The Writing Life

Long stretches of your work involve doing nothing. This is hard to explain to others, who think you're goofing off. Sometimes you are, but goofing off is part of the job. It may look like you're just sipping coffee, listening to music, and staring into the middle distance, but, in actuality, scenes play in your head. Characters speak, laugh, argue, die. Whole worlds appear and disappear. A pen moves across paper. The paper gets crumpled and thrown into a wastebasket. All this in your head. Your family worries about you. You've just been sitting there for hours....

A routine helps. You carve out this little chunk of life dedicated to sitting quietly and appearing to do nothing. Often, that's what gets done. Failure makes up a large component of what you do, but you have to keep trying and keep failing to make anything happen. When things are dead and nothing comes, it's blindingly frustrating, painfully boring. Your words are colorless, inert. Repulsive. You want to get up, walk away, do anything else. When it's completely hopeless, that's about all you can do, but you keep at it anyway. You hate what you're doing. You curse that you ever got into this thing. You're never going to have another idea, never going to write a decent word.

Then something happens, a glimmer...and suddenly it's four hours later, your hand's cramping, and you feel like you've been tripping your brains out as you flip through a dozen pages and wonder where they've come from.

The mail carrier is not your friend. Most of the time, he or she brings you envelopes you've typed and stamped yourself, and, though their contents may vary in form, language, and tone, they usually more or less say: no. You teach yourself not to care, but you do, and any writer who says they don't care about rejections is lying to you or themselves. You do learn to keep going; there's no choice, really. But once in a while, you'll let your guard down and let yourself hope--really hope. This movie begins to play about how this'll happen, and then that, and then another thing. How the doors are about to burst open and welcome you in.

Then the rejection comes, and it hurts the hell out of you. You have go sit by yourself, unable to be with people. Sometimes, frankly, you just fucking cry. A tiny part of you wants to die and be done with it all. Sometimes it takes a couple days to get over, sometimes a couple of weeks (occasionally, never...though the intensity lessens with time); and, all the while, you have to deal with the voices that tell you: you're wasting your time, you suck, it's pointless, nothing's ever going to be produced or published again. This is not a condition solely of beginners; your favorite author faces the same thing because there's always another level to rise to and, usuallly, fall short of.

Other times, the bounce comes, you shrug, move on. There's no telling how you'll feel. Sometimes, the big ones have no effect. Sometimes, the little ones snap your bones.

Perversely, you have to hope. When you drop an envelope in the mail or click "send" on an e-mail, there's one part of you urging "yes, yes, yes...this time" and another going "forget it, no way, never happen." The "yes" keeps you going; the "no" keeps you armored. The only thing that stops the strobing between poles is more writing, more submissions. Like planting a perennial, submitting a manuscript is an affirmation that there will be a tomorrow. And, like a perennial, those manuscripts have a way of coming back year after year. Submission means you're in the game; being in the game means, most of the time, you lose.

When it gets really bad, you'll go the files and take out old reviews, thumb through production photos, wonder if you're ever going to sit in the audience and see your work again or walk into a bookstore or library and see your name on a book's spine. When it gets really, really bad, it's time to take a break, pull weeds, play the guitar, do some art you don't have to be good at, see a movie, get together with friends and listen to problems refreshingly different from yours...if they are, because artists have a way of flocking together in solidarity. And, yeah, sometimes we pour a glass or flick a lighter or swallow a pill because, for a little while, it turns you into someone else--someone with a window between themselves and their self-inflicted suffering.

You learn humility, and not for show, at the same time you have to carry an ego sufficiently outsized to believe what you're doing matters and will somehow pay off. That people will actually come to see your play or buy your book, and that, incredibly, they'll like it...or at least remember it.

When success comes, it's surreal. You disconnect, not quite believing it's happening. And, in a strange way, you don't because you still have to protect yourself, and, when it's over, you realize you've missed part of the experience due to your wariness.

Truth? It's gets incredibly dark sometimes. Grim. Your own personal cloud follows you, and rains continually while the rest of the world basks in sun. On the other hand, you're one of the luckiest people in the world, and you can't imagine what it's like for everyone else.

In other words, you're a complete lunatic: a writer.