So was entitled the literary collection of my 12th-grade Creative Writing class. The name represents the brooding fervor of youth, when we had the ability to bat off all distractions and focus on the task-at-hand when we chose to. People always say our parents get smarter as we get older, “youth is wasted on the young,” other adages that glorify the dissipation of our dreams. But I find myself in a sweet spot now where I’m beyond wishing for childhood and wise enough to feel the effects of passing time. And so I begin to see the plots of un-contrived wisdom in my younger years.
Writers share many problems, but most of them are different. My author friends run the gamut from newly-married, childless, living the neo-Bohemian life, trying to make that MFA work for them, to married-several-years with kids and living that suburban dream we all swore against, to long-married (10+ years of marriage is getting scarce for Gen X-ers like me) and toiling in the fields of all those “Writer’s Digest” feature success stories where it’s some mom in corporate management who found pre-dawn blocks of time for 12 years, monastically staving off little ones and work e-mails and the recycling truck to power through a best-seller. More power to them. I couldn’t do it. I don’t check e-mail until after sunrise and I listen for Waste Management on Fridays at 7.
I don’t even have a “thing.” Bestselling authors, as it turns out, don’t live enchanted lives. They put their pants on one leg at a time like everyone else, but the difference is, once their pants are on, they make best-selling novels (if you didn’t catch the reference, you definitely need more cowbell). I admire Stephen King because he’s a real dude who started being persistent with his goals when he was young and after the quintessential stack of rejection slips impaled on the metal spear at his desk, he started selling books. He puts his family first, he makes a pot of tea at 9 every morning and writes 10 pages, every day of his life, except his birthday, according to King in his book On Writing, which is about…
If I have a thing, it’s simply choosing to be a writer or not within a 10-20 second period of every day – when the alarm goes off at 5:30 a.m. I get my coffee not out of precious routine but because someone’s going to get hurt if I don’t. I sit in my uncomfortable recliner and put on my grandma’s old blanket because it’s there, and I’m cold. I write 2 feet from my gun cabinet because that’s the only place it will fit, although if I ever become a best-selling author I can lie and say that it had significant meaning. Isn’t it pretty to think so.
Every writer wants some sort of community. Writing groups (I’m not part of one but I guess I should be), camaraderie a la Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs milling around some broken-down shack where they do drugs and muse about the drifter’s plight. Forum threads where we say things like “my routine is sitting in my recliner with my grandma’s blanket.” But I wrote way more per day when I was 16. I’ve got volumes of journals ranging from the severely narcissistic to ones I actually TITLED, like “Thoughts and Ponderings on Existence and its Meaning” or something that was destined to be cool. But now that I’ve simmered down and taken a look at life, the path to being a successful writer comes down to doing this, for me: write words on a page. If you know you have a story to tell, put it down. Put it down for as long as you can for one day, and when you can’t do it anymore, come back and do it the next day. Physically force yourself to go to your place, address your pen or keyboard, and make the white page black.
It’s a long time now from “Shut Up and Write Something,” I have to do more than shut up. I have to get up. I have to step up. And I have to keep that momentum that I know I have, despite vocations, appointments, domestics and that false thing I’ve picked up since being 16 years old, impossibility.
