Writers hear much. Some of it follows them throughout life
and some makes no difference.
My best friend has said some
profound things in the thirty-four years I have known him. Infuriating truths that bore into your nerves. During my department store stocker days, I
remember whining about my job, even though I had no right. Back then, my friend divided his time between
a MASH unit and the hospital where he worked as an ER trauma nurse. I had not lived enough yet to understand. My parents were alive and my house still un-flooded.
I was too untouched by life to realize
he and I knew different thresholds of pain.
A “bad day” didn’t mean the same thing to me as it did to him. When he tired of my whining, he said, “Look,
everybody’s job sucks. That’s why they
call it ‘work’ and not ‘play.’”
Guess what I
still hear at 2 o’clock in the morning, when I’m staring at the ceiling?
Here’s
another one, from the summer of 1992.
My family had
recently moved back to Missouri, and my friend was visiting. He leaned against our washing machine, while
I sat on the corner of a desk, beside the typewriter my parents had ordered
from Fingerhut. Because he is a
caregiver, he listened to my lamentations again, but what he said at the end became
another one of those nerve-jangling truths that this time felt like a betrayal.
That week’s
tragedy came out an old copy of Writer’s
Digest wherein an article asked, “Do you want to write, or do you want to
have written?”
I didn’t like
the question, because I had no answer.
Well, that’s not actually true. I
was afraid of trying to answer. Avoiding
it all together meant I would never have to consider that maybe I just wanted
to have written. Most of the articles in
WD said those who wanted to have
written really just wanted fame and fortune.
I took comfort in that neither of those was my goal, but I never
considered it could also mean something else.
Writing takes
a lot of work to appear effortless.
Even though I could get lost in
writing for hours, some of that time (no, let’s be honest -- a lot of it) was
taken up with reading how-to books on characterization or plotting --
painkillers for the blank page. Those
books told me the average professional writer produced about 2000 words every
day. I remember actually circling the
number with my index finger and feeling the same giddiness a comic book
collector feels every time he steps into an old flea market and dreams of digging up a
copy of Action Comics #1. I wanted to write 2000 words a day.
And sustained a consistent pace
only once. For a whole month. All during the January before my 19th
birthday, I wrote 10 pages per day longhand.
I was so very proud of the notebooks piling up, but I still refused to
call myself a writer after that, because after that I never finished much. Does
that sound like you want to write, or that you want to have written?
After my friend
quietly listened to these fears of being an amateur, he said the thing that
felt like a betrayal:
“You know, until somebody starts paying you to
do this, you’re going to have to accept that it’s just a hobby.”
Something in
me shriveled. My pragmatic friend was
wrong. Why did this have to be a
hobby? Why did money have to be the
determining factor? I didn’t have to be
rich. All I wanted was to be able to
write full time.
If
your goal is eight pages of finished script a day and you only produce two
pages on Monday, you had better produce fourteen on Tuesday . . . . You may
never gain [financial security]. If you can produce only one or two category
novels a year . . . you will never know a time when the wolves are not a
stone’s throw from the door.
--
Dean Koontz
Writing Popular Fiction
My friend is
a clever man. I think he wanted to piss
me off enough to prove him wrong.
I didn’t
listen. At 21, I still had decades to
become a writer. If I didn’t want to
write today, I wouldn’t have to. It was
okay to take a break every time it got difficult and inspiration
evaporated. I wouldn’t have to push
myself until I was publishing regularly.
No, I didn’t realize the contradiction.
I refused to let myself just write, even if it was crap. If I had done that . . . just write and write
and write . . .
Only about 30% of what professional
writers produce is publishable, meaning that what the public sees is only about
1/3 of what an author actually writes. It
was years before I would understand that the good ideas lie beneath all the crap,
and that you have to write through the upper layers to get to them.
Instead, I
kept waiting for when I would be able to write 2000 words a day. Obviously, this inevitably happened to all
writers, magically, around the time they sold their first novel, probably.
Then, I
turned 30 -- with the knowledge that Stephen King published his first novel at
26. By the time he was my age, Isaac
Asimov published I, Robot and was
probably working on the last draft of Foundation. Bradbury gave us The Martian Chronicles. A
30-year-old Poe was inventing new genres.
And Conan’s father Robert E. Howard was dead.
I had been
writing “seriously” for 12 years. The
notebooks I rolled through and completed that one January now held pages with
yellowing edges. One drawer of the
filing cabinet hid a handful of short stories, most with chunks still waiting
to be written. I had even submitted a
couple. Years ago. However, if someone had asked me “Can you
show me some of your writing?” I would
have had a hard time finding something whole.
When was the last time you finished a story?
I don’t remember.
If I had
written just 100 words a day in those years, I would have had 4 novels or
roughly 100 short stories.
Plenty of time
remained though, even if I hadn’t felt like writing in the last month. (The periods that I didn’t write had grown longer.) I didn’t have as much time as I used to. I had been working 40 hours a week for a
number of years. I had a marriage and a
mortgage and much better excuses not to write.
Besides, if I
didn’t write anything today, at least I didn’t write anything bad.
If
you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin
to die, or act crazy, or both.
-- Ray
Bradbury
Zen in the Art of Writing
I was either
32 or 33 when I quit. Back in my early
twenties, I met a real estate agent who had once wanted to be a writer. “Don’t ever give up,” he said. “You’ll regret
it.” I thought: That’s not something I have to worry about. Why would I ever give up? When I did, I realized he was wrong. The word “hobby” no longer offended me. Walking away from writing no longer felt like
hollowing out my soul. It merely faded
into something I used to do.
Another
decade passed. I became a dad. I got a degree. I got hurt.
The house flooded. Mom was
gone. Then, so was Dad. And through all that I never had anything to
write about.
Remember my
best friend who is full of those quips that seem to stick in your skull? He picked up a new hobby in the last few years. He writes a blog called The Pen and the Sword
about his adventures as a Redneck Diplomat.
He’s working on a book too. He
always did run faster than me.
Oh how I wish
I could go back and talk with that 8-year-old child, who lived in the
countryside, bored, and decided one day to write a play about a monster. The 4 or 5 pages contained several sketches in
place of the words he could not spell. I
would have said, “Keep doing that. Every
day.”
I am 41
now. I wonder how old is too old to
start your life over?
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