Tom Jenks said it best, Good writing is really, really, really, really, really, reeeeeaally hard.
The comment came in a phone conversation we had years back and was finished with a mixed laugh that at the time was difficult to place. It was a laugh that’d come to haunt me thereafter. Jenk’s maxim went on to become one of the truest things I’ve ever heard about writing.
At the time I didn’t know who Tom Jenks was other than the editor of Narrative who’d just picked up a story of mine entitled Martyr. Later I’d come to find that Jenks had been senior editor at Scribner and fiction editor at Esquire and has published or edited everyone from Hemingway to Kurt Vonnegut and Arthur Miller.
In short, the guy knew what he was talking about. Nonetheless Jenk’s words-to-the-wise fell on deaf ears. In fact I felt a little embarrassed for him that he’d reduced writing to so simplistic a statement. At the time I was on cloud-9. In the short span of a few months I’d been published in two good literary journals and here Narrative was picking up another. Writing in my blind, heightened state seemed no longer hard and publishing for that brief nugget in my history no longer an impossibility. Apparently I began to think everything I wrote was gold. How easy it was to forget the prior seven-eight years of writing religiously every day (never mind a whole lifetime) to untold piles of rejections.
Anyway after the Narrative piece I hit my 2 all downhill from here. One by one the stories came back, if they came back at all. A year past. Then another… At age 34 I was washed up.
With writing there is usually never only one thing wrong though I think I can boil my basic dilemma down to something of the spirit of Tom’s deceptively simple words. Good writing doesn’t come easy.
This slow re-realization was brought home at get together at a bar with a friend who’d recently become a writer himself. And like many (if not all) writers new to the craft they think they know everything there is to know about writing pre-hand and don’t need to take any pointers. They ask questions to which they already have all the answers. They write a 4-500 plus page manuscripts in two months, spend a week-and-a-half doing what they consider editing, then bulldoze the mess into some unfortunate soul’s hands for feedback they’re not going to take anyway. This is often followed by a harassing stream of emails fueled by their great impatience for the praise of their genius they’re certain is due them. If only they could break in. Because after all success with writing is who you know, not the quality of your work… Such was the nature of our relationship.
Obviously I’m being hard on the guy because I was guilty of similar illusions-of-grandeur. What son does the father secretly begrudge more than the one whose faults resonate most with his own?
If writing is eeeeeasy than you can write whatever crap you feel like, right?
I went on my merry way, hoping my genius friend would disappear and he’d move on to something else less masochistic and insane as becoming a writer.
He did disappear for a while. When I saw him again it was Fall and he’d since self-published his book (a book that’d taken him somewhere in the ballpark of two 2 months to write and edit). He was gloomy and irritated and the voltage of his illusions-of-grandeur odometer had dropped a considerable percentage since I’d seen him last. His book had sold a total of ten copies (probably all friends) and the reviews on Amazon were eating at him. He bitterly detailed one whose critique I considered quite apt. When I tried explaining that he may want to contact this person as a smart reader, he cut me off. He was good at cutting you off.
He went on talking as usual. Well, to hell with you, I thought, smiling and feeling stupid for him. Let the moth flutter into the bug zapper.
Arrogance in any area in life inevitably invites the devil. The fickle deity who grants good writing is a testy, pissy god and he’s not fond of cocky, loud-mouthed, know-it all writers. In fact he pays special visits on those numbers as he had me after Narrative. My penance: a plague of unending rejections…
Pulling off a decent story much less a very good story I won’t say is impossible but close to it. And I’ve come to find the more of a pain-in-the-ass a story is for me, the more hell and misery and frustration and anxiety it reaps to the point where I don’t think I can go on and where I begin thinking dark thoughts of burning it or tossing it all in the garbage (something Twain had done with Huck Finn; his wife discovered it and dug it back out) the more potential for success it has. In my experience the best writing comes from the mud, not the high horse.
So my dark age continued. The steady flurries of rejections continued. And with each one I sank a little deeper in the familiar mud. As a result I started working harder again and to look at my work more realistically, honestly.
One night that winter I came home from work. It was cold and the earth frozen and silent with January stillness. I was about to go inside when I stopped and for some reason walked out into the field. I looked up into the glowing twilight. The instant my eyes met the sky I saw a shooting star streaking to the south. It exploded in a shower of light.
There was something about it. Some silent power hummed down.
I didn’t hustle the star for any favors (stories published in this or that mag, Pushcart Prices, Pulitzer etc. etc.) as I might’ve in years passed. I simply said thank you. And I really meant it. I don’t know why I said it. I just did. Then I went inside.
A week later (no exaggeration) I received a phone call from Richard Mathews chief editor of Tampa Review. He explained that I’d won the 2012 Danahy Award for Fiction, $1,000 cash, and publication in the following issue of the magazine…
I’ve heard writing gets easier as you go along. And in its way I suppose writing does get easier in that you simply become accustomed to its stages, its difficulties, its frustrations. You learn, too, which blisses to trust and which ones to be wary of.
All said there’s nothing else I’d rather be doing.
