On Vocational Awe

The two sides of writers and the lies we tell ourselves

In my first writers’ group a friend and I half-jokingly talked about how we would go out in public and think things like, “These people don’t know it, but I’m a writer.” As if being a writer conferred some special quality upon us. Thank goodness we never said such things aloud to strangers.

But it does take a certain attitude to be a creative writer and to stick with it, despite the incessant rejections, despite knowing that the possibility of fame and fortune—or even self-sufficiency from our work—is quite small. It takes an ego that balances the literary success-seeking id with the superego that readily admits our shortcomings as writers.

It’s a state of mind that says what we do is important and prestigious. It says we are doing something exceptional by practicing an art we believe is a pinnacle of human achievement.

Recently I was introduced to Fobazi Ettarh’s 2018 essay: Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves.

The essay was written about librarians, people who willingly enter a field that promises little money or acknowledgment, and these days not even the promise of a lasting career. The attraction seems to be a desire to devote oneself to the idea of a holy pursuit that transcends the secular—books, or more specifically, the great ideas that have been transcribed throughout human history. As the gatekeepers to this knowledge they are bestowed a special status.

I think the idea extends to writers as well.

Many of us have not achieved the kind of financial or critical rewards we hoped for as writers. But we are constantly encouraged by writing gurus to persevere, to keep at it and not think about the possibility of secular reward, but to continue to write, if only for the sake of writing. It’s as if these writing experts are saying that if we continue on, unquestioningly, we will get our just rewards in the next world¹.

Ettarh, who served as a librarian at Temple University Libraries, California State University Dominguez Hills, and Rutgers University, elaborated on her concept: “Vocational awe describes the set of ideas, values, and assumptions librarians have about themselves and the profession that result in notions that libraries as institutions are inherently good, sacred notions, and therefore beyond critique. I argue that the concept of vocational awe directly correlates to problems within librarianship like burnout and low salary.”

Sound familiar?

She continued, “Their narratives of receiving the ‘call’ to librarianship often fall right in line with Martin Luther’s description of vocation as the ways a person serves God and his neighbour through his work in the world.”

How many of us believed we received a similar call?

Her essay talks about the holiness of libraries, with their origins in Middle Ages monasteries. “The physical space of a library, like its work, has also been seen as a sacred space,” she wrote. By extension librarians are the monks or priests in this sacred space.

Writers these days typically don’t work in that kind of environment². We are more like ascetics, cloistering ourselves away from the rest of the world in order to think our holy thoughts.

The final part of Ettarh’s essay is titled, “Martyrdom is not a long-lasting career.”

A martyr is a person who is everything and nothing at once. Martyrs see themselves as devoted to the highest of spiritual callings, and to achieve that they must be the lowest of beings in the physical world, willing to sacrifice their existence in defense of their ideal.

But with martyrdom, one might say, comes a form of ego, a belief that the practice of being less than makes one greater than. Does it not say in the Bible, “For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted?³” The expectation of eternal glory and ultimate justification seems to be a motivating factor for the martyr.

No doubt many martyrs have been entirely altruistic in their motives. But in some psychological studies martyr-like behavior is considered a pathology, a way of expressing a desire for status that cannot be achieved in conventional ways. Some research even refers to a subtype: the “martyr narcissist.”

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What is a writer without an ego? There must be some ego involved in seeking the validation that comes with publication. Otherwise why do it? A person could keep a diary instead, and not worry about submitting and rejection.

Like librarians we are subject to low pay (or no pay!). We have to deal with the incredible amount of competition inherent to our chosen pursuit. We endure decisions about our work that are based on not content, but gender bias or generational bias or cronyism or social politics or publishers’ preoccupations with celebrity.

The incessant negativity associated with being a writer chips away at that ego until it convinces many writers their work does not deserve fair payment…or any payment at all. For some these factors are more than enough to make them stop writing…to stop believing.

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Those are the outside forces acting upon writers. Inside us is the mystical, where the writer’s humility lies. It’s a strange and almost counterintuitive combination, this ego and humility. But without both aspects a writer is incomplete.

Writers who take the work seriously do not think about themselves while creating, but instead immerse in the story and the characters. It’s not so much that writers become their characters, but that writers lose their sense of self, the awareness of oneself that we have at any other time. We lose touch with the physical world and become spiritual, in a way.

And as this is going on the subconscious considers the art in which the writer is engaged, and how best to achieve its most perfect form. The writer is in service to the writing ideal. I think this is not limited to the literary style, but true across all genres.

You can’t write well if you’re thinking about yourself or the greatness of your writing and how it deserves recognition, and yet you have to maintain some ego about it, even if it’s just to complete the work.

Someone once asked Sir Laurence Olivier what makes a great actor. He responded, “The humility to prepare and the confidence to pull it off.”

We are strange creatures, are we not?

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Does this describe you as a writer? How much ego do you have? Does your humble side keep it in check or does it get in the way of good writing?

What else I’m reading:

Colleges, Maybe Try Teaching! Academia has become unrooted from pedagogy, by William Deresiewicz

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The image at the top is derived from a still from the 1931 movie “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” That’s Frederick March as both characters.

1. Meanwhile, many of these “gurus” will get their rewards in this world by taking us on as paying clients in desperate need of their “guidance.”

2. Anymore, at least. Prior to the advent of the Internet many writers would spend all day at the library doing research and writing.

3. Luke 14:11