novelist, essayist, teacher
The other day a young woman asked me what I did for a living. What an interesting question. If I had to live off the money I make from writing, I’d be living in a garden shed. On the other hand, it is through writing that I live. So, in a very real sense, when I answer that question by saying, “I write for a living” I am telling a far deeper truth.
Then I asked her if she was a reader. “Oh, yes,” she replied.
“And what sort of books do you like?”
A long time ago, I was standing in my kitchen with my friend, Michael. Michael a big Guyanese guy with an easy smile and a laugh to fit his size, asked me if I had a piece of gum. I said I did and handed him one, but forgot to mention it was a new sort of gum, and with a liquid center. Before I could warn him, he bit down. The expression on his face was of instant horror and disgust, as though he’d just bitten into a nice juicy cockroach. When my laughter subsided, I explained, and happily he found the event funny as well.
This week a friend called me, her tone a bit tightly-wound, and asked if I had a few minutes to talk. My friend is a writer, someone I’ve met only recently, and she’s just published her first book. It’s done pretty well. A few nice reviews, a bit of attention. She should be happy. But she didn’t sound happy.
“Sure,” I said. “What’s up?”
“I feel like an idiot.”
“You’re not an idiot. What happened?”
“I just got my first royalty statement.” She groaned. “I’m an idiot. I thought I’d get royalties. I thought I’d get some money.”
Perhaps these seven sages are searching for the next bestseller.
Before I published, I had this fantasy that somewhere, perhaps on the top floor of a glittering skyscraper in New York City, at the end of a long corridor lined with books and the portraits of famous writers, was a room in which stood a heavy oak table surrounded by high-backed leather chairs. In these chairs sat The People Who Knew Literature. Oh, how I believed in them. From the fetid pile of manuscripts (some stained with mysterious rusty-red marks, others with tear-blurred ink) these sages picked out sparkling gems, sure to become classics. They discerned the wheat amongst the chaff, the figure inherent in the uncut granite, the gleam of the diamond in the lump of coal.
A couple of nights ago I watched the tail end of a television show about a serial killer. In this episode the serial killer in question was a goth rock star who had lost himself in his stage persona. At the end of the show a woman’s voice-over quotes Cyril Connolly:
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than write for the public and have no self.
That struck a chord with me, both as a writer and as someone dedicated to sobriety and walking a spiritual path.
There comes a time when every writer wants to give up, to crumple those pages into tight little balls and toss ‘em in the basket, or better yet — burn ‘em. In fact, when I’m teaching I often tell students this in the first class, so they won’t be blindsided when it happens to them.
If you happen to be feeling just now like it’s hopeless, like you should just give up those silly dreams of being a Real Writer and get back to something more sensible and less emotionally draining like say, alligator wrestling or land mine detection… You’re not alone. Happens to all of us. Yes, even the Published (snort) Author!
I recently heard of an internationally acclaimed author whose work I admire IMMENSELY, having his newly finished novel turned down. (And no, I’m not going to name names.) I don’t know why the book was turned down, although I can’t imagine it was because it wasn’t well written. This man is simply incapable of writing a bad sentence. I’ve been thinking of him a lot. You can imagine the pain of working so hard for so many years to develop a readership; how you might deservedly feel, after lots of praise and attention and prizes and so forth, that you’ve earned the right to keep on publishing, and then…it stops; you’re silenced. Agony. I pray he’ll find the inner resources to come back from this, to keep the faith, to write again, but who knows. A blow like that can silence you forever. It can send you into depression’s bottomless pit; it can break you.
