You have to be desperate in order to break away from the
comfort zone of conventional success, whatever that term, “success” might mean
to you at a given time.
Desperate may also earn quotation marks, indicating any
number of ironies, not the least of which is an inner drive to break from the
income from the relative ease of writing to formula in favor of a venture out
into the unknown, where you are in the sudden position of no immediate income
stream plus a blank computer screen, which is to say no immediate project which
will become the vehicle from your departure from the comfort zone.
Here’s what’s wrong with that picture: The projects that were bringing in the income
stream were neither inspirations, visits from the Muse, or social/moral issues
about which you felt a burning passion.
They were instead results of a long time learning some of the many
elements that comprise story. You made
the mistake of thinking you would work on these until an inspiration came
along.
You have since learned that inspirations are things persons
who do not write—or paint or act or photograph or compose—visualize as
arriving, in neat packages; say packages such as the distinctive blue Tiffany
box.
Any of the pulp things you sent off, month after month, had
the potential for what you believed you longed to write but were too frightened
to attempt. So instead, you made a few
desultory starts on “literature,” a term that deserves the quotation marks here
because you’d made it inaccessible, not real story, and in the bargain, you’d
invested it with a kind of scary surface that, once touched, would spoil. Almost without variation, you cannibalized
these intermittent bouts of literature, injected them with story, sent them
off, and began the next without realizing what you were doing, which was making
yourself desperate in a way that frightened you so severely that you were
afraid to touch fiction for a few years and had to go back into editing to seek
another word rendered in quotes, “refuge.”
By relying on something you could do well, you didn’t have
to think about fiction until it caught up with you, made you desperate without
the quotation marks, which more or less proves your point here: You have to be desperate to tell stories as
opposed to being in despair that you are not able to write stories and,
perforce, must “settle” for nonfiction.
You need to be so desperate that you read and write beyond
the notion of commercial success, which is a term that should also go into
quotation marks because of recent experiences you’ve had as an editor and a
reader, discovering works in which you had no hand or interest, works that have
been huge commercial successes.
Much as you would still like to have an occasional
commercial success, you would rather have a personal success first, meaning
you’d like to have produced something you did not think you could bring off at
first and are now quite pleased you persisted with it.
Your reading and your writing have the desperate need to
focus on dramatic rather than commercial success. You wonder how a scene has been made to pay
off. Did you learn something from
reading that scene that you can carry over into the writing of your own?
Without variation, the answer comes to you: push the dialogue, push the characters,
enhance the circumstances to the point where you are no longer using your tools
with an assured sense of result. Push
your concepts by giving them steroidal urgency and need. As you read, question yourself: Did the inner forces—inner doubts and
arguments—trump the outer ones, or was the situation the exact reverse? In that calculus, of which elements were you
the most aware—inner or outer? Do you
see a pattern you can exploit with your own people, your own circumstances,
your own conflicting moral choices?
When persons you know tell you they read for enjoyment, do
you think they put quotation marks around the word enjoyment? Do you think they enjoy seeing characters
sweat out problems they doubt they can handle?
Is there an unspoken layer of sadism in you when you read for enjoyment
with enjoyment in quotation marks?
All this has to be thought out with care in the hours when
you are away from your work stations, the one at home in front of your large
screen, the one at Peet’s where you use a lined note pad and swill away at
Espresso Forte lattes. Is your sudden
spending even more time at Café Luna because of the new barista or because it
is overall a more conducive work area?
The hours when you are not working on reading or writing are
important in the sense of being a significant entryway into your inner
life. In some ways, your attitude toward
your inner life is similar to your attitude about a story in early draft; you
are not comfortable with sharing, even though, at the proper time, sharing,
conversation, close arguments with persons you admire, find their way into the
attitudes and conflicts in your stories and the nonfiction book you’re working
at.
When Bettina asks you what you’re working on, it is one
thing to say, an essay, a review, a story.
She would think you quite daft were you to say you were working on your
inner life. Of course, you are working
on daftness as well as your inner life, your hypothesis being that it is quite
better to be daft than a curmudgeon. In
fact, now that you think about it,
You resort to daftness and lunacy and humor as anodynes to
the prickly darkness of the curmudgeon.
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