On The Plains of Hesitation

I've got maybe fifteen pages left on my second draft of the novel. It'll be done by tomorrow, and possibly even by the time I go to bed (around three tomorrow morning). I'm presently taking a break from composing, officially to rest my brain and have a coffee, but actually because I want to hold onto this fantastic sensation as long as I can.

I often think that most people are unaware of what a struggle it is to write a book-length work of fiction. I mean, don't get me wrong; I've never held to the whole "writing is just as hard as laying bricks" school of thought (this idea almost exclusively pushed by writers trying to convince others that they aren't panty-waisted logothetes). It's not difficult to accomplish so much as it's easy to not accomplish. Dark whispers come to you as you write and tell you why you should just stop writing. You're working too hard. You're pushing yourself too hard. You're losing touch with your friends and family. You need to focus on work/school/whatever. And worst of all: it is not and will never be good enough.

Most people quit. I have several times. And once you put it down, it's agonizing to pick it up again.

Throughout the time since I left home, I have often been sitting in a coffee shop, smoking and caffeinating and whatnot, when a friend of mine comes over and wants to introduce me to someone. Sometimes it's a woman, but it's usually a man. He's often disheveled, and usually conforms neatly to a common writer stereotype in their style of dress (sport coats are probably most popular, followed by the "rebel writer" dudes in black leather jackets). As the guy looks me over with a pompous sneer, my breathless friend introduces him and adds: "He's writing a novel."

I have never, ever seen one of these chaps actually writing before. I've never heard of one of them actually completing a novel, or a shorter work for that matter. Gradually it becomes clear that "I'm writing a novel" is not so much a promise of results for them, but rather, an impressive thing to say to naive women.

I have met literally dozens of people who were "writing a novel."

I have never met anyone who actually FINISHED a novel.

I'm gonna go write. I'm so very close to the peak.

So Very Close

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"Will You Read My Writing?"

Short Answer: Nope.

Long Answer: My buddies, like I've mentioned before, have this charming habit of introducing me as a "writer." It would probably be more accurate, at this point in my life, to describe me as "a cubicle-dweller who often skips work to write," but they extend me this privilege, and I do appreciate it.

Unfortunately, there exists a downside to this. I'll be sitting in this here coffeeshop, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and typing furiously, and there'll be a tap on my shoulder. I'll look up, and there will be some mopey teenager with a notebook in his hand, brushing the emo mop out of his eyes as he says, trying to be casual: hey-could-you-just-read-this-thing-I-wrote-it's-not-very-good-but-you-know-whatever.

First of all, folks, let's get something straight. I write fiction. I am not a journalist. I am not a poet. And I am definitely not your goddamn psychiatrist. This last one is especially important. To date, not one person has approached me in the coffeeshop with a piece of actual fiction and asked me to read it.

Rather, the kid in question always hands me a notebook in which he has scribbled the endless, intractable problems which have plagued his young and tragic life. Popular topics include My Mom Being a Bitch, School Being Stupid, Girls Being Mean To Me, and of course, How Hard It Is To Be a Teenager.

First of all: I know it's hard to be a teenager. I used to be one. Don't make me relive that melodramatic crap, okay?

Second of all: Personal experience can and does make for fine writing material. However, if it's not at least set up like fiction - i.e. dialogue with description of surroundings and sometimes the character's thoughts - then it's really just pointless exposition. Nobody wants to read four chicken-scratched pages of you whining about some girl who won't fuck you.

"But John," you say. "Does that mean that you WILL read my writing if it's honest-to-Mithra fiction?"

Here we wade into deeper waters. The answer: maybe.

The problem here is that most people, regardless of what they may claim, cannot take a little criticism without getting bitchy. People naturally overestimate the quality of their writing. This tendency actually seems to be strongest in those who haven't been writing very long, which means the bitchiest primadonna writers are almost always the ones who need the most work. You will have to forgive me if I don't want to give criticism to some angsty kid who won't do anything with it, and who will call me an asshole in the bargain.

So. If I've known you for a while, and you give off an air of genuine concern for the quality of your writing, and I really, REALLY think you'll listen to what I say, then hey, I might read your writing. Otherwise, don't even ask. I will be suddenly and mysteriously busy.

Here's a Helpful Tip

You can't write a good story from first-person perspective about a well and truly moral person.

There. There it is. Now you're a writer.

Seriously, though. I was sitting here, plugging away at my damn novel, when I got this terrifying feeling of recognition, the feeling that I had seen this bad boy before. Specifically, it was starting to look and feel like the stale shit those hapless fucks in my first workshop pumped out.*

Panic. I've been pouring my blood, sweat and tears into this fucking thing. And now it's OFF, even for an early draft, this bad boy just has something truly, deeply, unsettlingly inhuman going on in it. But what? WHAT, damn you?!?

And then it occurred to me: This character is such a fucking nice guy. He doesn't have flaws, except ones he is working on with earnest determination and a plucky attitude. He's like somebody you'd meet at a fucking AA meeting or something (and don't start with me, I know from experience).

"Well shit, Johnny," you say. "Guess you'll have to scrap that fucker."

HELL no. Because you know, that prick at the AA meeting? The one who's all understanding and determination? Statistical evidence he goes home and belts back a couple shots. And hey, that's just from membership surveys. He probably also laughs at homeless people and says negative things about nice people. He sneaks out of bed at night, careful not to wake his wife, and meets up with some 22-year-old flygirl wearing naught but leather boots and a smile.

Bet you wanna read a book about THAT guy. I know I do.

So, rather than just scrapping what I've got, I'm going to show this guy's ugly side, too.

Beginning draft 2...






*When I describe my first workshop as "hapless fucks," I am specifically exempting aspiring sci-fi writer Benjamin Wheeler from the characterization. Hey, Ben, it's that dude from RCTC, the one with the drunk stories. Hope you're on paper somewhere.

Writing in College, or Sisyphus Gets a BA - Part 1

My buddy Dominick is in the habit of introducing me with the statement: "This is [nickname I picked up years ago under murky circumstances]. He's a writer."

In the interest of managing expectations, I usually back off of this plateau and say something akin to, "Well, I'm studying writing at UW-Milwaukee." If I'm lucky, they just ask me what kind of writing I do, and I can quickly end the conversation by simply confusing them ("Tragicomic absurdist realism. It's hard to explain.").

Other times, our intrepid newcomer feels a need to press on, and they ask me: "What do you think of the writing program up there?" Occasionally, the same sentiment is expressed far more snidely: "Oh yeah? Where did Hemingway go to college for writing?" Either way, it's the same question. To wit - does taking college writing classes do anything to actually improve your writing?

There's a question I've been asking myself, with progressively more pessimistic answers, for the past three years. At the moment, I'm thinking that the teachers are occasionally helpful, though whether they're worth three grand a semester is pretty much up in the air. Your fellow students, though, are generally only helpful indirectly, and usually in a way that's bound to piss you off.

The workshop system works like this: first, you write something. Then you bring your stuff to the class. They edit the work and give you comments, and you do the same for their manuscripts. On the basis of their commentary, you then edit the work and turn it in to the instructor for a grade. The first and biggest problem with this system is that, at UW-Milwaukee (and a lot of other places), there isn't really any clear method of separating people with raw talent that needs to be polished from people who suck, and will probably suck forever. It is a time-honored tradition that, in each writing workshop, there are always a couple of writers who Just Plain Suck.

Now, most writers are insecure about their work when they get started (and probably forever after, but I'm not a mind reader). The problem is that they tend to react to this with a lot of pompous bravado - you just don't get it, man. You can try and give them tips on their writing, but if you don't preface it with a lot of kowtowing about how it's already almost perfect and you're just splitting hairs, they're just going to snarl at you. Most young writers don't want to be told how to get better - they want to be told that they're already brilliant, and that no further work will be required to etch their name upon the age.

For example, I had this guy in my last workshop, who we'll call "Robbie." Robbie was this wanky, right-on film major who, for some reason, had wandered into the writing department. He wrote this clunky, overwrought story about a father taking his kids to Chuck E. Cheese, and loaded it down with plenty of phoned-in angst and short, Palahniuk-ish generalizations about the futility of modern life. Robbie, of course, thought his work would knock our socks off.

Then it went into the workshop meatgrinder. I don't think we ever actually got to the content of his story (such as it was), because we ended up spending most of the hour trying to decrypt his baffling mechanics. Robbie apparently didn't believe in commas, and he would indent almost at random, including, on one occasion, right in the middle of a sentence. Obviously, this was a first draft. But going into a writing program without an understanding of basic mechanics is kind of like saying that you want to attend an art program, but cannot draw.

(Actually, a friend of mine who works as a sculptor tells me this is shockingly common, but let's not digress.)

Around the fortieth or fiftieth comment pointing out an extremely basic error, Robbie snapped.

"Okay," he huffed. "Everything in that story is there for a reason. I wrote it how it's written for a reason."

Our instructor, Professor George Makana Clark (a helluva guy, and one of few writing instructors I've ever had much respect for), let a wicked grin slide across his face. "Robbie," he said, "after your last submission, I told you to go get help at the Writing Center. Did you... go to the Writing Center, Robbie?"

"Yep," Robbie said. Professor Clark smiled a bit larger.

"And they told you you could indent like this?"

"Yeah," Robbie said. "They said as long as I was consistent..."

"But you're not consistent, are you, Robbie? In fact, there are two pages here where you don't indent anything." Pause. "Are you sure the person you spoke with actually worked in the writing center? It wasn't, say, a homeless person?"

And that's why I liked Doctor Clark. Beyond having proved himself in the trenches (he won an O. Henry Prize in 2006) and dispensing some good sense, if your writing sucked, the man wouldn't pull any punches - he would tell you that you sucked. But more about that in my next installment.

"Now, John," you say. "It couldn't all have been bad. As y0u said yourself, there were indirect benefits from dealing with these proles."

Indeed there were. These shitwits, for all their flaws, probably kept me writing and submitting. It's easy to lose track of the odds in the writing game. Nothing's more intimidating than those little blurbs under each magazine in the Writer's Marketplace, which usually go something like this: "Receives 400,000 submissions a month. Accepts 2 per quarter."

"Jesus," you think, "They reject an ungodly percentage of their submissions! How will I ever get into that other 1%?"

And then you realize - those hordes of rejected writers aren't generally made up of people like you, slaving away over a piece for weeks on end, editting, drafting and re-drafting until you think red ink is going to start pouring out of your nose.

Nope. Those hordes of losers are self-important dipsticks like Robbie, poor souls who truly believe that every nugget that drops out of their brain is Pure Genius, and that any failure to realize this is a perception issue on your part.

Wanna stand out from the crowd in writing? It's very simple - get over yourself.

In The Beginning

The year was 2005. I had quit drinking after five years of flagrant alcoholism, dropped out of the University of Iowa, moved back in with my parents, and been savagely dumped by a girl I then thought to be the love of my life. In the midst of this emotional shitstorm, I decided to become a writer, mostly because it was the only thing I was any good at and I can't tie a noose.

This was an ambition I had nursed for some time. As early as the age of seven, I had been drawing pictures on steno pads and then stringing them together for my mother in a verbal narrative. Later on, I spent many a night pounding away at a bottle of Jim Beam and cackling over my keyboard, belting out ten or fifteen pages in a single night. I'd usually wake up in the morning, look it over, and realize it was complete crap. It was a lot of fun, though, and my super-secret desire was to actually do it for a living. This seemed beyond unlikely, but it was a fun thing to think about at the apex of a booze-soaked night, when my ungodly BAC made anything seem possible.

But when you're dry drunk, lovelorn, and trying to remember how to tie that damned noose, you'll grasp at any straw. So I decided, damn the torpedoes, I'm going to try and be a writer. I did not actually know what this would entail, or how to close the distance between my present predicament and the position of, say, Tom Wolfe. But I figured I'd write a lot, and if I sucked I'd get better through endless practice. So, step one: write a whole fucking lot.

This is precisely what I did. I grabbed myself a notebook and an array of pens, enrolled in a creative writing workshop at the local community college, and got down to it. My days blended together into a single, ongoing routine - get up at nine, go down to the coffeeshop I worked at, score a large Depth Charge, and write. Go to class at about one. Get out around two-thirty, and spend the remaining time before work at four editting manuscripts for workshop. Get out of work around nine-thirty, go over to my buddy's apartment, write some more there. Go home, fall into a fitful sleep, and get ready to do it all again tomorrow.

After a solid six months of dead ends, I finally came up with a little ditty called "Knight in Shining Tie-Dye," a 963-word fiction piece that I felt was pretty keen. It was then that a thought occurred to me, a thought terrifying in its enormity: I could publish this motherfucker.

I had trouble even accepting this notion at first. To me, publication was - and is - the line between a talented amatuer and a struggling professional. To send a piece out for publication was to step forward and claim the forbidden mantle of The Writer. It was a psychological gamble; if it turned out that editors didn't actually like my writing, my self image would be downgraded from Undiscovered Talent to Guy Who Couldn't Hack It.

Regardless, I tried to get down to the business of it. A friend of mine was also in the hunt for writing glory at the time, and had in his possession a copy of the 2005 Novel and Short Story Writer's Marketplace. I asked if I could borrow this bad boy for "just a day or so," and then proceeded to hang onto it for a period of two weeks. During this time, I hopped on the internet and looked up every magazine that seemed like it might, conceivably, like my writing.

Finally, at the conclusion of all this research, I settled upon AntiMuse.Com, an irreverent humor zine published by a chap named Michael Haislip. After reading through the archives and laughing my ass off, I figured Mr. Haislip might be a man amenable to my sense of humor. So I went back to the computer, pulled up "Knight in Shining Tie-Dye," and started in on my fourth round of edits. There would ultimately be five complete drafts before I finally sent the damn thing.

It was with some trepidation that I shared my plot with my comrades. To be perfectly honest, the other writers I knew were mostly writing confusing, "avant-garde" minimalist pieces, and so found my style of writing very nearly repulsive. Upon hearing that I was submitting to AntiMuse, my pal with the Writer's Marketplace decided that he, too, could try tossing something over Mr. Haislip's transom. After all, if they'd have any interest in my pedestrian scribblings, surely an experiment in extreme minimalism would score a spot, right?

So me and my pal both sent our pieces out to AntiMuse. The suggested response time was thirty days, which I have since learned is a snap of the fingers in the world of writing. My friend passed this month in studied nonchalance. "They'll probably reject us both," he said, "But at least we tried." I, on the other hand, checked my email three times a day the whole time, just in case the editor somehow responded early. I knew this to be unlikely, but I didn't particularly care. I just wanted to know whether I was in or not.

Finally, on Night 30 of the vigil, I clicked my inbox open to see an email from AntiMuse. I opened it, and my heart leapt. They liked the story, and they wanted to publish it in the November issue.

"Holy shit!" I bellowed. "The like my shit!"

At the time, my friend was across the room at his desktop computer. "What are you talking about?" he asked.

"Check your email, man. AntiMuse is buying my piece." Even as I said this, a feeling of dread washed over me. Really, what were the odds that they would have accepted both of our submissions? I mean, how hard-up for writing could they possibly be? And if they liked my shit, then they probably wouldn't like his.

My friend clicked on his email inbox, saw an email from AntiMuse, and opened it. His face went slack, and then clouded over.

"Well?" I asked meekly. "Did they take it?"

"Man, FUCK THIS!" he shouted. "I fucking QUIT!" At which point he stood up and marched out of the room.

One word: Awkward.