Writing Won’t Cure Toothache

Colleen Mondor and I must be on the same wavelength. She’s a writer and book reviewer in the Pacific Northwest, and today she posted about that pesky question of whether writing is really important to the world, the way ending war and world hunger and curing disease are so clearly important.

Colleen is reading John Daniel’s Rogue River Journal, a book about six months he spent writing in an isolated cabin. [Aside: is it just me, or is it every writer’s dream to spend an extended period of time in a cabin in the woods? It’s certainly on my life list, even after seeing Secret Window.] And since Daniel and Colleen are both reflecting on their writing vocations in light of their father’s work, I figure I’ll join them.

My dad has been practising dentistry for almost thirty-five years. Just this month, he sold his practice in preparation for retirement a few years down the line. He and my mom spent the weekend in Ottawa, celebrating this new stage of their life. At lunch yesterday, my mom came back from the washroom and reported what had been written on the cubicle wall:

The three essentials of life: warm water, clean soft toilet paper, and good dentistry.

How does a writer compete with that? No matter what we compare writing to (dentistry, labour union organizing, waste water treatment, curing cancer, ending war), it’s always going to come off badly, without the kinds of tangible benefits that these other kinds of work can demonstrate.

I humbly suggest that we need to look at writing from the opposite end. When we’re figuring out what to do with our lives, rather than asking “What would be the most beneficial thing for the world?”, we ask “What can I do, with excellence and passion, that has some benefit to the world?” Because, as I hope I’ve now beaten into you with all this talk of life purpose, if we’re not tapping into our passion, we’ll burn out and be no good to anybody.

If I look at my life as a whole, I’d say that art in general, especially the narrative arts like writing and film, have saved me. Maybe not an individual book or a particular movie, but the cumulative comfort and insight brought about by stories has made life worth living. So maybe the cure for psychic pain is almost as important as the cure for cancer.