Now that my Internet-holiday weekend — really a function of Baby than me not wanting to go online — I thought I would take up Fringes‘ permission to whine as loudly and pointlessly as my son. Who was doing said whining at 3 a.m. last night. And the night before.
In the penultimate shot of Martin Scorcese’s "Goodfellas," Ray Liotta, as mobster-turned-informant Henry Hill, is picking up a newspaper from the porch of his ranch-style house, barefoot and wearing a bathrobe. Hill is in witness protection. He’s living in an anonymous suburb with brick bungaloes and station wagons with wood paneling in the driveway.
His worst fears have come to pass. Not that he ratted out his Mafia cohorts, or that he had to serve time, or even that he got caught. It’s that he’s just another nobody in the ‘burbs.
"I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook," he says.
Though I am not going to testify in a Gotti trial and have no plans to enter witness protection, Wife and I are considering a move to the suburbs, as we have decided that our carbon footprint was not large enough. It’s a situation both Wife and I once swore would never happen. I’ve got a good but unglamorous job, a mortgage, and a one-year-old boy. Though I lack a car, once we trek to suburbia, that will inevitably follow. So will a slow death.
When I read other blogs, it occurs to me how little of the literary life I am living. I’m not writing fiction, attending readings, going to conferences and workshops, or following the latest-and-greatest in literature. Everything seems subservient to Baby, or my job, or cleaning the apartment after months of bed bug hell.
But it’s not like before Baby blessed us with his nocturnal yelps that I was tearing up the literary landscape. My novel was stuck in agent-editory purgatory; my attempts to write a non-fiction book were stalled on the first page; and my 10,000-line epic poem in Dutch about the migrating habits of Canadian geese…oh, never mind.
Oh, I know, there are plenty of people (some who are reading this) living in a suburb and who are writers, probably more productive than I am, and probably a lot more talented as well. It’s not that I want to castigate suburban living, but in my stilted, myopic worldview, it’s a surrender to a way of life I though I’d never live.
I live in the red one
I might as well face the truth: I’m 43, have high cholesterol, two bad knees and one bad shoulder, and the doctor is telling me to lose 15 pounds. I don’t have the time nor the energy to do these "literary" things (though I do, curiously, have time to write this blog and comment on others’ blogs). When I was much younger, like 23 or so, I imagined that by this age, I’d be established as a novelist (stop laughing). Not only would I have time to live the literary life, it would be my life.
But then, as I was sitting here, complaining in my head, I came to a stark and sudden realization. Do I write because I enjoy writing, or am I writing so that I can live a certain way, or to be a certain person?
It’s not an academic question. Great art has been forged by the desire to seduce, to flatter, to become famous, to gain riches. That the motives may seem skewered does not make it any less artistic. In fact, there are those who argue that is the main reason we create, to attain this intangible thing called "status."
Or, put another way, does one want to be a Writer, or do the things that writers do?
Right now, I’d settle for some sleep. Writers are allowed to sleep, I believe. It’s in the contract.
Excellent post. See what getting out the whine does for your complexion?
I think you need to sleep. A lot.
Seriously, the question do I write because I love to write or because I long to be the person living the writer’s life is one that I’ve thought. And, because I don’t want to live a literary life, dislike being the center of attention, and am decidedly uncool, I can safely say I write because I like to. The downside is that my ambition isn’t that high, and I lack any motivation to actually the several WIPs done, edited, subbed out…
I write because I can’t imagine the alternative.
Of course, a paying gig would be nice as well.
I’m a writer living in suburbia and my house IS the red one. My dream is to move downtown once the kiddos are grown and gone. I consider this a temporary exile.
I’ve lost track of the times I’ve slowed in front of my neighbor’s house thinking, “Now which one is mine again?”
First things first, try to get together a group of writers with kids. You can make playdates when Book Junior gets a little bigger and you will still be able to keep all the advantages of living in an urban enviroment.
Second, quit it with the “age” excuse. Didn’t McSweeney’s sign some former screenwriter who is in his eighties? Your age shouldn’t matter if your work stands up on its own.
Third, embrace your demons, make them your own and then, own them. Phillip K. got it together enough to get some good stuff down and where would King be without the shining.
Fourth, you don’t need sleep, you just need enough time to jot out a basic outline on a cocktail napkin.
“Or, put another way, does one want to be a Writer, or do the things that writers do?”
It’s part of your nature, it’s in you. Buckle down and get to it.
You’ve hit the nail on the proverbially painful head here Bookfraud. Writing, producing fiction, editing and revising, plus doing the awful administrative stuff like querying and contacting journals and agents is all really hard work. And time-consuming. And despite a few lucky devils, writers are asked to do this in addition to the day job or night job or combination thereof that puts food on the table and gives us a place to live. So you kinda have to love it enough to do it on top of everything else. And sometimes we don’t. Sometimes it seems like too much. Sometimes it IS too much. So we take a break, we sit back and then we start to feel really really guilty. Which produces the effect I’m detecting in this post.
Here’s a dumb suggestion - feel free to throw it out the window of your new suburban home - try writing one sentence a day. Just one. Or if you feel like it, sit down for 10 minutes and see how many sentences you can get out. Sometimes little stuff like this can get you out of the “I’m a loser for hating the thought of writing right now but I also hate myself for not writing right now” mood.
Even when I’m at my most depressed, when my Amazon numbers are horrific and 3 people show up at a signing, when my agent tells me yet another editor passed on a new manuscript, I still want to tell stories. I’m obviously a masochist, aka, writer.
Dear Bookfraud,
Look on the bright side–you have one great shoulder!
I am wondering if you would address one of the Great Mysteries of Life, namely: How come people who are not actually writers (nonwriters) can sit down and churn out a book in six months, whereas actual writers labor and agonize and sweat and revise and still have no book in say, five years? I don’t get it.
I thought this a perfectly lovely essay about the writing life. Thank you.
Dear BF, When you are old, as we are, and have only one shoulder, as you do, you write to write, because you are incapable of “living the writer’s life” which, last time I looked, required two shoulders, two knees, and good clean, non-gunked up blood. Move to the suburbs, dude. It’s nice there. You can park places. It might lower the volume in your life, not to mention your blood pressure and cholesterol (however that word is spelled). You’ll be able to hear yourself well enough to write some stuff you like. xo, Lily
For whatever it’s worth, I think I know you feel: and I’m not 43 with a one-year-old baby. Or a spouse.
But that whole not having quality writing time thing? Or not being as far along as I’d planned? And struggling with my motivation…
Those things… I get.
Ah, mid-life crisis?
u got good taste in music folk