Excerpted from Writing as a Way of Life: A Book About Art, Craft, and Devotion (Black Lawrence Press, 2025) by Brian Morton.
Envy is the most serious occupational hazard of the writing life. Not eyestrain, not alcoholism, not carpal tunnel syndrome. Those are among the hazards of the writing life, but envy is the major hazard, and it can kill you.
Spiritually, I mean. It can kill you spiritually.
And every writer has to deal with it. Every writer alive.
The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes that “everybody, it seems, is shadowed by an imaginary other person, a lucky counterpart, who gets all the happiness...” There’s no writer who won’t know what he means. To be a writer is to be haunted by an imaginary other.