I've never been one for New Year's resolutions. Why wait for an appointed time to make a necessary change? But wedged between year-in-review lists and previews of the most-anticipated books of the coming year, my various timelines have been speckled with resolutions to write more, submit more, and publish more in 2023. To steel ourselves against impending rejection and to try and fail again. Some folks have resolved to publish in dream journals, others to meet quotas for word counts and even for rejections. Everywhere the implication that more or better publications will defend against that creeping certainty that we're not really writers unless we're publishing. No more messing around, we say, this will be the year. I wish the resolvers strength, perseverance, dozens of new credits, and millions of cheering fans, but, in this column, I want to offer some inspiration to those less interested in resolving to tick certain boxes, those who'd rather not publish, who aren't ready yet, or those who worry not playing the accounting game means they're wasting their time.
Coined by the essayist John McPhee to explain an idea first articulated in the eighteenth century, “deep time” refers to the geological notion of immense time scales, lengths of time unimaginably longer than a single human life, than generations of human life, longer than the span of the human species altogether. Deep time refers to a length of time beyond our imagination—the scale at which minute changes in the day-to-day transform mountains into valleys, rivers into canyons, uninhabitable rocks into lush tropical forests, planets into clouds of cosmic dust. In Annals of the Former World, McPhee explains deep time with a bodily metaphor: “If you were to lift your arms and spread them wide and hold them straight out to either side and think of the distance from fingertips to fingertips as representing the earth’s entire history, then you would have all the principle events [of forty million years] in the middle of the palm of one hand.” The entire space of a human life, less than the length of what you’d clip off your fingernail. What is a New Year’s resolution in the context of deep time?
Certainly, we’d be hard pressed to make writing resolutions on the geological scale, but I think placing our yearly ambitions in this context draws attention to the real scale of labor and cultivation that goes into making a career. Rather than resolve to do this or that this one year, what can each of us hope to make out of this one writing life? For me, resolving to submit to dream journals or obsessing about writing quotas has never done much but turn my writing practice into an administrative task, another item on a list of chores to complete, applications to submit, emails to send. And I think most of us want to cultivate more than that. Further, I think encouraging each other to think in terms like the New Year’s resolution makes for a toxic culture of competition and bean counting that is ultimately hostile to the real work of good writing. These kinds of resolutions imply that we’ve already failed if we haven’t lived up to similar standards in years past. “Wait a minute,” I think every time I see one of these posts, “other people submit fifty or a hundred times a year?” Should I really be keeping track of the number of form rejections versus the number of encouragements to “try us again sometime?” What’s wrong with me? But, no, I don’t think so. In truth, as they say, it’s never too late to plant the seeds, to let the roots take hold, to wait for the flowers to bloom. Many of the best writers worked slowly, sporadically with deep time goals, or, perhaps, without any goals at all. The shape of their contributions only becomes visible in retrospect.
Consider Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, who graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a BA. She went on to earn a master’s degree, raise two children, and work half a decade in publishing before releasing her first novel, The Bluest Eye, in 1970. She was thirty-nine. Or there’s Madeleine L’Engle, who wrote journals and stories beginning at the age of five and almost gave up her writing career at the age of forty before the idea for A Wrinkle in Time struck her on a family road trip. After more than thirty rejections, A Wrinkle in Time appeared in 1962, when L’Engle was forty-four. One of my favorite examples of literary late blooming is Millard Kaufman. Kaufman took up screenwriting after serving in the Pacific Theater of World War II, introducing Mr. Magoo in the short film Ragtime Bear (1949) and authoring a number of notable films, including Bad Day at Black Rock (1956) and Raintree County (1957). Then, at age ninety, Kaufman published his first novel, Bowl of Cherries, with McSweeney’s in 2007. That year he told Scott Simon, writing a novel was “the last thing [to do] until a next thing show[ed] up.” In that interview, Kaufman recalls hearing Somerset Maugham say, “There are three rules for writing a novel, unfortunately no one knows what they are.” He continues, “I thought, if no rules exist, I might as well try it.” Stories like Kaufman’s aren’t even as rare as we tend to think. In fact, one study reports that the average age of first-time best-selling authors is forty-eight. Not planned or schemed, certainly not plotted at the outset of any given new year, stories like these resist the pressure to commodify inherent in New Year’s resolutions: No rules exist, you might as well try.
There’s a cliché I started hearing a lot when I had kids: The days are long, but the years are short. Like the best cliches, this one strikes at the heart of something that feels universally true about life. We experience time and time scales differently, in different contexts and for different reasons. Recalling that long days add up to short years puts the lie to the resolution to seek so many rejections before this time next year and reminds us that we live our lives across grander scales. Perhaps we will not live to see the erosion of the mountains, but we can take a few years, hell even a few decades, to perfect our necessary books. Some say pondering ideas like “deep time” leads to the inevitable despair of nihilism, but in 2023, I’m choosing to believe it’s possible to erect the literary equivalent of an earthen monument with a resolution that outpaces the new year. Here’s to ambition and success for you too, at whatever scale you might need it to be.
A great one!
Very nice. Thanks and happy New Year.