Permission Slip

An editor once gave me a piece of advice that I still think about: “You have to give yourself permission to be a writer.”

This advice was given pre-Internet. The magazine was filled with buzzing young people who were on the make. The assistant job was just a waystation until you made it as an artist, or a novelist, or cashed in and went to law school. No one wanted to become an editor, or at least no one in my circle. That was seen as kind of a failure, a half-life. (Let me just reiterate how young we were.)

I was one of those buzzing young people. But I lacked confidence. My family wasn’t artistic and the only intellectual people I knew were Jesuit priests. It was hard to picture myself as a writer. The editor who gave me this advice could sense my hesitation, my inability to commit. But what did he mean by “permission” exactly?

I think on a basic level it’s ignoring the tasks that grind you down, and choosing to be bad at your job for an afternoon or a week or several months. Conscientiousness is a classic enemy of promise. (It’s a little funny how editing itself can become an effective technique to avoid writing, or carrying out some other closely held creative idea.)

But “permission” is also a certain indulgence of your spirit, of your ego. It’s so easy to lose your nerve. To read the words on the page and find them inert and distasteful. To ask why it should be you writing this story rather than anyone else on Earth.

So it’s also a permission to fantasize a bit, to believe in yourself. The editor in question published short stories as a young man but he never completed his novel. I suppose that he had trouble giving himself permission.

The editor also told me to throw away my regrets and not dwell on missed opportunities. “The past is bullshit.”

That’s been a little more difficult to pull off.