with one, and only one, TV show: Mad Men. If you haven’t drunk that flavor of Kool-Aid yet, I highly recommend that you find a cup and start sipping, because it’s some good drankin’. In the most recent episode, we learn that a regular character, an account executive at an ad agency, writes science-fiction short stories on the side under a pseudonym. He’s had some of his stories published and has even attracted the attention of an editor who might want to anthologize them.

The writer’s boss gets wind of this situation and calls him on the carpet to berate him for his divided loyalties. The boss thinks that having a semipro writing career on the side is a sign of insufficient dedication to the hand that feeds you. The account man, chastened, agrees to stop writing. He later tells a friend at the ad agency that he will “leave the writing to the writers.” But in the last scene (shown at the top of this post), we see him in his underwear, writing a new story — and, as the voiceover informs us, using a different pseudonym.

What intrigues me about this little story arc is how it valorizes the efforts of a part-time writer. The account man isn’t characterized as an “aspiring” writer; he’s just a writer, and a somewhat successful one, despite the fact that he works full time and more as an advertising account executive. I think the story is saying that writing has its own value that is completely distinct from the labels we attach to it or whether we’ve “made it as a writer” or what we do for a living. The man’s writing is an inherently good thing that is worth doing and worth protecting, so he does it, and he protects it.

There’s something pure about such an approach to writing. He’s not trying to get successful enough at his writing to quit his day job. He’s not trying to win fame or money or adulation with his writing. He’s not trying to become anything. His writing has no aspirations beyond itself. For some reason, he just feels compelled to write, to keep trying to tell stories that are true and that move people.

I think I know — finally, at long last — how he feels.

The Blank Page Gets Blanker

When last we saw our hero, the intrepid blogger had just taken a job that required him to travel to another city every day. Others might have quailed at the thought of the dreaded “I-40 commute,” spoken of with such loathing throughout the land. But not he! No, because he obtained the smallest, lightest writing machine that would accomodate his economy-sized hands, and he rejoiced at the thought that his “commute” would instead be a serene hour and a half (round trip) spent crafting tales and narratives and pure language, unencumbered by the demands of operating a motor vehicle, secure in the skill and caution of what surely must be the very finest bus drivers in the history of bus driving.

And so he would write instead of driving; think about stories instead of cursing people who drive slowly in the left-hand lane; hit the return key instead of the turn signal. He would write, he would write, he would write.

But what? What, exactly, would he write? He was working on a story for a moving-picture show, it was true; but he was working on that with another writer, and at that time it was the other writer’s turn to work on the moving-picture story. When it came to the moving-picture story, the intrepid blogger had to hurry up and wait.

And there was his blog, of course, which he loved and which he felt committed to, like a favorite course of study that never ends; but that didn’t take up seven and a half hours a week. Nor was it his deepest heart’s work. No, his deepest heart’s work was . . .

Ah. And now he comes to it. What does he work on when he has no partner waiting to be tagged, no subscribers waiting to be fed, no editor, no deadline, no obligations to anyone other than himself and whatever gods set him on this path? What does he write when his strongest obligation is to the writing itself?

Chapter 44: In Which the Wild Mustang Returns to the Corral

Sorry for no blog posts lately! Jeez, you must be feeling all neglected, all low self-esteemy, all questioning your inherent worth and all. And do I ever know how that feels.  Hence all my dysfunctional compensatory behaviors. Speaking of which, where’s that bartender?

Well, until she gets back, let me explain what’s been going on and why I’ve been a bit of an absent blogger. You know how, when you’ve been running your own freelance business for eleven years, you get to a point when you realize that you’re doing okay as a businessperson—but only okay? I mean financially. As in, you’re keeping your mortgage paid, but your retirement plan consists of hoping that Steven Spielberg will option your screenplay for a fat six figures. And you do the math, and you figure out that while you could improve your receivables somewhat, there’s an upper limit to that—and you’re not very far from it.

So you start thinking about going into a new line of business. Like, maybe you could give seminars on how to write the perfect Facebook status update, or you could give a workshop titled “Writing Tweets That Matter.” Or maybe you could set up a lucrative business ghostwriting the memoirs of people’s pets! There’s got to be a lot of money in that niche. But that would require marketing yourself, developing a new set of contacts, trying to get your first client—basically starting all over again.

And you don’t want to start over again. Because you’ve been an editor for seventeen years now, and for better or worse, this is how you earn money in the world. For better or worse, this is the best field for you to plow, even though your little independent farming operation is on the verge of showing diminishing returns. Which means it’s time for a change. A big change.

So then you start looking for jobs. Not desperately, but in a very picky way, because the whole point is to improve your situation, not to make some lateral move that you’ll regret in a year, which you’ve done before and which you’ve seen others do.

And then you finally find a job to apply to, and it’s a big deal because you haven’t applied for a job in years. And you send off your spiffed-up resume and you fill out the online application, and you wait . . . and cobwebs cover the phone, and the crickets are snickering at you behind their wings, and nothing happens.

So you apply for two more jobs. And after you apply for one of them, the cobwebs once again multiply, and now the crickets are openly giggling, and you wonder if it’s just too late­—if you’ve been a freelancer so long that no company would hire you, unless you want to pursue a rewarding career in telemarketing.

But the third job. That one calls you back. That one wants to interview you. And after the interview, the hiring supervisor tells you that you did a great job, and you think he really means it. And then they want your references. And then they make you an offer.

And you accept it.

So you’re thrilled to once again have a regular paycheck, dental insurance, and a retirement plan that does not involve a Hollywood mogul. But part of you is scared, because what about your writing? Have you traded in your creative aspirations for a higher income-tax bracket? Have you sacrificed your art on an altar of business-casual attire and direct-deposit stubs?

No. Because if there’s one thing you’ve learned by this point, it’s that your writing is the golden goose. If you do have some sort of purpose for being here, writing is a fundamental part of it. Not “your” writing, necessarily; just writing, the activity, the artifact, the body of art and culture and work that is writing. You create it, you consume it, you sculpt and polish and improve it. Your clients and employers think you edit for them, to make them happy, and of course that’s part of it; but there’s another part of it that isn’t for anybody—not even for you. It’s for the writing itself, to make it better. It’s as if there’s a secret pact between you and every piece of writing you’ve ever edited, a secret agreement that you and the writing will work together to make the writing excel, just for the sake of excelling. Because excellent writing is a beautiful thing that deserves to exist.

So you’re going to take this job, but when you do, you’re going to take the bus to work, rather than drive; and you’re going to take a small, light laptop computer with you; and you’re going to write every morning and every evening: an hour and a half of dedicated writing time five days a week, which is more than you’ve written on a daily basis in a long time.

And one more thing: before your job starts, you’re going to let your blog readers know why you’ve been absent lately. You’re going to ask them to understand, and you’ll hope they do. You’ll reassure them that once your new routine gets established, you’ll get back to regular blogging. You’ll thank them for reading, and you’ll wish them well.

You know how all that is, right?

Letting the Chips Fall

Photo courtesy of Ben Dodson.

When I first decided I wanted to be a writer, in that far-off, dim era we now call 1987, all I knew was that I wanted to write. I didn’t think much about what writing would entail, or what good writing consisted of, or what I wanted to accomplish with my writing. I just wanted to write.

Well, I also wanted to “be a writer.” I knew even less about being a writer than I did about the writing itself. But being a writer constituted a separate—and perhaps even more important—goal.

So I came up with an idea for a story. I thought it was a great idea: interesting, exciting, rich with potential. A writer friend of mine asked me to tell him my idea, so I did, and in the silence afterward I realized that he had formed an opinion of it. I was scared to hear that opinion, but I summoned my courage and asked him what he thought.

He said, “Well, I like it, but it’s been done before. I think you need to come up with something more original.”

Bam! For the very first time, I ran smack into the wall of artistic judgment. You have your ideas, and you’re enamored of them; but are they any good?

I spent the next twenty years consumed with that question. I was trying to perform a sort of balancing act or compromise: I wanted to write about what I wanted to write about, in the way I wanted to write about it; but I also wanted it to be good. I felt like I was trying to be a matchmaker between two wonderful people who just couldn’t seem to get along.

As time went on, that uneasy marriage became a vexed ménage à trois: I wanted to write what I wanted to write and it had to be good and it had to be publishable. I was trying to get my work in print, which meant that I had to get some editor to agree to let his or her publication serve as a venue for my work. And let me tell you, in the Venn diagram of my writing career, those three circles (pleasing myself, being good, getting published) have overlapped very few times relative to all the writing I’ve done. Very few times.

But now I’m coming around to a different view of it all. This view can be summed up in a couple of quotations, the first of which comes from writer George Saunders:

I think the only defensible position is to sort of say to hell with making a living and put all your energy into making something new, that seems beautiful to you—that is, to try your best to push your work into a new/iconic place and let the chips fall where they may.

In other words, you have to quit worrying about whether the work is publishable and just try to push it to a deeper, more beautiful, newer place. Try to do work that has something iconic about it, which to me also calls to mind the mysterious and the mythic. That may sound like a recipe for never getting your work published, and maybe that’s exactly what it is. Maybe that is indeed exactly what it is. But I find that I’m okay with that. I mean, yes, I would still like for my work to be published, but nowadays it’s much more important to me for my work to inhabit that “new/iconic” place. That is, I want the work itself—the act of producing it, as well as the finished product—to have certain attributes that may or may not have anything to do with whether it ever sees the light of day.

The other quotation comes from poet Carolyn Forche:

Quit worrying about whether or not it’s good and worry about whether or not it’s true.

If I had to explicate what Forche means here, I would say she means that the writing should be true in the same sense that anything else is true: it’s true if it corresponds to something about the world that’s true. That’s all—but it’s deep. She’s talking about writing that is fundamentally interpenetrated with reality itself. Writing that is true in this way has a zing and a freshness you don’t find in writing that is self-consciously obsessed with whether it’s good, or whether it’s literary, or whether it’s observing the proper genre tropes, or whether it’s salable. It’s just trying to be true. When it succeeds, you know it, you feel it, you taste it.

So where does this leave me? I’m just trying to get to the new place, the iconic place, the true place. Letting the chips fall where they may. This doesn’t mean I’ll never submit my writing for publication or try to sell a screenplay, but those aims have now become secondary (at best) instead of primary.

If you’re a creative person, you’ve likely struggled with this yourself. Why am I doing what I’m doing? What is the point? What is the purpose? Or, as I’ve phrased it before: What is the basis of your work? The answers continue to change.

“You Must Keep Feeding the Lake”

In the comments on a recent post, I talked about how, when it comes to my writing, I’m trying to keep my eyes on the real prize, which is all about “feeding the lake.” That metaphor comes from a quote by writer Jean Rhys, author of Wide Sargasso Sea. I didn’t have the quote handy at that moment, but I resolved to track it down and share it with you because it expresses a way of looking at writing that I am only now beginning to understand.

Here’s the quote:

All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. And there are trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.

What initially tripped me up about this quote is the statement “I don’t matter.” Of course I matter! Everyone is special—especially me! But seriously, those of you who know me may know that I can have a very touchy insistence on my rights, my dignity, my space. (And by the way, if you’ve seen the Mike Leigh film Happy-Go-Lucky, you know where I’m headed with this; but if you haven’t, then take a look at this YouTube clip, definitely with the sound on. The whole scene is really great, but fast-forward to about 3:00 if you want to skip to the creamy center. My space!) I have always been a fervent believer in the inherent worth of the individual, which is why statements like “I don’t matter” can piss me off.

But I’m coming to a new understanding of writing in general and my writing in particular, and that understanding is based on the notion that my writing is best conceptualized as an act of service to something larger than myself; something that includes me but also transcends me. Sounds a lot like “God,” which is not the term I would use, and I’m still working on the terminology—I’m a writer and editor, after all, I’m always still working on the terminology—but for now let’s just use the term “lake.” And then let’s gently amend Rhys’s quote (without doing violence to her meaning, of course) by inserting the phrase “when it comes to writing” at a key point. Then we get this: “When it comes to writing, all that matters is feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.” Now that’s a statement I can get behind.

You, My Creature, Shall Make the Villagers Pay!

About two and a half years ago, I came to a startling conclusion: I didn’t know why I wrote. I had been writing ever since fourth grade—but why? Why write a single word, ever, at all, then or now? I didn’t know the answer in fourth grade, and I was no closer to an answer at age forty; but I finally decided that I needed that answer. I needed to know why I wrote, because something was wrong with my writing. Despite my efforts over many years, I had gotten very little of my creative writing published, and I was beginning to think that there was something off-kilter in my approach—not my approach to getting published, but my approach to writing. So the philosopher in me dived down to the root level to ask the most basic question I could ask about my writing: why did I write?

Once I began asking that question, I realized that even if I didn’t know why I wrote—why I had always written—I knew what I hoped to achieve with my writing. For a number of years I had deeply cherished the dream that I could one day become a top-notch writer in the literary world: the kind of writer whose work appeared in Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays, the New Yorker and the Paris Review. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that dream, of course. Many writers have exactly that dream, and some will make it come true. But for me there was something wrong with that dream. And just several weeks ago, I realized what it was.

I realized that for me, the dream of becoming a successful literary author was linked to the fact that I had flunked out of college when I was eighteen.

Lots of people flunk out of college, but most college flunkouts are not National Merit Scholars who have always self-identified as brainy good students. For me, flunking out of college meant having my identity forcibly ripped away from me, and my self-esteeem with it. (I know that sounds melodramatic, but that’s how it felt at eighteen.) In the aftermath of that failure, I felt horribly unworthy and flawed. I continually felt that I had something to prove, some deficit to overcome, flaws to remedy or conceal.

Over time, those flunkout feelings ebbed, but I still felt them to some extent when I went back to college, in my thirties. And then, after taking a particularly engaging course in American literature, I saw how school could actually help me become a better writer: by teaching me how to analyze literature.

I kept going to school, kept writing, and soon I found myself harboring a new dream. I wouldn’t be a Stephen King type of writer, as I had wanted to be when I was twenty or twenty-five. No, now that I was thirty-four and back in school, I would be like Tobias Wolff or Jane Smiley, those literary writers who emerge out of academia with graduate degrees and who return to academia to teach writing as a way to support and encourage their own writing; writers with impeccable credentials and glowing reviews from the snobbiest critics, not to mention decent sales and the occasional movie deal; writers who have Made It.

A fine enough dream, but it was there to serve a deeper purpose. I now understand that underneath the glowing visions of literary success, I believed that if I were to claw my way up from the pit of abject academic, intellectual, and personal failure, all the way to the very top of the literary world, then I would have finally redeemed myself as a student, as a writer, and above all, as an intellectual.

That’s a hell of a burden to put on your writing. In addition to creating beauty in the world, moving the reader, enlarging and enhancing literature, being true, being good, being an enjoyable activity, and earning money, my writing also had to redeem the greatest failure of my life. That last purpose became the tail that wagged the entire dog, infusing all of my writing with a dreadful sense of insecurity; that same insecurity that had dogged me ever since I flunked out of college. In my writing, I wound up using content and styles that were not close to my heart, that did not derive from the core of who I am, because I was trying to compensate for the failures of twenty-five years ago. When I really stop and think about it, I don’t want to write like Tobias Wolff or Jane Smiley. I’ve tried—for years and years I’ve tried—but my heart’s just not in it. So I’m letting that dream go.

What will I do instead? Well, that’s another post or fourteen. For now I’ll say that I’m developing a deeper understanding of the real reasons why I write—the reasons why I have always written, both long before I flunked out and ever since then. So my pseudo-advice for this week’s installment of “Sad Writing Tales” is that any creative person would do well to examine their motivations for doing what they do. Here’s the question as I’ve been formulating it lately:

What is the basis for my creative activity?

Asking that question will do you a world of good. Answering it—which may take years, as it’s taken (and continues to take) me—will do even more.

Egoism vs. Love, with Apologies to George Orwell

Back on February 4 I posted a dream titled “The Transvestite, the Dune Buggy, and the B&B.” It was my fourth post on my brand-new blog. My first three posts had generated a decent amount of comments, and I thought that any post with the word “transvestite” in the title would get a ton of comments. But to my surprise—and chagrin—no one commented at all.

“Why the chagrin?” you say, in a placatory tone. “Isn’t it enough to look at your stats and know that the page was viewed 13 times?”

“Well, no, it isn’t,” I peevishly reply. “I do want pageviews, but more important than that is response.”

“But why?” you ask, the very soul of reason. “Why is response so important? Isn’t writing its own reward? Don’t you love to write? And if you’re doing what you love, isn’t that enough?”

“Damn good question,” I respond, masking my anger. Too good of a question to answer right away, in fact; so to buy time, I look again at the post of the dream, wondering if it was too boring, too long, not enough transvestites. I notice that at the end of the dream, I’m talking to a caterer and explaining how I used to live in the bed and breakfast where we are: “The caterer smiled and nodded, but his manner seemed perfunctory, as if he was just obliging my reminiscences because he had to. He seemed to find me tiresome.”

And there you have it. I want a response to my writing because, to me, that would mean that my writing isn’t tiresome. A response would mean that somebody had read my post and was interested enough in it to respond to it. It would mean my writing isn’t just a series of pebbles dropped into a bottomless well.

These feelings are understandable, as any creative person will attest, but I think I may have taken these understandable feelings too far. There’s such a thing as giving others too much power over you and expecting a relationship (in this case, writer and audience) to meet impossible needs—needs arising entirely from the desire to gratify a neurosis, which I think is the case with my writing. Neurotic needs are impossible to meet because the neurosis is never satisfied. It always needs more.

Allow me to illustrate. One time my wife was working on her computer in our home office while my writing critique group was meeting out in the living room. After the group left, Angela told me that during the meeting, my voice had sounded higher, more strained—more anxious—than it usually did. Well, I thought that was to be expected, and I told her as much; I loved my group, and I got kind of wound up when I was with them. I’m one of those excitable types. My plausible rationale ended the discussion, but secretly I wondered if there was more to it than that.

A couple of years later, some friends of ours got married, and they asked me to help them write their vows. I pitched in gladly, and at the rehearsal dinner the bride-to-be unexpectedly introduced me before a room full of people (98% of whom I didn’t know) as “a writer” who had helped them with their vows. I was deeply uncomfortable being described that way, although I didn’t know why; I just knew I wanted to vanish into the walls when she said that.

When I put all the pieces together, it looks like I don’t believe that I’m a “real” writer. That’s why I was uncomfortable being called out as a writer at that rehearsal dinner. That’s why I was so anxious with my writing group: because I was desperate to curry their approval, to have them designate me as a real writer. That’s why comments on blog posts matter so much to me: they validate my blog writing. I’m desperate for others to validate me as a writer because without that validation, I don’t believe that I’m a writer. Which suggests that my main motivation for writing is to “be a writer.” The writing itself is only a means to that end.

That seems like a horrible motivation for writing, doesn’t it? It seems like a recipe for despair, disappointment, and failure (not to mention alcoholism, which might explain a lot: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Raymond Carver, et al.). Maybe it’s not so bad, though. I say that because of George Orwell. He wrote an essay titled “Why I Write,” and in it he says there are four main reasons why writers write (monetary compensation aside):

Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. . . .

Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. . . .

Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

Political purpose—using the word “political” in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.

Orwell says of these motivations, “They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living.” I can see how all of these motivations have driven parts of my writing, but at bottom, why do I write anything, ever? I think—I reluctantly conclude—that the primary reason is behind door number 1: sheer egoism. I want to “be a writer” because that appeals to the egoistic part of me.

Again, a plausible rationale; but no. No, no, no. I simply cannot accept that my writing is, or must be, mostly driven by the same motivations that made me want to be on the honor roll in grade school and president of the drama club in high school. And even if I am motivated by sheer egoism, then it’s time for me to grow up as an artist and put my egoism in its place. Egoism certainly has its uses—primarily as armor against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune—but it will only take you so far. Egoism takes you outward, but it won’t take you inward, which is where artists must go if they want to explore the deeps and shallows of the human heart. I look again at Orwell’s list, and nowhere on it do I see the best reason to do anything: love.

One time I read on an author’s blog (I think it was Theresa Williams, but I’m not sure) that she was motivated in her writing by a sense of love for the reader. When I first read that, I thought she was a bit off her nut. Now I think she might be onto something. Similarly, I once heard Alice Walker say that a good teacher should be motivated by love for her students. “Now, this can be a somewhat impersonal love,” Walker said, “but it’s love all the same.” I think one of my challenges—perhaps my biggest challenge—as a writer is to find a way to write from a sense of love: perhaps for the reader, perhaps for someone else or something else, but love all the same. Maybe then I can finally get behind this famous quotation by Thomas Merton, if the word God is replaced with the word love:

“If you write for God you will reach many men and bring them joy. If you write for men–you may make some money and you may give someone a little joy and you may make a noise in the world, for a little while. If you write for yourself, you can read what you yourself have written and after ten minutes you will be so disgusted that you will wish that you were dead.”