What Matters by Clifford Thompson

Today, EditingGenius welcomes Whiting Award winner, Clifford Thompson, who has some very poignant thoughts on the work of writing.

 

This year I won a Whiting Writers’ Award in the category of nonfiction. Theaward has greatly improved my outlook. It has also — this is not a complaint — left me feeling a little strange, for reasons that at bottom have to do with the strangeness of being a writer. To be a writer is to want two things: to create good works and to receive the balm of recognition. It is to tell yourself that only the first of these truly matters and to have your words fall on your own deaf, or at best unbelieving, ears. It is to be a nation of one, operating with both a surplus — the drive to create, and the joy that brings — and a deficit, a lack of the normal person’s capacity to be satisfied with the ordinary good things of life. I used the word “balm,” which suggests a relief from suffering, and most often to be a writer is (I know how maudlin this sounds) to suffer. For me, the Whiting Award has gone a long way toward relieving that special brand of suffering.

 

This brings me back to feeling strange. It is difficult to comprehend a situation fully when you’re still in it, and it is only now, as I put one foot outside my predicament, that I begin to understand just what was happening to me in there. At fifty, I am the oldest of this year’s Whiting winners by a wide margin. The award, by far the most significant measure of recognition I have ever received, is given to writers of “accomplishment and promise”; the word “promise” points to the future, but, to face the stonehearted truth for a moment, the majority of my days are most likely behind me. That doesn’t mean that I can’t accomplish much more as a writer —  I am very, very excited about the possibility of doing just that — but it does mean that I spent a lot of my life in the hell of waiting for something that showed few signs of ever coming. I can see that now, and it is a strange thing to realize. But I can see something else too. I wasn’t just waiting; I was working. In getting the telephone call telling me I was to receive the Whiting Award, I did nothing — nothing — that I hadn’t done before I got the news. What this proves is what I used to tell myself: What matters is the work. Now that I no longer need to hear those words, I finally believe them.

Clifford Thompson is the author of Love for Sale and Other Essays and a novel, Signifying Nothing.

For More Information about the Whiting Award, click here.