I've been maintaining this blog for something like six years now -- and I use the word "maintaining" very loosely. Anybody with eyes can see how infrequently it's been updated. If this blog were a child, social services would have whisked it away from its crack-daddy a long time ago and plunked it into a healthy foster home, and with good reason. Yet here it stays, like that toy in the basement that still gets pulled out and played with by a bored kid on summer vacation.
But enough metaphors. I didn't actually come back here to flog myself with some excoriating
mea culpa about web-presence irresponsibility (although that does sound kind of fun). No, I'm here today to talk about something I read on a tombstone -- Charles Bukowski's tombstone, actually.
I haven't read a lot of Bukowski, mainly some poems and his novel
PULP, which -- despite being sniffed at as lesser work by Bukowski scholars (and by that I mean Amazon reviewers) -- I really liked. Mainly what I know is that back in the days when I was working in bookstores, Bukowski's goofily formatted Black Sparrow trade paperbacks were consistently the most stolen merchandise in the store. I don't know what being "America's most shoplifted writer" gets you, but I'm willing to bet that Bukowski probably doesn't give much of a shit, being dead and all.
Which brings us back to his tombstone, and its epitaph:
DON'T TRY.
The first time I heard this, I assumed Bukowski was basically taking some final, ultimate piss, flipping off all his sycophants and cult followers with a glib drunk's "why bother" bumper-sticker shout out to bleak existential pointlessness and the fundamental vacancy at the bottom of the universe. And who knows, maybe he was.
But I don't think so.
These days, I think it was simpler and maybe more -- ahem -- zen.
If I've learned anything from the thirty years I've spent staring at the blank page, and then the blank screen, it's that there's no bigger waste of time than the act of consciously trying to write good fiction. Let me say that I again, so there's no misunderstanding: For me, at least, when I sit down and try to "come up with an idea," I might as well stick my hand in a garbage disposal. That way, at least, the painful part is over quickly.
From where I sit, here at my kitchen table on a Friday morning in July with the Hold Steady blasting on the iPod and my dog at my feet, I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to write next. This past week, I finished the final edits on the sequel to AU REVOIR, CRAZY EUROPEAN CHICK, and a new screenplay, and sent them both off to their respective destinations. Initial responses to both have been quite positive, so that's good.
So now what?
I have no. Fucking. Idea.
Now, historically, when you find yourself in a situation like this, you have a few options. You can start strap on a headlamp and go spelunking through the inevitable files and salvage yards of unfinished stories, discarded ideas and abandoned novels, hoping for a shimmer of insight into the problem that caused you to jettison those project(s) to begin with, tinker with them long enough and and maybe even get that sumbitch up and running.
I've done that.
Or, you can just pick one of the dozen
new ideas currently swimming around in your head and try to kick-start
that poor, undeveloped zygote into existence with the sheer force of ambition and literary brio. Done that too.
You can just start writing, picking a character and following him or her along the page like a six-year-old chasing a butterfly across the lawn. Yep, done that as well.
Or, you can update your blog.
Which is to say, hang out with your family. Go to your day job. Catch up on your human interaction. Rent the stupid comedy that you missed when it was in the theaters because you were writing. And when the inevitable itch comes to sit down and try to put words on the page, before they're ready to come to life, do everything in your power to resist it.
No problem, right? Sure. Just like telling a two-pack-a-day smoker that all he has to do is just through away that soft pack of Camels. Easy, right? Just...chuck 'em in the trash. Have a stick of gum instead.
Because here's the news. When you've done it long enough, writing becomes a habit. Not to get too uppity about it, but for those of us indulge in this completely illogical and indefensible creative act, day in and day out, in the face of a thousand glaring arguments to the contrary, it's never exactly been a healthy lifestyle choice. It's a compulsion, frankly, and not a very pretty one, like biting your nails or crunching ice cubes while your spouse is trying to watch
America's Got Talent.
There's a reason why, when they show writers in the movies and TV, they're almost never actually in the act of writing. It's not pretty. Yet we pursue it anyway. Why? We're sick. We've got what Michael Chabon calls "the midnight disease," and as hard as it is to keep going, it's even harder to quit.
So we sit down at the keyboard and we
try. And invariably -- mistaking ambition and good intention for real narrative intuition -- we screw it up. Because intuition doesn't respond too well to being pushed around. You can't tell your instinct that it's time to get to work. It's the other way around, and thank God...because if my conscious mind were responsible for a tenth of the shit I've put on the page, I think I'd be mentally exhausted all the time.
Truth: The real work comes from deep down, when you don't realize it's being done. The upside is, at its best, when that initial burst of the real, true thing arrives, it sometimes feels almost effortless, like a package arriving on your doorstep.
The bad news is, you can't force it. And, if you're me, anyway, you do anyway. Because at the end of the day, I'm weak. I'm an addict, and even when I know it's not going to lead anywhere, I find myself out there anyway, chasing the dragon.
Which is when I go back and look at Bukowski's tombstone again, the last words he had, not for his fans and sycophants, but for writers, because he was one, he sat there and put in the hours, and he knew how it was.
America's got talent, but when get right down to where the rubber hits the road, talent doesn't do it. Or timing. Or ambition. Or inspiration.
Sometimes you just have to leave it alone, and go back to your life, and when you're ready, then go back to work. When it's time, it's time.
Don't worry.
You'll know.
