Just do the work

There is a line from the poet Mary Oliver that should be taped above the desk of anyone who has ever wanted to write something.

Oliver once said that when she was younger, she deliberately avoided taking jobs that were too interesting.

She needed to make a living, of course. But she didn’t want the work that paid the bills to consume the best part of her.

So, she developed another habit. She got up early.

“If anybody has a job and starts at 9, there’s no reason why they can’t get up at 4:30 or five and write for a couple of hours,” Oliver once said.

Then came the part I love.

She said you could then go to work and give your employer, “their second-best effort of the day.”

I wouldn’t tell my students to put that philosophy on a résumé, but I understand exactly what she meant.

Mary Oliver was born in Ohio in 1935 and knew from a young age that she wanted to be a poet. She also understood something else pretty early: Poetry was probably not going to make her rich.

Legendary songwriter Guy Clark once alluded to this in a song: 

“There ain’t no money in poetry. That’s what sets the poet free. I’ve had all the freedom I can stand.”

Oliver knew this early on and, when she was young, made a list of the things she might have to live without if she chose the life of a poet. 
Items on the list included fancy clothes, an expensive car, meals at nice restaurants.

Then she chose the poet’s life anyway.

She went to college but didn’t finish. She worked various jobs. She lived simply.

And she wrote.

Morning after morning.

Year after year.

That’s the part of Oliver’s story I find most interesting.

We tend to tell stories about successful people backward.

We start with the Pulitzer Prize. We start with the bestselling book, successful business, championship, promotion or big break.

Then we work our way back through the person’s life looking for signs that greatness was inevitable.

It almost never was.

Oliver published her first collection of poetry in 1963.

Then she kept writing.

She published five books of poetry without becoming particularly famous.

There were no viral social media posts to suddenly change her life. No algorithm discovered her. No overnight success.

There were just mornings. Thousands of them.

Mornings when Mary Oliver got out of bed and wrote because that was what she decided she must do.

It reminds me of another Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, and one considerably closer to home.

Larry McMurtry was about as prolific as an American writer could be. He produced novels, essays, memoirs and screenplays across a career that stretched more than half a century.

And he had a routine.

McMurtry wrote in his 2008 memoir “Books” that, beginning with his first novel, he would get up early each morning and write five pages of narrative.

Every day.

Weekends didn’t matter. Holidays didn’t matter.

By the time he published that memoir, he had doubled his daily output to 10 pages.

There was another interesting wrinkle to McMurtry’s method: He generally didn’t outline his novels.

He started writing and followed his characters wherever they took him.

Think about what that means.

“Lonesome Dove” runs hundreds upon hundreds of pages. It contains characters and scenes that have become part of Texas literary culture.

But McMurtry didn’t sit down one morning and write “Lonesome Dove.”

He wrote his pages.

Then he got up the next morning and wrote some more.

And the next morning, some more.

That’s not terribly different from Oliver.

Their writing was certainly different. Their lives were different. Their voices were different.

But both seemed to understand something fundamental about creative work.

You do the work.

You do it when you feel inspired.

You do it when you don’t.

You do it on Monday.

Then you come back Tuesday.

Oliver’s persistence eventually led to an extraordinary moment.

One evening in 1984, she was washing dishes when the telephone rang.

Her 1983 collection, “American Primitive,” had won the Pulitzer Prize.

She was 48 years old.

Think about that.

Oliver had been writing seriously for decades by then. She had organized much of her adult life around the practice. 

She had intentionally kept her expenses low. She had taken jobs that wouldn’t consume her creative energy. 

She had gotten out of bed before daylight to write while much of the world was still asleep.

And for most of those years, relatively few people noticed.

Then the phone rang.

We love the phone-call part of the story.

We don’t talk nearly enough about all the mornings that came before it.

That’s probably because persistence isn’t particularly exciting.

There is nothing glamorous about getting up early on a Tuesday and doing the work.

There is nothing especially inspiring about Wednesday, either.

Thursday doesn’t make much of a splash.

You sit down. You work. You go to your job. You pay the bills. You go to bed.

Then you wake up and do it again.

Success, when we see it from a distance, can look like a moment. Living it usually looks more like a routine.

I’ve spent much of my life around writers— professional journalists, aspiring journalists and college students learning how to put words together for a living.

One of the most common mistakes young writers make is waiting for inspiration.

They imagine good writing happens when the right idea arrives at precisely the right moment and the words suddenly pour onto the page.

Sometimes they do. Most of the time, they don’t.

More often, writing happens because somebody sat down and started writing.

Oliver had her mornings. McMurtry had his pages.

Neither method was complicated. That’s probably the point.

The same principle applies well beyond writing.

Maybe your thing is exercising.

Maybe it’s building a business.

Maybe it’s finishing a degree, learning an instrument, saving money, restoring an old house or finally writing the book you’ve talked about writing for 20 years.

Whatever it is, we tend to imagine that someday we will find enough time to do it.

Oliver and McMurtry understood something better.

You probably won’t find the time. You must claim it.

And then you must come back tomorrow and claim it again.

Sometimes that means getting up at 5 a.m.

Sometimes it means writing five pages before breakfast.

Sometimes it means accepting that nobody is going to applaud for a very long time.

And sometimes it means doing the work for years without knowing whether the telephone will ever ring.

Oliver died in 2019 as one of America’s most beloved poets. McMurtry died two years later, leaving behind one of the most remarkable bodies of work in modern American literature.

But long before the Pulitzers, acclaim and famous books, they were simply two writers getting up in the morning and putting words on paper.

That may be the more useful part of their stories.

Because very few of us can control whether we win the prize.

We can control what we do tomorrow morning.