On Living the Writer’s Life: While Sleeping on a Bed of Nails, Eating Dry Ramen and Keeping the Muse From Laughing Too Hard at Us
What we really want when all the hoopla, contests, and moments of doubt pass into the night
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Imagine - it’s what we do when our fingertips are not tapping away at the keyboard putting amazing thoughts to a page or reading parts of a script that your agent handed to you the day before and thinking I can do this.
Then gathering up your courage or determination or whatever emotion it is that gets you up and walking towards that audition door, opening it, and stepping inside and seeing 12,786 other actors auditioning for the same role.
How do you feel now?
That’s what it’s like every day for a writer.
Sending off that manuscript. Typing that email and pushing Send.
Posting that story on Medium and thinking of its chances as your story slides down the chute and begins its journey along with 78,914 other stories and poems submitted that day.
Okay, I’m not being the most positive person in the world right now. I’m not living up to the Zen standard that I set for myself years ago, as I journeyed from the East Coast to the West to find myself.
And I did. In a small two up, two down in Los Angeles. But that’s another story.
This one is about Reality. That thing we’re surrounded by.
It’s about honesty as it brushes up against the never fucking ending desire to make things appear better than they are, because Christ on a bike, some days have to be better than others, in order for the asses in this world to get up out of bed and onto the freeways.
Some days we need to hear or believe or whatever falls somewhere in between that we have a chance. That whatever it is we are creating, whether it’s brushed onto cavass, strummed onto a cassette for submission, or posted online, is not just a bit of our soul but an actual thing of value that people out there will want to see, hear, or read.
We have to do this. We have to set aside the thoughts, the bad ones; the ugly slightly gnarled, and bent notions that limp into our consciousness and start barking out orders to leave, hide, go away, and desist from being who we are.
Otherwise, those above-mentioned fingertips will forever stop their tapping.
The world out there, the one that’s willing to pay one baseball player $70 million a year for playing a game that the vast majority of the world has no interest in watching, also says what is and is not important.
What is and is not worth reading and has the audacity, the hubris, the fucking 5 inches in diameter balls to point to AI-generated prose as brilliant and useful while ignoring a poet’s words of love and sadness and the beauty of a petal falling back down to Earth.
That insists we send our heartful words and whacky sci-fi ideas and painful personal essays into the same boiling cauldron of nightmarish constructs, affectionately known as Internet Content. To fight their fight against brutish ads, vicious political attacks, and endless pleas to buy something that most of us neither need nor want or God help us, already have stacked in an overcrowded garage that we’re preparing to empty and bring to a Goodwill store.
Writers are warriors who don’t like to fight. We’re Jedi-Knights with light sabers in hand, a horde of fucking ugly assed aliens coming at us, while all we want to do is say a few words, hope it helps, sip some more coffee and get back to it, after taking a quick pee break.
We’re not all outstanding. We’re not all made of wood, metal, or some new-age material that doesn’t stain, rust, or peel in the sun and will last a millennium without decomposing.
We are human beings, created by nature, designed by God, or us, or some ancient consortium with a fucking warped sense of humor who are here on Earth to entertain, enlighten, make laugh or cry or feel wanted while earning a living, eating some decent food, having sex when our partners remember that we’re still here, because they haven’t seen us in 10 days. Trying our best to be worthy and of use.
What’s not to like?
And in today’s world, that same one mentioned above tends to ignore most of us because there’s always something more interesting trendier, and mind alteringly cool, and now out there - all we really need and want is a chance.
A chance to be seen and heard and yes, paid in legal tender that we can then use to pay bills, buy cat food, a better grade of coffee, a new package of briefs, socks, the good brand of cookies that doesn’t taste like recycled chemical waste and a night out with our partners, who love us and understand us and most times are THE only things keeping us from sliding off into the abyss.
We don’t love all of you. We don’t know all of you. And if we’re a typical writer we don’t spend much time with other humans, NOT because we don’t want to, but because our minds are filled with ideas and words and images of what people might do if they had special powers.
If they could rule the world, or maybe make a difference and don’t have the bandwidth to sit still and converse. But when we do, when someone finds us of interest and lends an ear, we can be charming and delightful and someone you might actually like to be friends with.
But we don’t take it personally when you ignore us, we’re used to it. We don’t sulk; well, we do, but we hide it well because we know it doesn’t help us or you. We know we’re difficult snarky and rude at times, but honestly, just at times. Otherwise, we live and breathe and look a great deal like your cousin from Philly or the hot manager in Mergers and Acquisitions and while we may not sound like them – we bleed red.
And if you slap us or much much worse, if you ignore us, we will hurt like no one has hurt before.
And that’s not hyperbole. Because writers are imaginative creatures and when we fail, we imagine all sorts of things that probably no one ever thought about us, but we imagine it nonetheless and it’s far worse than anything others might have said. We’re like that at times.
Thinking that our prose sucks. That our poetry is fit only for cereal boxes. That our plays are best kept for kindergarten recitals. And that novel we wrote, the one we spent two years every night at our desk, the one pushed up against the wall under the stairs, wearing a miner’s light strapped to our foreheads so we could see, will probably make the editor laugh or suggest we run it through AI to improve it.
It’s not that we’re masochists, though there might be evidence to the contrary, it’s that we’re sensitive and doubt stalks us like a shadow.
Mostly because we’ve been ignored, unacknowledged, and set aside.
Imagine how your first teddy bear feels, the one that you put on the top shelf in your closet in 1996 and hasn’t seen the light of day since. That’s how we feel – only a little worse.
But we’re also resilient. And courageous and persistent to the point where editors and publishers have been known to scream – YES! – eventually.
And when they don’t, that’s okay, we understand what we have isn’t for everyone. But it is for someone. And in the end, all we ask is for a chance to find them.
Not much in the scheme of things – is it?
Pixabay imager by Viarami