This isn't really what you'd call a creative piece, but somewhere between answering service calls and staring at a room full of cars I don't want to drive, this came out of me, so I figured I might as well throw it out there.
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It's come to my attention in the last couple of weeks that I am terrified of writing, absolutely scared to death of the whole thing. If you like, you can stand up and jeer now. It's ridiculous, I know. I mean, I'm pretty good at it, or at least better than average, and with some work I could probably be really good. You'd think that something I'm good at would be attractive, would be something I'd want to spend all my free time doing. But the problem with being a good writer is that it's nothing like being good at math or sports or anything causal that other people seem to be good at and enjoy. Math works in a particular way, and if your brain is wired the same way, numbers and calculations are easy. Sports work in a particular way, too – only with physical activity there's some necessary training. You might be born with an affinity for baseball, but you sure as hell aren't born with the muscle structure required to play it. Writing is like a combination of both: your brain needs to be wired to process stimuli in a very specific way in order to translate thoughts and images and whatnot into text that is not just readable, but enjoyable or useful in some way. Writing also takes training – again, you can be born with an innate understanding of the way language works and what sounds "right", but if you don't practice you'll never get past relying strictly on instinct. But there's a third variable when it comes to writing something really good, I think. It's not inspiration, because writer's block is basically equal parts laziness and inattention. I have no problem with inspiration personally, because I figure I can get it anywhere as long as I write what I know and supplement it with a healthy dose of imagination (also a critical item on the will-call list for a writer).
Maybe it's desire. I guess it goes without saying that you have to want to write in order to do it, because anything you do under duress (regardless what you hear from high-powered executives that feed on stress and top-grade cocaine) isn't likely going to be your best work. I convinced myself for years that all I needed to produce a good academic paper was a bottle of cheap wine, a pack of cigarettes, and the last possible twelve-hour block before the deadline. A long string of "B" grades tells you what good I got out of that line of thinking. But then again, maybe that's a bad analogy because the papers I did for school rarely fell into the category of things I wanted to write about. Sure, the stuff I was reading was interesting, if for no other reason than I hadn't necessarily read it before. But compound the act of writing with all that expectation: grades, grammar, the ever-changing Modern Language Association stipulations on margin width and where to put the parentheses – whatever – and you immediately make the business of getting your ideas across on paper infinitely more complicated.
It's that attitude in myself, though, that makes me question whether I really should be doing what I'm doing – I mean, shouldn't that all be spurious when I put it up against my alleged desire to write? Shouldn't I want to do it bad enough that it doesn't matter whether or not I have to conform myself to all these rules and regulations? Like I said, maybe academic writing is a bad analogy, because if I'm cut out for anything to do with the written word, it's probably not scholarly work. I love reading and learning, but I really don't like research in the pure form.
Okay, now I'm getting to it. Why don't I like research? Not because of the act, but because of the complications – the rules, maybe. The strictness of it – it's the same reason I don't like wearing ties. I feel like I'm being throttled. Now that is a sentiment of which I am expressly not proud. I don't like the rules? Boo hoo, right? Nobody else seems to have any problem with the rules. Who the hell am I?
Maybe that's the biggest part of my utter failure to produce anything of real worth so far. I have this juvenile issue with my conception of my own abilities. Despite repeated attempts by friends and family to assure me of my competence and talent, I steadfastly refuse to believe them, and I don't know why. That's part of the reason I'm pushing myself to write this thing, right this very second, because I really, really want to get to the bottom of this problem and solve it so I can go on about the business of writing my ass off. Now, it's been suggested to me that my refusal to accept what ability I have is a direct result of the fear I talked about when I started out. I'm scared of failure, but maybe I'm just as scared of success, because then things will be expected of me. I feel like Michael Douglas' character in Wonder Boys, who gets stuck trying to write a follow-up to his first novel, which was critically acclaimed across the board. He winds up spending years working on this absurdly long, meandering text that doesn't really go anywhere, because he is paralyzed by the idea that it won't live up to the standard set by his first book. So he writes and writes and writes and in all that writing says essentially nothing. He's basically killing time while pretending – even to himself – to be productive, and all he gets for his trouble are boxes of pages that are more-or-less useless to everybody, especially to him. I'm in the same holding pattern, but unlike Douglas, I don't have a good reason: I never wrote the critically acclaimed anything, so where's the standard? In my head, that's where. What a truly ridiculous notion: to think so much about thinking that you cease to think at all.
And, I just noticed, everything I've written here is an expression of the same paralysis. I'm on my way to writing Douglas' box-book, under the auspices of self-analysis and, presumably, self-improvement. What am I accomplishing here, by writing these words at this moment, sitting at my desk in the showroom of Dave Wood Mazda on a Thursday night in January, right after sending off graduate applications to two universities where, if accepted, I will specialize in rhetoric and theory and eventually go on to teach other people how to write effectively? I guess people are right to tell me to get my shit together, because if this isn't really what I should be doing, I sure as hell shouldn't be trying to teach it to anybody.
And there it is again: the ultimate, incontrovertible excuse of not being good enough. It's all avoidance, I'm starting to notice, and it's consequently all bullshit.
I was sitting on the bus today, heading to work and listening to music while staring out the window at what passes for scenery in the Bradford, Ontario area, and it came to me that maybe my biggest problem is the problem itself. I think it's fair to say that I've identified what's wrong with me: yes, I'm afraid to sit down and do the thing. But I get caught up in the narcissistic masturbation of self-analysis; I focus on the problem per se – why it's a problem and how it came to be a problem. In doing this I spiral cheerfully into this bizarre Catch-22 in which I can't get by the problem because I can't get to the bottom of it, but the bottom is that I can't get to the bottom.
So what do I do? Well, exercise like this helps build my muscle construction so I can swing the bat better, but right now I'm just doing the exercise so I can look good naked. What is required is a movement of faith, sort of like what Kierkegaard talked about. I have to stop looking over myself with a microscope and take a step back, look at the big picture.
Who am I? Okay, it's pithy, but it's something that's occupied a lot of my brain power lately. Actually, that's a lie. Avoiding thinking about it has taken a lot of my brain power. Like I keep saying, it's absurd. It's like spending all my time trying to convince myself that the sky is purple. What purpose does that serve? Forget it, it doesn't matter – that's the whole point. Insidious, isn't it? It's like crawling around in Jello trying to find a marble.
Maybe the bottom line isn't "who am I". Maybe it's "what do I want". Actually, it's definitely "what do I want" because the things we want – really want – define who we are. So what do I want? I want to keep doing this my whole life. Not the narcissistic autopsy part, the writing part. I think with a little work and a little faith I could be really good at it, if I'm not yet. Am I scared? Yes, terrified. And yet, it's like broaching any anxiety, for me: once I get past the initial instinct to run like a motherfucker far away as I can from a pen or any kind of word processor, it starts to feel right again, like sleeping in your own bed after an extended stay at a hotel or on a friend's couch.
Once upon a time not only was I pretty good, I had actually started to believe I was pretty good – not in that head-expanding Harold Bloom kind of way, but in that legitimate, "this feels right so I'm going to keep doing it" kind of way. It's amazing how hard people try to tear that shit down when they see it. People, particularly people who fashion themselves artists, hate it when somebody comes along who makes them feel like a fraud or a half-asser just by virtue of being there. Because it wasn't my abilities that made me special at that time, it was my passion for it. I really, really cared about writing and I really, really loved to do it – even if most of it was below-par hormonal/depressive "poetry". I read everything, all the time, I took courses with other writers twenty or thirty years my senior – not because I was trying to threaten them or make them look bad, but because I wanted to learn from everyone and everything I possibly could – and I loved every second of it.
And people tore me down, told me I wouldn't make it, told me I was idealistic, which is basically the worst insult you could have leveled on me at that time. So what if I wanted to be like Jack Kerouac and go gallivanting all over the nation, writing and drinking and learning the language of people? (This was before I realized there was a lot more drinking and a lot less learning that went on for people like that.) If I could have done it at that time I would have. My tastes are a little different now, but the fact remains – the fact remains – that I still really, really care about writing and I still really, really love to do it. Even now I feel the tension draining out of my hands, the fog lifting from where it collects at the mid-point in my skull. I had no idea that just letting it all go and writing – for real, not for all the other bullshit reasons I've managed to find over the years – would feel more like coming home than, well, coming home.
In a lot of ways this is a hard realization to come to, because it means I have to admit that I spent the better part of ten years pissing on the thing I love to do, and much as I talk about the other writers I met and the effects, positive and negative, they had on me, I still have to own that nasty little bit of history. It doesn't taste good, but I can't justify it away. If I'm smart I won't dwell and instead I'll make use of it, inasmuch as I can. Experience is experience, after all, and it built the man I am today, who I'm happy to say I'm starting to quite like.
So maybe I'm scared and maybe I'm not quite fermented enough to qualify as good wine. If that's so, then so be it. I'm getting there. I will get there. And when I do, damned if I'm not going to taste good.
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