Do Not Do What I Have Done

Like many writers, I enjoy reading about the process of writing, am interested in how others go about writing, where they write, their desks. What are their desks like? What do they sit on? I want to know it all. Do they listen to music when they write? Birdsong? Or do their husbands provide the dissonant but humdrum soundtrack to their creative lives? Do they write with an open window, sunlight and fresh air pouring in? Do they have an orange cat who interrupts them when they’re writing, walking across the keyboard to drink water from a fish bowl that sits on their desk?

It’s fun to read writing prescriptives—all that received wisdom filtering down from on high or up from below—or worse, from middle management after a series of committee meetings. Sometimes advice from others can be helpful, soothing, recognizable, even inspiring. Sometimes it’s generic, dispiriting, flattening, sucking all the oxygen from the room with its aggressive certainties and grim proclamations, the kind of stuff that gives life to hall monitors, dog catchers, truant officers.

I would not presume to offer writing advice to others, except to say you would be a fool to take my advice. Having your work appear in print is only that; it’s not a license to pontificate. It doesn’t mean you know what you’re doing or what you’re talking about. Publishing is as much about failure as it is about success. It’s more about failure but why be discouraging?

Anyway, some of us like failure and it likes us.

When it comes to writing, my reaction to most of the standard advice in circulation is not a monument to maturity:

—Don’t tell me what to do

—You’re not the boss of me

I would not advise anyone to do what I have done concerning writing and publication. I got published, despite myself, which is my default stance in every aspect of life. I continue to struggle to get published, but that’s all right, because why should I be happy?

Interestingly, my path both to being published and not being published consists of doing the same things, which is either defying or ignoring the following writing/publishing tropes, and which causes me to conclude that nothing matters, so do as you please:

—I have never belonged to a writers group or workshop. I know very few writers. If I want someone to read my unpublished work I have to pay them. I occasionally resorted to reading new work aloud to my three shih tzu but stopped when they started to actively avoid me and talk about me in disparaging fashion behind my back. They also began to urinate in the office to express their displeasure. Point made.

If I approach a family member, manuscript in hand, I am greeted with a look of horror, punctuated by a comment similar to what my son once said to me about my writing: “Sorry, ma, not my cup of tea.”

—Kill your darlings. If I killed my darlings I would be left with speech tags and weather reports. Why would you kill your darlings in a novel any more than you would kill your darlings in real life? See where that gets you—fiction as the grocery-store aisle and endless conversations about lawn upkeep with the guy across the street. And yes, I am willfully misunderstanding the advice. Not everything I write is as darling to others as it is to me. I get it. Same with my kids. I like them, but not everyone does.

The thing is, it has to start somewhere. I’ve got to be in love with what I write. When it comes to writing fiction, I don’t date, I get married. And I have to be insanely in love to get married. (Note significance of adverb choice.)

—I refuse to reduce my work to conform to the tyranny of the log line, which is a marketing tool, not a serious measure of worth. There is a good reason for my refusal. I don’t know what my novels are about. I haven’t got a clue, not when I start, not when I finish. I don’t know the meaning of life either. So shoot me. I have no idea what I am doing from one day to the next. I also don’t know what color my hair is anymore. Ask God why He made mosquitos. My guess? He couldn’t tell you. He’s content to let us figure that one out. That’s what makes it fun.

Next, I’ll be expected to condense the whole of my life to a log line.

Oh, wait, I just thought of one. Canadian woman who has never had a drink of alcohol is plunged into an existential crisis when her two small daughters beg her to stop acting like “a drunken lady” at social outings. Or how about this? Canadian woman who aspires to acting career is plunged into existential crisis when mother-in-law tells her, “Some people have got it, you’re not one of them.”

—I never provide anyone with a synopsis, which is the equivalent of waterboarding writers and I will not be complicit. It’s my pet cause and my passion. When asked for one in the past, I have been known to launch a hunger strike in protest—three hours and counting. I would have gone longer except I went blind in one eye before lunch. God knows what would have happened by supper time.

Demanding a synopsis is a management technique and a make-work project. It is also a failure of imagination. Plus, who is kidding whom? In my experience as a newspaper editor and a magazine editor, I knew within five minutes—make that two minutes (I only said five to appear more serious)—if this was a piece I was interested in publishing or not. Life and death come at you fast in publishing. And not just in publishing—getting in and out of a clawfoot bathtub past the age of thirty can be harrowing, too, so there is nothing special or elite about being a writer.

—Perspiration not inspiration. Left to its own devices, sweat equity, is the enemy of originality. The tired admonition to put butt in chair is the same kind of thinking that has given us a Batman for every occasion. The wholesale commodification of writing, amplified by publishing’s gatekeepers giving themselves tacit permission to now order up what they want to read (My MSWL—a colony of vampiric unicorns competes for preeminence on a post-apocalyptic earth with a coven of Millennial witches who practice black magic that must be performed while ice dancing).

The resulting hysteria—tell me what you want me to write— threatens to sideline inspiration and will inevitably lead to yet another epic clash between Godzilla and…um…Batman.

I think we can all agree not everything that gets written or painted needs to be inspired, but, oh, when it is.