For one week in July and one week in August I teach at writing conferences, and the other fifty weeks I am a full-time writer, more or less. No, this is not quite true — the fifty weeks part — because I never get any real work done in December. December is traditionally a bad month for writing. It is a month of Mondays. Mondays are not good writing days. One has had all that freedom over the weekend, all that authenticity, all those dreamy dreams, and then your angry mute Slavic uncle Monday arrives, and it is time to sit down at your desk.
It is important that you sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively. So if you sit down at, say, 9 every morning, this is what you can probably expect to happen next: first you put a piece of paper in the typewriter, and then you stare at it for an hour or so. You begin rocking, just a little at first, and then like a huge autistic child. You look at the ceiling, and over at the clock, yawn, and stare at the paper again. Then, with your fingers poised on the keyboard, you squint at an image that is forming in your mind — an image, a scene, a locale, a character, whatever — and you try to quiet your mind so you can hear what the landscape or character has to say, above the other voices in your mind. The other voices are banshees and drunken monkeys. They are voices of anxiety, judgement, doom, guilt, and severe hypochondria, and a Nurse Ratched-like listing of things that must be done right this moment: foods that must come out of the freezer, appointments that must be canceled or made, hairs that must be tweezed. But you hold an imaginary gun to your head and make yourself stay at the desk. There is a vague pain at the base of your neck. It crosses your mind that you have meningitis. Then the phone rings and you look with fury up at the ceiling, summon every ounce of noblesse oblige, and answer it politely, with maybe just the merest hint of irritation. The caller asks if you’re working, and you say yeah, because you are.
And somehow in the face of all this uninhabitability — bacteria and spores would flourish in a petri dish of your disposition — you bear down on the writing voice, hacking away at the others with machetes, and you begin to compose sentences. You begin to string words together like beads to tell a story, to give your version of things. You are desperate to communicate, to edify or entertain, to preserve in this way moments of grace or joy or transcendence, or to set the record straight, to make history or scenes that spring from your imagination come alive.
You cannot will this to happen. It is a matter of faith and hard work, of becoming a channel for the right words. It almost feels sometimes like you just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it. But not in a Ouija board way. It is more like when you have something difficult to discuss with someone, and as you go to do it, you hope and pray that the right words will come, if only you go ahead and plug your nose and jump in. And often the right words do come. Then you read over the day’s work and spend the rest of the day obsessing — obsessing and praying that you not die before you can completely rewrite or destroy what you have written, lest the eagerly watching world learns how bad your first drafts are.
If you are like the rest of us, your first drafts will be really, really bad.
If you somehow manage to fall asleep that night, you wake up at 4 a.m., dreaming that you have died. Death turns out to feel much more frantic than you had imagined. Four a.m., the hour of the black dogs. You lie there filled with existential dread, considering the absolute meaninglessness of life, and that no one has ever really loved you, and you are filled with a free-floating shame, and a hopelessness about your work, and the realization that you will have to throw out everything you’ve done so far and start from scratch. But you will not be able to do so. Because you suddenly understand that you are completely riddled with cancer.
And then the miracle happens. The sun comes up again. So you get up and do your morning things, and one thing leads to another, and eventually, at 9, you find yourself back at the desk, staring blankly at the pages you filled yesterday. And there on page four is a paragraph with all sorts of life in it, smells and sounds and voices and colors and even a moment of dialogue that makes you say to yourself, very, very softly, “Hmmmmm.” You look up and stare out the window again, but this time you are drumming your fingers on the desk, and you don’t care about those first three pages, these you will throw out, these you needed to write to get to that fourth page, to get to that one long paragraph which was what you had in mind when you started, only you didn’t know that, couldn’t know that, until you could get to it. And then the story begins to unfold and materialize like a Polaroid picture, and another thing is happening, which is that you begin learning what you aren’t writing, and it is helping you to find out what you are writing. Essentially it is like a fine painter attempting to capture an inner vision, beginning with one corner of the canvas, painting what he thinks should be there, not quite pulling it off, so covering over it with white paint and trying again, each time finding out what it isn’t, until finally finding out what it is.
And when you do find out what one of the corners of your vision is, you’re off and running, and it really is like running. It always reminds me of the last lines of Rabbit, Run: “. . . his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs.”
Interviewers ask famous writers why they write, and Flannery O’Connor answered, “Because I’m good at it,” and it was (if I remember correctly) the poet John Ashberry who answered, “Because I want to,” and when the occasional interviewer asks me, I quote them both and then add that other than writing I am completely unemployable. But really, secretly, when I’m not being smart-alecky, I mention a scene from Chariots of Fire in which (as I remember it, as opposed to what may indeed exist on film) the Scottish runner, the hero, is walking along with his missionary sister on a gorgeous heathery hillside in Scotland. She is demurely ragging on him to give up training for the Olympics and to get back to doing his missionary work at their church’s mission in China. And he replies that he will go to China, that he wants to do that because he feels it is God’s will for him, but that first he is going to train with all of his heart, because God also made him very, very fast.
So God made some of us fast in this arena, of being good with words, and He gave us the gift of loving to read, loving to read with the same kind of passion with which we love nature. I lie on my couch with one of the great good books, lost in that book, soothed and dazzled, and every so often I can almost gasp out loud, looking almost as if I have just heard a loud, sudden noise, and mutter, “God Almighty.” My students at the writing workshops have this gift, of loving to read, and some of them are really fast, really good with words, and all of them desperately want to be writers.
No, this isn’t quite true: what they want is to get published. And I stand before them, and they think I’ve made it, and they think I’ve got it made, because I’ve had three books published, and then I bear witness to the fact that the two or three months before a book comes out of the chute are right up there with the worst life has to offer. They are pretty much like the first twenty minutes of Apocalypse Now, with Martin Sheen in the motel room in Saigon, totally decompensating.
But even this isn’t the worst of it.
The worst of it may be, must be, all the waiting, after you’ve finished your book, or a draft of the book, and you’ve sent it off to your agent, and to your editor, and to a couple of friends, and a week later you get a note from your agent’s assistant that the manuscript has in fact arrived, and maybe one of the friends has called to say that he or she has read part of it and that it is just terrific and not to worry, but you go ahead and have a small breakdown anyhow, waiting for your agent and editor to call and tell you that it’s brilliant. Every time the phone rings, you sing, “Let it please be him, oh, dear God, it must be him.” But it’s not him, and then you die and have to go on a massive eating binge, pacing, tearing at your hair and flesh. And then you calm down. You go for a walk or you try to read something, but you end up reading your own manuscript and gasping with shame at how bad it is. Just when you start going into spasm, your friend calls back and says he or she has read another chapter and just wants you to know that really, on the souls of their grandchildren, they swear it’s the best thing you’ve ever written; they love it, and they love you.
So you are OK again, for a good ten minutes or so.
After a couple of weeks, you call your agent because you can’t stand pretending to be cool anymore, and it all feels like Waiting for Godot as Edgar Allan Poe might have written it, but your agent hasn’t read it yet because she is swamped with infinitely more important matters. She tells you with the faintest hint of irritation that the very second she finishes it, or hears from your editor, you will be called. OK? the agent asks. All better?
And then you see in a flash of blinding insight that your agent and editor are in cahoots, and what you heard as irritation was really just the strain of withholding hysterics, and after being on the phone all morning reading each other passages from your book, they agree that it is the most embarrassingly bad book ever written, and they are honking and screaming with laughter. At one point your editor is laughing so hard that he has to take some digitalis, and your agent ruptures a blood vessel in her throat. They are reading the scene to each other where your hero tries to slit his wrists. Then your editor has to get off the phone so he can go talk to the legal department to see if they have to pay you the last part of the advance they owe you, or if maybe they can even sue you to collect the money they already paid you.
But all you can do is wait, and wait, and wait, until finally your agent or editor calls, and the book is terrific, and it will be published in the spring or the fall or whenever. It will be published. And so there are some happy months, rewriting, editing, working with the copy editor, loved and assured every step of the way, and then there is the utter miracle of galleys, where your book comes to you set in type and it looks like a real person was involved in the writing of it.
And then your book comes out.
Yo!
If you are lucky, you get a few reviews, some good, some bad, some indifferent. There are a few book-signing parties, a couple of interviews, and probably somewhere along the line, your first really devastating review — the review that says your book is a bowl of vomit. It is especially festive when this review is in the local press, so that all your relatives can read it, too. And the thing is, writers tend to be sort of shy and not very adept at taking criticism (or compliments, but that is another story). Take me, for instance. I don’t handle it well if someone casually and privately remarks to me that maybe yellow really isn’t my color. I say something benign, like “Well, maybe not,” but inside I’m thinking what a loser scum pig the person is and how I don’t want to be friends with him or her anymore. So when you see in print that some subhuman moron thinks your new book is disappointing, or boring, or lousy, you pretty much have to go ahead and completely lose your mind. Several hundred thousand people are reading the review over their morning coffee — reading it out loud to one another, chuckling over how clever the reviewer is. So you rant and you cry and you eat all the glass out of your car windows, and then your writer friends call and commiserate. And they really do feel sick for you, and angry, and they know you feel like a wounded animal, a raging bull, and they say the right things, that they love you and they love your book, and that it has happened to them, a year ago, or whenever. Because if you are a writer, it is going to happen to you.
Then, after a while, you want to get on with your life, which is to say, you get back to work on your new book.
But you don’t start new books or diets in the middle of the week. You start on Monday. First thing Monday morning, right?
So now we’re back where we began, at the desk on Monday morning, with a few ideas and a lot of blank paper, with hideous conceit and low self-esteem in equal measure, with fingers poised on the keyboard. And yet I tell my students twice a year that the writing part of my life is the only part that really makes sense. I tell them that in the week to come, we will discuss the ways and means of getting a little bit of work done every day at the desk, and that they will get better and better, if they write at least a little bit every day. They look at me and I can see that they are hoping I have absolutely flipped over the story they submitted for me to read before our classes began, that I will take them aside and say that not since Katherine Anne Porter or Gabriel García Márquez or James Baldwin has a writer so captured the blah blah blah, and that all the story needs is for us to put a little spin on the ending and maybe shorten the scene with Cammy and the ducks, and then we’ll send it off to my agent or to The New Yorker or whatever, and I tell them that this is not going to happen. What will happen is that they will be practicing every day like they would practice if they were learning to play the piano, or tennis, and they’ll want to be really good right off, and won’t be, but they may be someday if they just keep the faith and keep practicing. They’ll get better and better. And they may even go from wanting to have written something to just wanting to write, to be working on something, like they’d want to be playing piano or tennis, because it brings with it so much joy, so much challenge. It is work and play together, and it brings one into the now. And when they are working on their books or stories, their heads will spin with ideas, and they’ll see the world through new eyes. Everything they see and hear and learn will become grist for the mill. At cocktail parties or in line at the post office, they will be gleaning small moments and overheard expressions, listening like ships’ rats, veined ears trembling. They will learn to be those people on whom, as Henry James put it, nothing is lost. And there will be days at the desk of frantic boredom, of angry hopelessness, of wanting to quit forever, and there will be days when it feels like they have caught and are riding a wave.
Another thing will happen, the most important thing. One’s joy in reading the good writers will grow, deepen, and widen. It is like when a budding or talented amateur violinist hears Yehudi Menuhin play with the symphony orchestra, or do a double concerto with one of his sisters. Hearing that almost psychotic degree of excellence, one could nearly swoon, dazzled and comforted all at once. This is what it is like for me to read an excellent book — I am just blown away, and it is so great to feel this way. It humbles me, and it also makes me want to get back to the typewriter, to try to get better at telling my version of things.
This essay originally appeared in San Francisco Focus (680 Eighth Street, San Francisco, California 94103) and is reprinted with permission.
— Ed.
