One problem that results from an academic study of the artistic discipline you want to pursue is that you tend to think of yourself in the third person. Or at least I tend to think of myself in the third person. That is, you end up more focused on artistic effect than you do with artistic process. And that’s because artistic effect is something that can be meaningfully studied. What kind of book is this? What kind of choices have been made in terms of narration? What are the consequences of those choices? Does this book succeed? How do these choices, this success or lack thereof, relate to other books this author has written? Other books that her contemporaries have written? Etc. These questions aren’t bad. They aren’t wrong. But they lead toward a certain neighborhood: the gated community of sorting and judging, categorizing and ranking. The Moons of Jupiter was Alice Munro’s best book. My top three Munro books are . . .

Again, it’s not that these thoughts are wrong, but they are less helpful if what you want to do is write books, as opposed to only read/judge them. There is the old Picasso joke: “When art critics get together they talk about form and structure and meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.” It’s a simplistic joke and potentially apocryphal but it contains a buried truth. Once again I have found a pithy quotation that I will ruin by yammering about it for a thousand words.

The difference is approaching a work of art via its effect, via its larger societal and artistic impact, and the other is approaching a work as a project that above all else has to get finished. This kind of study tempts you into thinking that the writers themselves thought of their work in this historically significant way, when in reality they were people often pinched by circumstance just trying to get the draft done. This is one way that reading biographies of writers can be instructive. You see all the crap, all the life, they trudged through. You see the compromises made, the relationships destroyed, the jobs sought, the rent due. Of course the danger of this kind of reading is that biographies helplessly hero-ify their subjects. No one wants to spend 400 pages and ten years writing about a person they don’t end up admiring. So the heroic victory of the books always comes in to save the day. But details about the early grit years are often instructive.

To get prescriptive: The thinking about the writing, the thinking of oneself as a writer, must not overtake the actual writing, the laying of the bricks. You’ve got to build that wall. Later generations can come and tell you how worthless it is, or not.

There is a lady on TikTok who for some reason is rehabbing a beaver. It is emphatically not a pet. She is a licensed wildlife rehabilitation specialist and this beaver was found as a baby, and because beavers stay with their parents for a long time, it needs care before it can be an adult in the wild. Like the Picasso quotation, I don’t want to debate veracity. I just want to talk about her TikTok videos. She videos it building dams around her house. He accumulates domestic detritus and creates dam-like agglomerations. And then he goes outside to a little pond on her property and makes slightly more real dams out there using limbs and twigs and household objects that for some reason seem necessary. He then sleeps in her shower stall. His favorite found household object is a toilet plunger. The accumulated videos are uncanny, odd, adorable. When the lady discovers a new proto dam, she says he’s learning how to be a beaver. Which is totally ridiculous because he is a beaver. He doesn’t need to learn how to be what he already incontrovertibly is. The dam building is instinct. He does it because of some primordial genetic force that’s propelling him to chew and gather and adjust crap with his teeth in order to divert water.

And yet, this instinctive daily piling up does have the effect of practice. He’s doing what he does in the limited circumstances he’s got available. Perhaps being a beaver is more of a collection of activities than an identity. He learns how to be a beaver by doing the actions that have come to be understood as beaver behavior.

Is he any good at it? Is he practicing for the One Big Real Dam he will write one day? Or is he just building the daily dam because that’s what beavers do? Does it even matter? He wakes up, eats whatever she’s feeding him (mostly sweet potatoes?) and then gets to work damming. He’s not practicing so much for the big one (the exam at the end of the semester) as he is building because that’s what he does. There’s no linear improvement. The beaver doesn’t have a Blue Period, and this newest dam is not a comment on the foregoing history of dams, and it does not in any way interrogate its own “dam-ness.” (Not that any of that wouldn’t be interesting.) There might be some linear improvement but it is an almost accidental byproduct of doing the same task repeatedly day after day. Of course the dams will get better. He can’t help that. But the improvement is not really the goal. He simply likes building dams. He feels compelled to build them. All the non beavers and all the beavers who didn’t build the dam can stand back and admire and critique (these gestures being the same) and rank. And perhaps even this beaver will one day pause and reflect. But if her videos are any indication the beaver is sleeping or off to the next project behind the couch.

Perhaps this is not an entirely helpful analogy. One wants to write well. One wants to produce literature, however one defines that nebulous term. One wants to improve. One wants to produce the kind of writing that excited the writer himself way back when. Remember the good old days? All those papers that received a grade. One wants to be good. Otherwise what’s the point? These are all valid concerns. But they are second order concerns. Or they should remain second order concerns, lest you drive yourself mad with evaluation. The first order concern is learning how to be a beaver.