Suffering and the Brilliant Author

The kindle screen saver picture of James Joyce shows him sitting, his forehead on his hand and an expression of intense concentration/pain on his face.

Every time my husband or I hit that screen saver we say “I suffer for my art.” This is churlish of course, since Joyce is dead and can’t defend himself, and also since the idea that a writer was a “tormented soul” was part and parcel of the myths of the time.

But what goads us is that this myth is still there, as are a lot of others. And those myths are not only annoying when you encounter them applied to you, but they make many young writers think that writing is like stew: all flavoring and smell.

Instead of sitting their behinds at the office chair and setting fingers to keyboard, a lot of writers think they have to go out and “suffer.” This usually – humans being humans! – translates not so much into suffering as into the appearance of suffering. One of my favorite books as a kid as Tom Bailey, Story of a bad boy by Thomas Bailey Aldrich. In one chapter he describes the time he spent being “an unfortunate being.” This was while he was a teen boy and having much fun at “being in unrequited love.” The chapter closes with “Never have I been so happy as when I was an unfortunate being.”

When I read it, I was playing the same sort of game – sonnets my dears, I wrote something like 250 to a blond, green-eyed gentleman. Foolishness and mumming, but it made me feel grown up and important and suffering for love. That passage in the book should have annoyed me, but instead it reassured me that I was “normal” – always a difficult assurance to come by.

Most of the young writers – and other artists – who suffer for their art do the same sort of thing. They’ll take some menial work, but not too strenuous, and spend their free time – instead of writing – sitting at a café, wearing a melancholy expression and aching, aching I tell you, with unexpressed genius.

This is much easier than aching with expressed genius, which actually requires one to work one’s butt off and which always allows one to fall short of the greatness we perceive within ourselves.

So, why do I care? If they’re having fun and not hurting anyone?

I shouldn’t care. They really aren’t hurting anyone else, beyond making half the real estate agents who show us homes and know I’m a writer say something like “You’ll love this house, it has this room where the view of the mountains will just inspire you.” Which of course, would be very useful if I wrote poems about mountains, instead of workaday novels about flawed human beings. Okay, I concede there probably are flawed human beings all over those mountains, but it would take a really powerful telescope to find them, and the gentleman across the alley who paints naked in the room facing mine (no, don’t ask. WHY would you ask?) with the lights on in the early morning dark, is likely to think I’m using the telescope on OTHER things. It also makes strangers say kindly things like “I imagine how difficult it must be to suffer for your art.” (Somehow “carpal tunnel IS terrible” doesn’t seem to be the expected answer.)

But overall the person it hurts is the young writer himself.

Yes, I know that’s none of my business. Hurting others is evil, hurting yourself is simply stupid.

But I’ve seen too many – usually extremely talented – young writers become older writers who don’t write, though they talk about writing and suffer, suffer for their art.

The problem is by the time they reach middle age, the suffering has become real. Their entirely lives, they’ve defined themselves as writers. They often have taken jobs of little account or refused to pursue extensive education because they must “save time for writing.” Often they even have created worlds and characters that they want to write.

But by that time, they’ve created such and… expectancy of art, of how great their book will be, of everything it will incorporate, that writing – actual writing that involves putting words to paper – becomes impossible. Or at least highly improbable. Because if every sentence you put down doesn’t throb with inexpressible genius, then how do you justify all the years you spent, suffering for your art?

So you block yourself before you start, and your own expectations make your ambition moot. And what could have been several pleasant, entertaining and perhaps, even, in the end, enlightening books, die in the vine. Oh, and the “author” might go to his grave considered a great unacknowledged genius by all his family and his two friends, but in fact, even if he were a genius, he never did anything with it. Oh, and he’s added to the whole myth that the really good ones never write.

If you or someone you know, young and old are in that trap, here’s how to find the way back (I fell into that trap fortunately only between fourteen and twenty two, when my husband pushed me out of it, more or less unwittingly.)

1 – what my husband, an amateur musician, told me within a week of marriage. “Real writers write every day” was the beginning of my way out of the trap. Partly because – his being from another artistic tradition, one in which practice is important – he made me realize how much of anything is just habit and practice. How could I expect to write perfectly if I hadn’t made it an habit? If I hadn’t trained to?

2- Come to terms with the fact nothing will be as good on paper as it is in your head. This happens to every single one of us. You do the best you can at that time, and you trust your craft to improve with practice. (Dean Wesley Smith calls this “trusting the process.” I’m not a very trusting woman and this is almost impossible to me, but it DOES work. I’ve seen it. For me, it’s almost the only things that works.)

　

3- Forget writing one book that will live forever. Oh, it might happen. But IF it does happen it’s not because you sat down and ached with unexpressed genius and distilled from your emotions a book that is, to paraphrase my friend Alan Lickiss “a metaphor for the human existence.” Expecting this of any one book is sort of like if you could design your kid and you wanted him to have every talent and virtue that humans ever had. You’d end up childless. (um… nice short story idea.) Instead, work at writing several books that are worth reading. Preferably, though I understand this is MY personal preference, that are worth reading with little effort and that amuse, entertain, make the reader cry or worry or thing. You might get lucky and your entire output in aggregate might be a work of staggering genius that changes the world. Or you might write your tenth, or twentieth book, and find you finally produced that work of genius you wanted to create all along. Or you might simply make a living from this, and make a few people happy for a while. All of those are worthy outcomes, and you’ll never get any of them unless you write.

4 – Forget suffering for your art. There is enough suffering in the normal human life: making enough money to survive; living up to your commitments to spouse, children, even pets; the aches of advancing age; the frustration of never being as good as you want to be. It is part of being human that we can imagine perfection, but none of us can achieve it. The course of true love never runs straight, and that’s not just romantic love, but the relationship with your parents, for instance. How tangled is that? If you say not at all it’s because you’re not looking with open eyes. And that’s part of the problem. If you’re concentrating on suffering for your art, you’re not paying attention to the suffering inherent in being human. All those people who live normal every day lives? You’re seeing them as things, as stereotypes. This is the worst thing you could believe when you set out to create worlds that live.

5- Forget writing what you know. Or don’t. I have a fan who is a long-distance trucker, and reading his blog about his profession was fascinating. I remember a series of mysteries about a woman working construction. Again, it was fascinating because there’s so much about that trade I don’t KNOW. OTOH a lot of people interpret this to mean “write only what you know from personal experience.” Look, children, seriously, slice of life is boring. Oh, some details might be fascinating, but in general? We all live lives of quiet “snuffle. Yawn.” So if you feel a need to “write what you know” a) stop trying to do exotic stuff. You’ll find that normal human beings (well, and me) are just as curious about things like “who do bookstores work, inside?” “I wonder what it’s like to come to the mall before it opens.” “How do bus drivers really do what they do? How are shifts arranged?” etc as about “How do you run with bulls in Pamplona.” And b) unless you’re writing slice of life literary (and for that I’m not qualified to advise you) throw in a murder or an alien landing or a vampire, or for all I care all of them, provided you do it WELL. And no, you don’t need to kill someone to write about it. You can research in books and by attending classes. (There are usually a few on police investigation, run by local officers.)

6 – Read. Read every day. Read several hours a day if you can manage it. Take your favorite books from the shelf and take them apart (not physically) by analyzing how the author introduces characters, how he evokes what emotion. Now, how could you do that in your as yet unwritten opus.

7 – Write. Write every day. Write what you mean to write professionally and write other stuff too. Set yourself a minimum quota of words and write.

8 – Don’t take yourself seriously. Toss out all preconceptions about what a writer is, or what writing means. Throw out all the nonsense I know you’ve heard (I have) about process, like “A novel isn’t any good unless it takes 3 years (or five, or ten) to write.” Or “A story must be revised ten or twenty or fifty times before it’s any good.” (I came across this recently, of all things in a book aimed at indie writers: “If you don’t have the patience, persistence and pride to revise a story fifty times, you shouldn’t do this.” If I’d been unpublished, I’d have quaked. FIFTY times? My most revised story was revised probably twenty, and it KILLED it, and I didn’t sell it till I went back to the original. Ignore that nonsense. These people are crazy. By all means, if you NEED to revise fifty times [I can’t even imagine it. Do you write in Sanskrit in first draft?] by all means, do it. BUT you don’t HAVE to in order to make it “good” and it’s not a universal process.) Do what you have to do to create stories. Learn from your mistakes. Don’t sweat prescriptive dictates.

And now shut up and write. Ignore all the years you might have wasted. Start today. Sit down. Write.