Writing

Writing is not going well. You have been paid an advance of $45,000 for your next novel, whatever it is. This fee was negotiated on your behalf by your literary agent based on the strength of your previous three books—your second book won a PEN America award, and both your second and third books were shortlisted for the National Book Award. You are proud of the second book; the winner that year was an old friend from a writer’s workshop, which made it both easier and harder to lose. You were sincerely pleased and appropriately jealous. 

The second time you were nominated, your third book, you were mortified. You were relieved to lose. Your third book is a sham. Producing it was a march through the mud. It is not good work, despite the plaudits. That it received critical praise says more about the nature of book reviews than it does about the quality of the book. It sucks. You are afraid to even flip through the extra author copies you have, resenting it in particular because it marked the collapse of a notion you’d acquired: that you were a true writer now, that you’d put in the work.

The impasse you are at now is an order of magnitude worse than what you felt during the writing process for book number three. You’re supposed to send over a draft in three weeks’ time and you have nothing you’d stand by. You are panicking.

You’ve been removing distractions from your writing space like an elimination diet. You write, or attempt to write, in the upstairs guest room, previously your eldest child’s bedroom. You bought a desk, an old hardwood. A real writer’s desk. You purchased a swivel chair with well-reviewed ergonomic support. You ordered the noise-canceling headphones you’ve seen on the heads of industrious people on planes and removed all the art from the walls.

You installed a Chrome extension that allowed you to block yourself from certain distracting websites: social media, games, email, news, pornography. This worked for a period, but soon enough, if you had the urge to browse you would open Firefox instead. So, you uninstalled Firefox. A few days later, you began turning off the Chrome extension. You were too embarrassed to ask your wife to password protect it. 

You began unplugging the router before you entered the room to write. This worked some, until you turned to television. So, you moved the television to the basement. Without internet or TV, you did start typing more, nothing good, all shit, but more. After a week of that, you found yourself lying down on the bed and closing your eyes to think, which helped you come up with better ideas that were not shit, but it was too easy to get comfortable, so you stripped the sheets and pillows.

You tried writing on a yellow legal pad only to discover that you cannot write by hand. This was particularly upsetting. You feel like real writers—writers that the ovine book reviewers would call “your peers” but who are actually vastly more talented than you—could use pen and paper if they needed, and you suspect that most of them still use pen and paper to write first drafts, maybe even their second drafts, too. You wish you went through more drafts, but that’s not the problem you’re having now. The problem now is that 90 percent of the time you cannot get yourself to write, and when you can, everything you write is stillborn on the page, as if written by a machine who learned the rhythms and patterns of human story but who isn’t human on the inside, not really. 

You’ll begin sketching out a character, a paragraph of description, no plot, just who they are and what they are like. But after a page or so, you are passionately bored of them. Sometimes you are picturing someone from your life, like your wife’s personal assistant Emily, but they’re too specific—the idea doesn’t transform from the person you know into something believable but free to be written for. Or, you’ll find a character who lives and breathes, like a lonely man who’s worried about a smell in his apartment and is thinking about quitting his job, moving to California and hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. But then you’ll go to write a scene and you can’t find a voice for them at all, there’s nothing ticking in the scene, no reason to keep on, and so it dies. Or you’ll begin with a place, a location, a circumstance, but after much limning it’s simply a persona-less void: a train station with no passengers of note, or a hospital waiting room filled with, “patients and family.”  

Or, you’ll read over something you gave up on, like the three thousand words about some utility workers down in a drainage grate looking for a woman’s engagement ring, all because she was pretty and/or the daughter of someone important, and you’ll think: this is the stupidest goddamn thing I’ve ever read. The logistics of how the workers were contracted to the task are suspect, and the picture you’ve painted of the woman makes it seem like you have no insight into how women think or feel. Six months ago, there was a Twitter thread about this very topic—about the women in your books—and you made the horrible mistake of reading it. Maybe there’s a reason that all the women in your stops and starts seem to be on dates or asking for the help of men or talking about men or are themselves more masculine in their traits. Why are none of them just women, there, undeniable?

Maybe you have the yips. Can that happen to writers?

You are tempted to send your editor the best thing you have, a story about two dads watching a teenage girls’ basketball game, but you know that the story will not expand into a novel, and also that it is complete shit, just less complete shit than the other things you’ve written. Maybe you can buy some time by submitting something you have no intention of developing and in the interim you’ll come up with something better?

Eighty thousand words of garbage so far, sometimes literal free association garbage. It’s all in a single document on your computer labeled “Terrible writing—DO NOT publish in the event of an untimely demise” which is both a joke and not. Something was published recently by a deceased writer that made your skin crawl. And that’s a good writer, not a hack like you. You know you’re capable of writing well. You think your second novel is the kind of book that might be dissected in an English class someday, a sturdy book with winning characterization and an earnest story. The thing just fell out of you. You sat next to a man on a flight back from LA, and he told you a story about the church group he used to belong to, and the people lit up in your mind.

Your eyes hurt. You have headaches from using the computer all day long. You’ve got the screen on its dimmest setting and the computer on permanent night mode.

The most pathetic part is each night you go to bed thinking that tomorrow it will all be different. You’ll wake up and start writing before you even have the urge to procrastinate. Before you even look at your phone, you’ll start writing. You’ll get into the writing room and start writing and you won’t stop writing until you have at least four, five thousand words. And then you’ll have earned your reward: a short break, some breakfast, and a quick click around the web. 

But the next day is the same. You’re sidetracked by something, a desire for a protein shake that you want to make from scratch, necessitating a trip to IGA for ingredients, promising yourself you’ll write when you get back. But when you return, you neglect to unplug the router because your wife is still home, and you leave it on past her departure, reading Times articles. Just this one final article, and then you’ll start. You’ll click around until 12:30 p.m. and then you’ll begin. And by 12:45 p.m., you think, okay, 1:00 p.m. That’s when you’ll start.

Or you’ll you have agreed to lunch with a friend, and you’ll mentally scratch out the morning hours, 9:45 a.m. to 11:30 a.m., not enough time to really dig in or get productive, you’ll think, knowing that you’re procrastinating, knowing as you’re doing it but unable to stop or even subvocalize the truth. Once you cede the morning to endless putzing (but in the afternoon you’ll write!) you find yourself relieved to peck at this or that until a wave of anxiety about your entire career washes over you. So, you’ll do something “productive” for your writing that isn’t actually sitting down and writing, like tidying up your work space so that when you come back from lunch you can jump right in and you’ll still have plenty of time to write before your daughter gets home. Or you’ll make a list of character traits and a list of locations and draw crisscrossing lines from one column to the next and swear to yourself, “I’ll write one of these, no matter what.” Or you’ll write out your itinerary for the afternoon in exacting detail. As you’re doing this you both feel like it might actually be different this afternoon while also knowing that you are lying to yourself, and then you’ll be out at lunch with the friend, maybe an aspiring writer themselves who asks you questions about how you write when you’re not feeling it, and you cannot believe that you’re sitting there saying things like, “Getting something down, anything, is better than nothing,” like you haven’t spent months torturing yourself in the solitary confinement of your own expectations.

But those were other days. Now is today. Tonight. Your wife and younger daughter are visiting your mother-in-law, gone all night. And you really do write better at night.

You are sitting at your desk with the window open. It’s allowing a cool breeze into the room. You lean back in the comfy chair and stare out the window into the backyard. You are going to write.

You page break and close your eyes. It helps with the headaches. You are technically not supposed to take any NSAIDs, so says your doctor. “Any doctor will tell you not to take them…” he said. They cause ulcers or something, but despite that, you’ve been taking Advil regularly. Tylenol does nothing for you, you believe. You haven’t been drinking coffee which might help, and you’re not taking them on an empty stomach, so you think you’re in the clear.

You’re here. You’re focused. You are ready to write. You did have coffee today, actually, but it’s alright because you’re hoping to stay up late writing. It’s one of those perfect nights for a sweater. The radiator by the desk balances things out with a pleasant hiss. You like that the house is old and has radiators. You’ve always loved them.

Okay. You close your eyes so that you can really picture it, the thing you’re about to write, to really see whatever it is. You remind yourself the characters don’t know they’re fiction. They don’t know they don’t exist; they are living their lives as best they can.

It’s dark out. Maybe 10:30 pm. You don’t want to check. The computer screen is dim, but you know it will come alive when you go to type.

You’re here, you’re ready. The lights are off. You’re going to find an idea that lives. Really see where it goes. The breeze is playing nicely on your face. You’ve got your garbage document up, a new page loaded. You close your eyes again.

You see a bar. You’ve already written a novel that begins in a hotel bar. You can’t have four books, two of which begin in bars.

You see a hiking trail. It’s the one you and your wife hiked a week ago with your daughter. You’re picturing the three of you walking along. The woods are dense. It’s fall, too. The plants are…well, it’s difficult to describe the woods. You either have to know the names of all the plants, or you look them up, and even if you look them up, why would most readers know the difference between brush sage and sorrel fern. Writers who hyper-classified every plant strike you as pretentious. Or maybe just distant from you personally, two lifetimes away. You could describe them as sticks and branches, leaves and twigs, but then no one’s picturing much of anything. You could focus on the people? All you can picture is the back of your wife’s head on the trail in front of you. Maybe you’ll return to this.

You see an escalator. You’re descending. It’s a long, long escalator. You know somehow that it is deep underground, like in D.C. or Seoul. There’s something about the air, the temperature or the pressure. You see the back of a man’s head in front of you on the escalator. He’s a bigger guy. He’s standing on the escalator. His feet are sore. He’s got more weight than his body is built to carry. His thighs chafe and his feet hurt. But his bones and muscles, they’re strong. Strong from carrying all the weight. He’s not a sad guy, is he? Maybe he is, but he’s not a pathetic guy. He’s not a guy who sits on his computer all day like you. He’s heading to the subway, obviously. Maybe he’s going to Georgetown. He’s a professor. He’s a linguistics professor. He’s passionate, but not nerdy. He has glasses and a polo shirt and professional slacks.

He’s a good professor. People like his classes. No—they love them. He is entertaining. And he loves linguistics. He fell in love with it as a kid, at a younger age than you’d expect. That’s why he’s such a good professor, because he came to the material at an age where he had wonder, play, excitement. Studying words and language excites him. It connects him to a time in his life when everything was possible. He is respected by his students. He has made peace with the components his life is missing, and he’s filled up by what he does have: a passion, and a platform to excite others in that passion.

But what does he do now? In class? Teaching. You can read up on linguistics. Or maybe he’s home, alone. In your mind, you’re the one behind him. And you can’t see his face, though you know what it will look like. He’ll have a neatly trimmed goatee. He’ll put care into the shaving and the trimming. Maybe that’s the scene? Him at home, shaving, his routine, the specificity of it. Who does he talk to in his life? Who is important to him? Who matters to him, who does he care about? You believe him on the escalator. More interesting than the woods for sure, but not quite there.

You open your eyes and calligraphy the touchpad to get the screen back on. 

You need to really follow whatever you see until it’s something. You lie down on the sheetless bed and close your eyes.

You see an office. There’s a laptop set up on the desk. There’s a little hitch to hook it up to a larger monitor. On the wall behind the desk, a Rothko. Or more accurately, a poster of a Rothko. You see a woman working at the desk. But she’s not a stereotype. She’s a real woman, there, existing, believable.

She’s sad. She’s looking at something on her phone. It’s a video of something. It’s a video of her nephew. From Instagram. It’s her sister’s Instagram feed. The kid has been taking steps for three months and he’s still tottery. He’s laughing and throwing a ball down. Her brother-in-law hands him the ball and he throws it down right away, laughs with unpolluted joy. She’s tearing up but not making any crying noises. She’s not crumpling up her face, either. The video keeps finishing but she plays it again and again, the same way the kid never tires of throwing the ball. She doesn’t have kids. She feels those pangs and then they fade. It’s a craving. She’s largely happy. Mostly she’s sad that she hasn’t seen her nephew since the holidays and he’s grown so much already. That’s why she’s tearing up. But there’s doubt, maybe.

You see her put her phone away, the woman. She checks her email. She uses Microsoft Outlook. Her desk is professional and neat. Maybe this office is one of those offices by the highway on cement stilts, where everyone parks underneath the building on the ground level. There must be a better way to describe that. She looks at the time in the corner of her screen. You see her stand up and walk out of the room and down the hallway. She is going to do something, possibly something important. Ask for a raise? Cheat on her significant other? Confront a coworker? Steal something? These are all terrible ideas. It’s too boring to have her go down the hall to the snack area, searching around the chip drawer for sour cream and onion. You see she is walking with purpose. Maybe she is just getting chips. Maybe the chips are important in a symbolic way. Maybe it’s a small comfort. Maybe her moment of sadness has weakened her ability to not get Baked Lays.

You see a bedroom. Two bunk beds. You see the same woman from the office, but she’s a different person. This woman is married and has two children. They are twin boys, seven or eight. They have bunk beds and the comforters have comets on them. The top bunk isn’t too high, about the height of her head when standing. She’s been sitting in a child’s chair next to the beds reading a story. There’s a book on the floor, The Hobbit. The one in the lower bunk is asleep. Even though they’re identical twins, he is always falling asleep first. She and her husband—no, her wife—have had conversations about whether their personalities will change over time because of the extra sleep that Jaylen is getting every night. They both have cute pouty faces. Jason is still awake, and she’s up by his top bunk whispering to him. He wants her to keep reading The Hobbit, but she won’t do it without Jaylen. She is worried about hurting his feelings. Neither likes to be left out. But she wants Jason to feel taken care of, too. She doesn’t want him to feel bad for being engrossed in the story. 

So, she’s up at his bed, whispering to him. She’s telling him something, but you can’t hear her from over by the door. You want to get closer, but you don’t want to wake Jaylen. There are posters on the wall of soccer players you’ve never heard of. You’re going inch by inch along the soft clean carpet. You know there’s old wood underneath that could squeak.

You’re close enough to hear her now. She’s whispering to Jason. Her voice is soothing, steady.

She’s saying, “For a long time, the earth was fiery. Volcanoes and ash and asteroid strikes. Inhospitable to any living thing. No oxygen, no life. It was this way far longer than anyone could imagine. Over time, the lava cooled to rock. The ash fell to the ground. Water pooled and held together in bodies, bodies of water. The planet grew calm. The ground was barren, but around the mass of land formed a vast ocean, empty. The water wasn’t as salty as it is now. And something happened—no one yet knows what. A lighting strike, maybe. A charge of electricity that brought molecules together. Or something more spiritual, impossible to explain. It created a cell. One lonely cell with no one else around in the whole universe maybe. And the cell propagated itself. It replicated. And slowly, there were more. And somewhere in there, two cells worked together to stay alive, and they fared better than the lonely cells. And they propagated. Millions of years passed. The ocean began to teem with life. Eyes and gills and fins. Little legs to scuttle around on. Mouths of all different shapes and sizes. The output of that life washed up onto shore. An alga learned to take in sunlight, and from there, plants grew. They moved onto the land and flourished. One day, some brave little mudskipper was born with deformed gills that allowed her to take in some of the oxygen from the air, too. That little mudskipper could spend extra time on the shore where there was nothing at all to harm her. And that little mudskipper lived a long time, a lot longer than most mudskippers would, swimming in the shallows with the predators, and she had a big mudskipper family, and they could all skip about on the shore. Slowly, generation by generation, life on land developed, and the creatures evolved to eat the plants, and the plants spread through the wind and the defecation of the animals, and they grew. They changed. Some of the animals grew to eat the other animals. Some became terrifying lizards. Others became humble mice. Some took to the trees for protection. They ate fruit, grew smart. When the lizards left, they came down and learned to communicate, to invent. To write. After millions and millions and millions and millions of generations, a direct line of offspring from you to me, to my parents and their parents, to their parents and so forth, all the way back to that little mudskipper, all the way back to that first cell.”

She stops whispering. You can hear Jason breathing steadily, asleep. She turns around and looks at you. She really is beautiful. She reaches for the sash of her robe and undoes it. She’s looking at you with hunger. You want her, and she wants you, too. 

“Boo,” she says.

You wake up with a jolt. You are shivering on the bed with no sheets. You look at the clock. It’s 4:15 a.m. You’ve got this defecatory urge to get the idea out of your mind before you can forget it. It is alive. 

You stumble in the dark over to the table and write what you can remember on the yellow legal pad, white in the darkness. You shut the window and fall onto the bed, back into sleep almost immediately.

And then you wake up again, still in all your clothes on the sheetless bed, and the room is full of light. Your mouth tastes awful. Your wife and daughter will be back in a half hour. She has a soccer tournament this afternoon.

Walking towards the door, you see the yellow pad and you remember with rising excitement that you had a dream, a dream about something alive and present and vibrating and there and you wrote it down. You faintly remember waking and writing. You remember the excitement and hunger for an idea that preserves you. You pick up the pad.

Your handwriting is almost impossible to read. You can make out words or phrases here and there. “Same woman,” you wrote and underlined, but you can’t read what’s above it. Underneath that, you wrote, “The Hobbit,” in all caps. 

That’s already a book, you idiot. That’s already a book. 

What the hell are you going to do?