The writer Leo Buscaglia said:
Ancient Egyptians believed that upon death they would be asked two questions and their answers would determine whether they could continue their journey into the afterlife. The first question was, “Did you bring joy?” The second was, “Did you find joy?”
We’re a week into the new year and I’ve spent a good chunk of it reflecting on the previous year. I left 2014 feeling much older but not nearly any wiser. It was a year where I thought often that “the bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone” (Harriet Beecher Stowe). And it was a year where I sincerely hoped that Dumbledore was right – that “death is but the next great adventure.” It was also a year where I have never been so honest with myself about who I am as a writer, because it was the year where I best understood what Hippocrates meant 2,500 years ago when he said:
Ars longa, vita brevis.
Life is short, and art is long.
J.K. Rowling began writing the Harry Potter books because she said it was a story that she would’ve liked to read herself, and that was the only reason she needed to begin it. Another writer, C.S. Forester, said:
I formed a resolution to never write a word I did not want to write; to think only of my own tastes and ideals, without a thought of those of editors or publishers.
I feel as if we writers often hear the advice, “Write what you know,” but we rarely hear the advice, “Write what you feel.” After Rowling finished writing Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, her book spent a year drifting from one rejection to another (about 12 in total). It was finally accepted by Bloomsbury Publishing for an advance of £1500, but Rowling was warned to get a day job because her story wasn’t commercial enough to bring in any substantial amount of money (and at the time she was “as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain”). Some of the supposed noncommercial aspects of Harry Potter were pulled directly from Rowling’s own life – not from things that she knew, but from things that she had felt. Six months after Rowling started writing the first draft of her book, her mother died. In an interview with Oprah, Rowling said:
. . . if [my mother] hadn’t died I don’t think it’s too strong to say there wouldn’t be Harry Potter. . . the books are what they are because she died, because I loved her and she died.
Rowling also struggled with depression, and to express that depression she created dementors:
In Harry Potter’s world, the dementors are dark creatures who feed off human happiness, causing depression and despair to those in their path. Dementors are capable of consuming a person’s soul . . . I think I had tendencies toward depression from quite young . . . It’s that absence of feeling – and it’s even the absence of hope that you can feel better. And it’s so difficult to describe to someone who’s never been there because it’s not sadness . . . Sadness is not a bad thing, you know? To cry and to feel. But it’s that cold absence of feeling, that really hollowed out feeling. That’s what the dementors are.
Rowling began writing that first Harry Potter book because she knew it was a story she would’ve liked to read, but she finished writing the book because of what she felt. Her feelings of depression, despair, grief and most importantly her feeling of failure are what drove her to finish what she had started. In her famous Harvard graduation speech, Rowling said:
I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me . . . I was set free, because my greatest fear [of failure] had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
I cannot remember exactly what year it was that I stopped making new year’s resolutions, but I think this year I will make a resolution, and that resolution will be to fail as much as possible: “When we give ourselves permission to fail, we, at the same time, give ourselves permission to excel” (Eloise Ristad). Rowling is one of the most successful writers in the history of the world, but for quite a while she felt like she was the world’s biggest failure:
The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew . . . You might never fail on the scale as I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.
One thing I cannot ignore from this past year is that life is short and so is our chance to leave an impression on it. Why lessen the chance even more by treading lightly for fear of failure? “What is the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable?” (John Green)
“Ars longa, vita brevis” can actually be translated two ways. It can mean, “Life is short, and art is long.” Or it can mean, “Life is short, but art is eternal.” Looking back on what has impacted my life the most – what has inspired me to think deeper, to reach higher, to be better – has been words . . . words that have, more often than not, been written by people who died long ago but whose thoughts have changed how I live right now. Art is eternal. Which brings me back to the Egyptians: “Did you bring joy?” “Did you find joy?” Perhaps us writers get a freebie here because the correct answer to those two questions can be found in doing just one thing, and that one thing is to write what we feel – to write what brings us joy – and then through those words we bring joy to others. But writing what we feel requires us to be honest with ourselves: We have to be honest about what makes us tick, what makes us different, and then we have to have the courage to share that with others.
But if all of this starts to overwhelm you, remember what Rowling has also said: “The worst that can happen is that everyone says, ‘Well, that’s shockingly bad.'”
*Photo by Bells Design @ Gratisography / CC0
