I’m incredibly lucky to have found my passion at a young age. It was pretty simple: At around the age of eight, I proclaimed to my parents and teacher that I was drafting my first book. Even at that age, I had no illusions about the brutality of the publishing world. I’d probably have to finish two, maybe even three, hard-fought drafts before inevitably submitting to the slush pile at Penguin Random House – the publisher of “The Phantom Tollbooth,” my favorite book at the time – and signing a six-figure, upmarket debut deal.
I remember reading the last line of “The Glass Menagerie” in high school, crying for the first time in years and swearing to myself that I’d one day write something half as brilliant. I locked myself in my room and played angsty music, attempting to write a great love story before I’d even had my first girlfriend. At eight and in high school, I was deeply convinced that what I was working on was the piece — the one that a big kahuna would one day read and grovel at my feet for.
Looking back at these memories now, I can’t help but laugh and cringe at the same time. What the hell was I thinking? I feel this way about a lot of the writing that I’ve done at Dartmouth. It is a common feeling among authors, or at least it should be. Even though this thinking can be embarrassing, it’s an encouraging indicator of improvement and personal growth.
Despite realizing this pattern, I am once again in a period of time where I feel that what I’m writing is very serious. I decided to take my off-term to finish the second draft of my novel and work on an anthology of short stories while also taking care of my extracurricular obligations on campus. Since I am already committed to serving four years in the Army after graduation, there’s no real need for an internship to pad my resume, and this seemed like a far more fulfilling pursuit. Now, in week seven of 10, I can say that I’ve both loved and hated it, and that what I’ve learned has been indispensable.
Every time I tell people that I’ve been working on a novel, they immediately ask two questions: 1) “What is it about?” and, 2) “Are you going to try to get it published?” I always dread the second question. I think of the countless author’s accounts describing how they spent years on their first books only to never get published, forcing them to start from square one with an entirely new premise and only a slightly better idea of how to structure an extended narrative. I think of the story of John Kennedy Toole, who killed himself at 31 after failing to publish “A Confederacy of Dunces,” only for it to be published posthumously a decade later and win the Pulitzer Prize.
The more I’ve learned about publishing, the more dreadful it all seems. Getting a short story published in a mid- to high-tier literary journal seems nearly impossible, let alone signing a book deal. The greatest writers of times past and present endured rejection after rejection and endless doubt. It’s easy to read this online, but it’s significantly harder to internalize it. So, am I going to try to get my book published? I really don’t know. Maybe?
But of course, at a place like Dartmouth, it’s significantly harder to offer an answer like that without feeling incredibly self conscious. In his 1944 play “No Exit,” Jean-Paul Sartre depicted hell as a windowless drawing room in which people are tormented for eternity by each other’s perceptions and judgements. The play is famously summarized by the line, “Hell is other people.”
If hell is other people, then Dartmouth is hell. It’s the perfect size to gain a campus reputation; there are formal social sorting systems in the form of Greek houses and senior societies; and everyone is impressively accomplished in one way or another by the time they get to campus.
I think these factors, combined with Dartmouth’s strength in economics and its strong network of alumni at various investment banks and consulting firms, make it one of the best candidates for the collective entrepreneurialization of self. University of Freiburg cultural sociology professor Ulrich Bröckling coined the term “the entrepreneurial self” to capture the drive to orient your thinking towards market success, which he claims is a tendency of modern neoliberalism. He describes a world in which humans are constantly driven to “adapt to a society only capable of producing winners and losers.”
Competition can be a powerful route towards self improvement, but it can also be poisonous. Throughout this term, I’ve constantly had to remind myself that the choice I made to take this term off and write was a valid one, and not a total waste of time or an experiment marked by inadequacy. It might be dumb to think that not finding a formal internship means I somehow failed, but it also feels quite dumb to wake up here in the morning and work on a draft I’m not even sure is going to go anywhere.
Every time I feel this way, I have to remind myself: Going somewhere is almost never what a talented writer thinks about when drafting. They are obsessed with a feeling, a memory, an image, and have a compulsive need to follow that thing and make it real. So when I have that instinct and an opportunity, it would be idiotic not to follow it. After all, I don’t know when I’ll get to do this in my life next, and even if I look back at everything that I wrote this term and laugh, at least I’ll know that I improved and enjoyed myself while doing it.
This fixation with wasting time and optimizing for success is something that Dartmouth has drilled into me. It’s both an incredibly precious gift and a sometimes-overwhelming bad habit. This term, in the hours I’ve spent agonizing over the word choice in a single sentence or paragraph, it’s felt more like a haunting curse.
Not knowing when I’ll have concrete, positive feedback on things I’m working on has also been an unsettling experience, especially after getting used to constant grading from classes and various evaluations from ROTC. It’s made me doubt parts of my very basic identity, as a writer and as a regular person. I think this not knowing, however, might be the first step towards adulthood and living in a wide, unknowable world. For now I’ll take solace in the one thing that I remain confident of after seven weeks – that a day spent writing is not a day wasted.
Eli Moyse ’27 is an opinion editor and columnist for The Dartmouth. He studies government and creative writing. He publishes various personal work under a pen name on Substack (https://substack.com/@wesmercer), and you can find his other work in various publications.
