The Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros, 68, was driven to become a writer before there were stories of Mexican American immigrant life for her to read, never mind emulate. There were the Latin American Boom authors of the 1960s and ’70s (mostly men), and the poets Cisneros studied at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop (mostly white). She ultimately needed to follow Toni Morrison’s now-famous dictum and write the novel she wished to read. In 1984, she published “The House on Mango Street,” a series of prose-poem vignettes about Mexican American life in Chicago, its unorthodox form befitting its then-radical content.

Women’s use of autobiographical source material has produced its own bind: the misconception that their work is social reportage or self-expression, not art. Some women have tried to dodge this (for example, the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante, by hiding her identity altogether). Others have aestheticized autobiography itself by framing the women in their families, or their broader cultures, as unacknowledged artists — whether because of their craft work, as seen in pottery or weaving, or their love of language. Paying homage to these influences allows women to make a subtle feminist gesture on the level of form, rather than an explicit feminist statement.

But for the current generation of women artists, who have come of age with models who more closely resemble them, identity seems more like a source of community than a trap. To write from personal experience in 2023 might mean depicting a bilingual Chicana childhood in Chicago; but it will also mean engaging with Cisneros as a predecessor, and perhaps even privileging an audience that’s already familiar with her work.

“The benefit is undeniable,” says the poet and scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs about the legacy of her Black women forebears, including Morrison and Clifton. Gumbs, 40, who leads workshops on Black feminists like Audre Lorde and has published poetry collections inspired by theorists such as Hortense Spillers (“Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity,” 2016), sees herself as a beneficiary of the intergenerational network of honest Black talk and compassionate mothering — including creative instruction — that Clifton describes in her 1985 essay “We Are the Grapevine.” Clifton died at 73 in 2010, 51 years to the day after her mother. Yet sometimes, when Gumbs is writing, she can feel the elder poet — who, she says, “was so specific about ‘How does this look on the page?’” — telling her, “You don’t need that, or that or that.” Gumbs deletes the words, having learned from Clifton’s example not only how to write but how to listen.

Women artists, born into a Babylon of exclusion and possibility, reveal that creative inheritance is as promiscuous as legal inheritance is strict. We inherit a work of art, including the artfulness of someone else’s way of being, when it transforms us. I never met Morrison or Clifton, yet I have carried their words and ideas around in my head for some 20 years thanks to the teachers who introduced them to me. My professors were worldly, wry, stylish and kind, and I imagined that, by embracing their favorite writers, I might become like them. The best I could do, it turned out, was share what they had shared through my own writing and teaching. But that’s as it should be. Education, like any creative inheritance, is a gift bestowed indiscriminately and claimed most fully by those who pass it down the vine.

I once explained to an interviewer that there were two kinds of ambition: public ambition and private ambition. The former is the desire to be successful according to the worldly terms — sales, awards, prestige. (Very few writers, one supposes, are immune to this desire.) And then there is the private ambition, which neither asks nor receives confirmation from the world. This is the desire to be able to say, after scrutinizing a page of one’s own work, “This is as good as it gets; it’s good enough to be read by Tolstoy or Chekhov or Rebecca West.”

It turns out I made a mistake putting ambition and private together. Ambition’s etymology, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, comes partly from the Latin ambition-, ambitio, “soliciting of votes, canvassing, striving after popularity, desire for advancement, ostentation, pomp”; ambit-, “past participial stem of ambire, to go round or about.” Sharing this etymology are two other words: “ambient” and “ambience.”

So ambition has little to do with the intrinsic values of an artist’s work. An artist, if ambitious, must canvas like a politician: striving, soliciting and winning popularity; seeking (and demanding, appropriately in the case of West) external acknowledgment and approval. Some artists are good at cultivating art, others at cultivating ambition, and those who are ambidextrous deserve all our respect.

I make a distinction between art and ambition without any slight intended to anyone. We no longer live in the age of Montaigne, when one could stay in a tower and write for oneself. Some years ago, a celebrated author from Britain admonished me that one must not stop touring, giving Iris Murdoch’s career as a cautionary tale: Murdoch’s sales, according to this writer, slumped after she stopped touring. And these days, ambition’s demand goes beyond physical presence. An author with whom I sat at a recent signing emphasized, when she learned that I do not use social media for marketing and publicity, the importance of maintaining a constant presence on social media, which, if we think about it, is a perfect setting for the symbiotic relationship between ambience and ambition: There is no solitary ambience, just as there is no solitary ambition.

Art is insatiably demanding, and so is ambition. They’re not partners in a comfortable and easy relationship: Sometimes they work together, but more often they compete against — even undermine — each other. Much can be said about the artist caught as the third point of this fraught triangle, but perhaps nothing surprising. Stories of success are like stories of happy families, all alike, though most artists, one supposes, live in less happy stories.

I’m aware that when I borrow West’s line for my writing, I’ve edited her words. West did not say “good enough for myself” but “good enough for my world.” I wish I could ask her who else would be found in her world — certainly, the Times Literary Supplement was not.

A few years ago, a friend gave me a notebook as a present, and on the front page was a collage, a plush theater kept mostly empty but for a handful of audience members, including Chekhov, Turgenev, Elizabeth Bowen, Marianne Moore, Stefan Zweig, William Trevor, John McGahern and a few others. So that, I can say, is truly my ambition — not just good enough for myself but good enough for those in my theater.

And here I have to make a somewhat ambivalent case in defense of my demon, by acknowledging her daemonic qualities. Ambivalence is not only an enemy — she could never be just one thing — but often acts as an ally and an inspiration. Every book I’ve written has grown from the seeds of uncertainty that ambivalence has sowed. By positing the opposite, the red to my green, or the blue to my orange, she opens up the vast prismatic spectrum in between. This is my demon’s genius, to force me to recognize and consider the rich and subtle array of ideas, feelings, beliefs, reactions and choices that are possible in any situation. Of course, this can be confusing, too. Ambivalence has a contrarian’s eye for possibilities. When I say “black,” she says “white.” When I say “this,” she suggests “that ... and how about these, and all those others?” Confronted with so many alternatives, it’s easy to succumb to self-doubt and inertia but, when I get stuck, rather than sitting back smugly and taking a break, my ambivalence goads me back into action.

All this to-ing and fro-ing makes ambivalence a somewhat old-fashioned and inefficient monster, not well suited to life in a fast-moving world where beliefs must be expressed in certainties, and thoughts compressed into 280 Unicode glyphs. Where opinions must be monovalent, and minds must be made up. Where flip-flopping is seen as an executive weakness, and uncertainty spells political death.

Conversely, ambivalence offers us the opportunity to weigh choices, consider alternatives, ponder possibilities and even change our minds. This mulling slows us down, but is that necessarily a bad thing? When it comes to writing fiction, slow is often good — or at least better — and so I try to practice patience. But patience, for writers, poses yet another challenge. There’s an oft-quoted saying that writers don’t want to write; we want to have written. When I start a novel, I want to know what it is going to be, but writing requires the ability to tolerate not knowing, often for years at a time. The Romantic poet John Keats called this “negative capability,” which he defined as the capacity “of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts.”

And this is the discomfiting gray area that my ambivalence likes best. It’s the shrouded, unsettling place from which literature emerges, the in-between space of generative tension, where the most nuanced fictional characters live, and where their stories are born. I don’t have to love this state of tension or hate it. I don’t have to love or hate my ambivalence, either — to do so would be to squander her power. I just have to tolerate her uncertainties, mysteries and doubts long enough to transfer them to the page.

Everyone imagines artists’ egos as massive and destructive, rather like a three-story-high Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon, broken loose from its handlers and menacing the crowds below. And towering egos certainly aren’t gender exclusive. The determination to splash one’s innards across a canvas or over the page or stage requires a foundational conviction that you’ve got something to say that other people ought to hear. The “I” is full of itself. This isn’t limited to artists; all of us are possessed of an I, an ego, that defines itself over and against the other selves it encounters. This ego makes decisions and translates the depths of our innermost selves into sensations and ideas that are intelligible to others. Because art involves making meaning through aesthetics, the ego’s function as manager and translator is essential to the artist. And for the female artist, the manager-ego is further tasked with balancing her I with sexist limitations imposed upon her confidence, her awareness of herself, her stature and how she expresses those things publicly.

Permit me a digression: Remember Sasha Fierce, Beyoncé’s aughts-era alter ego? Sasha was sexy, bold and utterly unafraid. Beyoncé created Sasha to counteract her own onstage shyness, so the legend goes. How about Tina Snow and Hot Girl Meg, Megan Thee Stallion’s alter egos? Or brash, dirty-talking pioneer Lil’ Kim and her Queen Bee back in the ’90s? These alternates make for good show business, but they’re also a container for attributes and audacities that may not fit — or perhaps are not permitted to fit — within the performer’s regular persona.

Alternates are a place to process doubts and insecurity by overpowering them with a larger-than-life superwoman. As any artist can tell you, doubt can cripple. The artist must diminish its power if she wants to succeed. But doubt is also a motivator: It spurs the artist to try harder, to be riskier, to regard her creations with skepticism, which pushes her toward greater exploration and innovation.

Of course, the invention of alter egos isn’t limited to women. Ziggy Stardust sprang from David Bowie’s starry mind. But significantly, while Ziggy was supplementary to his male creator, the female alter ego often exists in contrast to its maker — a host for what the artist cannot be, or a part of herself or her performance she fears the public won’t accept. It’s no coincidence that Lil’ Kim’s Queen Bee has been hailed as an early herald of Black feminism in hip-hop, rapping about sexuality and financial autonomy with the same bravado as her male counterparts.

I don’t mean to suggest that the female artist requires an alter ego. But there’s some valuable modeling there in terms of circumventing expectations and broadening the scope of what’s possible — a metaphorical, integrated alter ego, if you will, that moves the artist toward Weems’s clear sense of herself and where she stands. After all, Beyoncé killed off Sasha Fierce over a decade ago because, she said, she didn’t need her anymore. Now she’s just Beyoncé, which seems to be going pretty well.