The Only Way to Write
You woke up that morning, the same as every morning, at seven o’clock. You got off the floor and opened your laptop and you wrote. No chair to sit on, you just stood there in your shitty apartment with your laptop on the kitchen counter and wrote.
You didn’t feel like writing but you did it, anyway. You did it because you had given up your military career to chase this crazy dream of being a writer; a dream that even other writers scoffed at.
You did it because the only way you ever knew to succeed at anything was to work as hard as you possibly could. So you wrote, just like you had, for four hours a day, every day, eight hours a day on weekends, for the last six months.
You wrote because every writer you had ever admired had always said the same thing: the only way to write is to shut up and write.
Hemingway had said it. Richard Price, too. You’d pored over interviews with Vonnegut and Dylan and found the same. Stephen King had said it in almost those exact words. Bukowski, L’Amour, all the same. Shut up and write.
But when you went to geology class that morning you were thinking something else. You know you were. You were still thinking it when you went back home. You were thinking that that advice wasn’t doing you any good because you’d been following it for six months and your writing still sucked.
You tried to write before the Tom King conference started but you couldn’t. You just sat in your apartment feeling sorry for yourself. You found reasons not to write. You went out for coffee. You read ‘Blue Angel’ by Francine Prose and wished you could write like that and felt cheated that you couldn’t.
When the conference finally came you went to it with despair and childish hope. You were hoping that King would whisper some mystical advice in your ear, something to cure all your doubts, some definitive secret to being a professional writer. As if there was a closely held password to some professional writer’s speak easy in the city where they all sat around drinking rum and coffee and sharing their esoteric techniques. You knew it was foolish, but you wished it, just the same.
The conference came. You sat in the front row to make sure you didn’t miss a word. You sat there in rapt attention and wrote down everything Tom King said as though it were a math equation to be solved later.
You liked Tom King. He was direct and serious about his art without being pretentious. He spoke like a craftsman. He took pride in what he did. He cursed unselfconsciously. He was dignified and eloquent, but you could see the passion still burning in his eyes. You could see the young man that used to rail at white audiences about the rights of the First Nations. You could see his anger and the pride in his anger. The pride in his passion.
He imparted practical advice. He said that, to write, one must put everything else aside and focus entirely on his art. He advised to stay away from adverbs and adjectives. You had read that in Stephen King’s book, already, but it was good to be reminded: now you had heard it from two Kings.
But one thing he said hit you harder than the rest. He said to remember, always, that everything you write is shit. The only good writing comes from rewriting. Just like that, without saying it in those exact words, he had said it in essence: the only way to write is to shut up and write.
You walked home in despondency.
No magic wisdom had been imparted. No esoteric secret. No password to a covert professional writer’s speak easy in the city. You went home to your shitty apartment and felt sorry for yourself. You reread ‘Blue Angel’ by Francine Prose and wished you could write like that. You felt sorry for yourself that you couldn’t.
You paced around your living room and thought about giving up. You thought about all the money you could make doing something else. You thought about how so many things came so easily to you, and how writing just didn’t. You thought about how hard you worked at writing and how you still weren’t any good at it. And you thought again about giving up.
You read through all your books, all the writers you most admire, and you tried to figure out which style you should use, which techniques to steal, which voice to imitate. You thought about studying the market to determine what kind of stories you should be writing; what kind would sell. You read your creative writing textbook and tried to figure out what you were doing wrong.
You didn’t meet your daily work quota. You didn’t write at all. You just paced in circles and thought about it. But you didn’t do it. Then you looked over and saw that Bukowski poem on your corkboard. ‘if you’re going to try,’ Bukowski said, ‘go all the way. otherwise, don’t even start. all the way,’ he said. ‘all the way.’
Then you thought about Tom King. ‘Everything you write is shit.’ Shut up and write.
And you popped open your laptop and you started it up. You stood there at the kitchen counter in your shitty apartment. You thought about Tom King. A man with no excuses. A man that pretended nothing.
You thought about Bukowski, who had succeeded, despite years and years of bitter rejection.
You thought about Hemingway, Dylan, Price, Hunter S. And with the clock reading midnight you stopped feeling sorry for yourself, you stopped analyzing, you stopped reading, and while the rest of the world was falling asleep, you finally shut up and wrote.
Copyright 2018 Jeff Suwak
