A First-Century Slave Teaches Me How to Write

I was in the third grade when I met with my first professional success as a writer. Without telling us, my teacher had entered some of our illustrated stories into a competition. The prize for the best one was to see the story performed by a troupe of actors who visited local schools. The results were kept a great secret until the day of the performance. I remember walking into the gym/cafeteria that also served as my tiny Midwestern school’s auditorium and seeing the backs of my parents’ heads in the front row. That was when I knew that my story had been selected, and I would see this tale—a proto-Marxist account of a mouse who tried to persuade staplers, pencil holders, and rubber stamps on my teacher’s desk to rise up in rebellion about their working conditions—performed in front of basically everyone I knew at the time. I felt a complicated mix of emotions: pride, delight, a little anxiety, but above all—and nearly overwhelming every other positive emotion—fear.

It wasn’t that I didn’t think my story was good. If memory serves, it was widely praised and applauded, although, at least among my peers, that probably had more to do with the fact that the performance was getting us all out of square dancing class. It wasn’t even that I had to stand up in front of the whole school afterward to receive a certificate: I didn’t know about that until the last possible second, which was probably for the best.

No, the fear that I felt was a nebulous and more existential terror, and it was my constant friend and companion for many years afterwards.

It was the fear that, no matter how substantial and wonderful my accomplishment was that day, I would never be able to reproduce it.

I had, I realized on some barely formed eight-year-old level, gotten on the treadmill of achievement, and there was no getting off it.

My relationship with my creative work was transformed by that moment, and not for the better. It took about 33 years for me to recover from my first professional success, and I owed it all to a first-century slave who never wrote down a single word in his life.

1. The handbook

We probably don’t know his real name. Epiktetos–or Epictetus, as it is usually Latinized–means “acquired” or “gained” in Koine Greek, a reference to his low status. He lived from roughly 50-135 AD, which places him in a fascinating stretch of Roman history: he was born under Nero, lived through the reigns of several emperors both terrible and competent, and died during the peaceful years of Hadrian. He was, for at least the early part of his life, enslaved to a man named Epaphroditus, who had himself been a slave before becoming one of Nero's powerful freedmen.

At some point Epictetus was freed, though we don't know exactly when or how. He studied philosophy under the Stoic teacher Musonius Rufus, and eventually set up his own school in Nicopolis, in what is now northwestern Greece, where he taught until his death. He was, by all accounts, a compelling and occasionally terrifying lecturer. He could also be very funny, though his humor tends toward the kind that makes you laugh and then wince, because you realize that, in the immortal words of Roberta Flack, he’s singing your life with his words.

And, as I said, he never wrote down anything. That task fell to one of his students, a Roman named Arrian, who attended his lectures and transcribed them. Arrian produced two works from these notes: the Discourses, which run to four substantial books, and a much shorter work called Enchiridion.

Enchiridion, perhaps for brevity, is the most widely read. The word itself is usually translated as "handbook" or "manual," and that translation is worth pausing over, because it tells you something about what kind of book this is. It is not a treatise. It is not a meditation. It is not a self-help book, although it has been repurposed as one with enthusiasm over the last decade or so. It is a handbook in the most literal sense: a compact, portable set of instructions for how to live your life when your life is not going the way you wanted it to go. Which, if you are a writer or an artist or a musician or anyone else who has chosen to spend their finite time on earth making things and hoping that other people will care about them, is essentially all of the time.

The Enchiridion opens with what is probably the most important single idea in the entire Stoic tradition, and it is one that I suspect you will find, as I have, deceptively simple to understand and genuinely difficult to accept. Here it is, in the Elizabeth Carter translation that has been standard since the eighteenth century: “Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.”

That's it. That's the whole foundation. Everything else in Stoic ethics is, in a sense, an elaboration of or a footnote to this single distinction, which later philosophers came to call the dichotomy of control.

1. Stoicism, a brief introduction

I come to my Stoicism (imperfect as it often is) as a writer, but what I will say here is largely applicable to anyone who puts creative work out in the world, whether it’s mystery novels or photographs or paintings or websites or new business ideas. For now, though, and by way of introduction, I will make this even more broadly applicable: Epictetus writes to anyone with a human body.

As humans, then, what is in our control and what is not?

We might go back to Epictetus’ list, which requires some further elucidation. Let’s start with what he says we don’t control: our bodies. Really? Our property? Same reaction. Reputation? What? Command? Huh?

Here’s what I think he means. We don’t control our bodies in the sense that we live in the world and are subject to its natural laws: physics, biology, germ theory, mortality. We can do things to try to improve our health, but an encounter with a single microorganism could bring us to our knees at any moment. Epictetus was reportedly beaten by his master until crippled. Lack of control of our health was even more true in Epictetus’ time, before vaccines and CT scans, but there is still much that lies beyond the power of modern medicine. The death rate, the last I heard, is holding steady at 100 percent.

Property (we might read this as wealth) falls under the same rubric. We can do things to try to insulate ourselves from economic shocks, like save and invest wisely, but (speaking as historian of economics) so much of economic life lies out of our control: employment cycles, macroeconomic trends, natural disasters, interest rates, even the economic health of the families into which we are born and what opportunities this secures for or denies us.

Reputation: How many people were falsely accused and ruined for extremely small or misunderstood offenses during the Twitter era? How much did any of that have to do with actual racism or sexism? In many cases, not much. You cannot control what people say about you, or whether they are generally believed, often due to groupthink mentality that ebbs and flows with the tide of vibes and politics.

Finally, command. My translation of this word, ἀρχαὶ, is something like “who commands,” but it might also mean “whom we command.” My best guess is that it refers to something like where we stand in the hierarchy of the world. It’s easy to see how this is influenced by matters outside of our control: where and to whom we were born, our upbringing, our personalities. As in the other cases, are there things that we can do to put our fingers on the scales? Of course. But much of what we agonize about–and this really is the key to Epictetus–is under the control of chance, fate, providence, or whatever you choose to call the minute interaction of circumstances that is 90 percent luck and 10 percent choice.

The much smaller list of what we can control includes: opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and “whatever are our own actions.” In short, the only things that Epictetus really believes that we control are the things we think about the external circumstances of the world: how much we allow ourselves to suffer, what opinions we have about ourselves.

1. The implications of the dichotomy of control for artists

It took a profound professional setback for me to fully internalize Epictetus’ message.

Although I’d never quite given up on the idea of writing novels, I’d allowed myself to get distracted, mostly by failing to understand the dichotomy of control. By this point in my life, when I was in my mid-to-late thirties, I’d encountered most of the major Stoic texts. I’d even taught the Enchiridion (twice) during sophomore seminars at St. John’s, where I was a faculty member. I’d had some professional writing success (a short story published in a major anthology, plenty of non-fiction in The Atlantic) but I’d also seen my fair share of rejections. Anecdotes about writers and rejection abound, but my favorite visual is of Stephen King, who papered his office with them and then, in a moment of despair, almost threw out the typewritten manuscript of his first commercial success, Carrie. There’s a very similar story about Vladimir Nabokov and one of the greatest masterpieces of the modern era, Lolita. (His wife Vera had to wade into a Dumpster to rescue it, supposedly.) Conventional advice for writers is that the ratio is one acceptance per thousand rejections, possibly more in the era of AI-written cover letters.

But the truth was that I was self-rejecting at a much earlier stage of the process.

I would start manuscripts, and then stop. My hard drive from 2020-2024 is a graveyard of half-formed ideas and 50 pages of something started over summer or winter break that subsequently just stopped. Whenever I did manage to complete something (usually a short story) I would send it to one or two places, get a rejection, and then stop sending it out. This behavior now strikes me as bizarre and borderline mentally ill, but it’s possible to reconstruct what was going on in my head now, thanks to Stoic terms:

1. One or two rejections on a piece meant that it wasn’t any good and I should stop sending it out.

This is possibly the most important insight of Stoicism for writers and creatives: rejection (which falls under the category of reputation and the opinions of others) has nothing to do with the actual quality of a piece of creative work. It is one of those things entirely outside of your control. Especially when you are talking about small numbers, the operation of chance in the universe is enormous. You may have encountered those editors on a day when their children were sick. They may have had a personal aversion to the subject of your work that has nothing to do with its quality. They might be poor judges of writing, despite their professional positions. They might be average or good judges of writing who made a bad call. To internalize their opinion of your work to the extent that I did is madness, but many writers and creatives struggle to remember this. The reason that they struggle is that they fail to realize that the opinions of others are not within their control.

1. Worse yet, I would abandon work without seeing it through because I was sure it would be eventually rejected.

Self-criticism and perfectionism, as I interpret them now, are classic anti-Stoic positions that afflict many a creative person. When writers describe what’s getting in their way, “perfectionism” is often identified as a chief culprit. But where does perfectionism come from? Despite the name, I think it has little to do with applying an impossible internally-derived standard to one’s work. I think it has far more to do with the internalization of outside voices, to the point where they seem like one’s own voice. There’s a saying among writers that the work that exists in your head is always better than the one that exists on the page. While your work exists only in your head, as a pure and beautiful idea, it can’t be subject to the criticism and mauling of the world. When I got stuck, I would just stop: that way, I couldn’t spoil my perfect idea. The result was that I never finished anything.

1. Even worse yet, I didn’t spend my time doing the thing I really wanted to do.

To understand the problems here, we need to go to the work of another Stoic philosopher, the first-century playwright Seneca. He wrote a short treatise called On the Brevity of Life, which is another one of those texts that says something that seems like it's plain common sense, but acquires its difficulty in the doing. What Seneca reminds us is that human life is short (a fact outside of our control) and that we are how we spend it. His argument is not quite that we waste time, although we do; it is subtler and more unsettling than that. Seneca's claim is that most of us are what he calls “preoccupied”: we pour our finite hours into pursuits that we never consciously chose, that we drifted into because they seemed expected or safe or prestigious, and that we would never have selected if someone had sat us down at the age of twenty and said, “You have about four thousand weeks. Spend them carefully.” The preoccupied person arrives at the end of life, Seneca warns, having never really started it. Too many of us forget which of our goals are instrumental (means to ends) and which ones are ends in themselves, and by the time we notice the difference, the time is gone.

That was exactly the story of my life. My childhood dread of the treadmill of achievement turned out to be quite prescient and psychologically astute. It turned out that my writing would carry me, first, to Harvard University, where I got in as an undergraduate on the strength of my portfolio and won my department’s writing and research awards every year. This in turn carried me to UC-Berkeley for graduate school, where I started turning my academic research into articles for both scholarly and mainstream publications. I fit fiction into the cracks and told myself that I was being practical by not choosing between it and the academic career towards which I had been building, largely based on a foundation of other people’s opinions of my writing. But “practical” was, I realize now, another word for “fear of falling off the treadmill of achievement.” Or, to put this in Stoic terms: fear that I could undermine other people’s idea of my success and status (things decidedly outside of my control) if I didn’t do what good little graduate students generally do and get an academic job, so that they can make more graduate students. Concretely, what this looked like in my own imagination was my parents would have to tell their friends that their daughter didn’t have a “real job,” but was instead a struggling fiction writer.

Seneca, unlike Epictetus, stood at the very pinnacle of Roman society. Born to a wealthy patrician family, he soared beyond them to the heights of the imperial court, serving as a tutor to Nero and one of the most successful writers of his day. He was in a good position, therefore, to understand the trap of status, or the treadmill of success, as I’ve been calling it. He wrote about men as powerful as Augustus and the orator Cicero and how their wealth and power blinded them to the true value of time. The truly wise understand that time is the only non-renewable resource: and what we spend ours on is the only thing truly within our control. Status doesn’t really exist outside of people’s minds and fallible opinions, but time certainly does.

IV. The setback

I wish I could tell you that studying the Stoics extensively has led me to wisdom and bliss, but it’s not that simple. As I alluded to above, it took a minor earthquake to shake me out of my complacency, and I’m sure it will take others during the course of my life to help me course-correct again.

This earthquake was losing my tenure-track job for reasons that, when they were stated to me, seemed absurd and false. One of them, for instance, was that my writing was “too polished.” Another was that I was incapable of learning things.

At first, I was too shocked to do much of anything, or think clearly about my predicament. It took almost a full year to realize that the comical obtuseness of the charges was itself a gift. It helped me dissociate myself, at last, from the opinions of others: or, more accurately, recognize opinions as merely that, opinions. The insidious thing about the treadmill of success is that every time you do succeed, you start to identify with the opinions of the judges. That works well enough–until they withdraw their approval. Which, inevitably, they will. Nobody wins everything. What’s left standing after that: well, that is in your control. It might be the only thing that is.

Maybe even more importantly, losing my job meant acquiring time: time for the pursuit that really mattered to me, free now (mostly) of the high stakes which I’d attached to it, free to see the real meaning of time. What, now, did I have to lose? My boss and colleagues, whom I’d been close to for years, had already identified me as a worthless person. If a snarky twentysomething agent or editor in New York thought that my work wasn’t publishable, what did I care? My reputation, finally, appeared to me in the proper light: as something that was completely and totally outside of my control, and had nothing, necessarily, to do with the quality of me.

V. Afterward

Every morning, I wake up and write. That, when you’re a creative, is what is inside your control, maybe the only thing: whether you show up to do the work, whether you steadily work to improve your art, whether you find the courage to submit it to the world, if that’s what you want to do. (And you don’t have to. There’s no rule saying you must be seen in the eyes of the world to be a real [fill-in-the-blank]).

And sometimes, I should admit, I can’t write. But that has nothing to do with the old writer’s block of worrying that my work won’t be well-received or that it isn’t “good” enough by some long ago internalized standard. When I don’t write, it often has to do with having a higher priority: I need to spend some time with family members, or my seven-year-old daughter brings home a gastrointestinal microbe from school that prostrates all of us for a week.

I almost hesitate to write this–because it is definitely outside of my control–but what happened was that I got a six-book deal for a mystery series. I am being careful not to identify this as an effect of my writing,

isn’t, or not wholly so. If I hadn’t finished the first book and submitted it to a publisher, I wouldn’t have gotten a deal. But almost everything else from that point was beyond my control. I happened to meet with a publisher who was looking for a book of the particular kind that I wrote. I happened to find their website during an open submission period after reading another book that they’d published. And so on.

Once upon a time, I would have interpreted this moment of professional success as a moment to identify with the judges of the world (and then, naturally, to be disappointed when, as is inevitable, I get rejected again). But Stoicism is a philosophy for times of plenty, as well as ones of scarcity. When done properly, it reminds us that our so-called “successes” are also not entirely within our control: they, too, are born of a long string of coincidences, outside opinions, and reputational matters. You cannot take the consolations in distress without taking the exhilaration dampening effects in triumph. Not honestly, at any rate.

I look back now at my story, the one I wrote in third grade, with new eyes. As I said, it was all about a mouse who was desperately trying to rouse the objects on a teacher’s desk into rebellion. It doesn’t end in success for the little mouse (creatively named “Mousie”). Why doesn’t it end in success? Because the mouse doesn’t realize until very late in the story that not only can he not control the opinions or actions of others, but that–as inanimate objects–rulers and staplers don’t actually have opinions or the ability to act. The story ends ambiguously, with the mouse, unable to deal with his failure, jumping off the desk. My first encounters with official Stoicism often felt like this: like commonsense propositions, available to a child, that turned out to be surprisingly profound and difficult to adopt when I tried. I wrote the truth as a child, but it’s taken me until now to accept it.

For further reading

Stoic primary texts

About the experience and trials of the creative life