Motivation

I don’t even know how to phrase this properly. I won’t get it right.

Writers think many things about themselves, but “common” is not one of them. Yet, there are so many. Maternity writers, Retirement writers, Memoir writers, This Book is a Result of my Fame in Another Career writers, Already Famous writers, Inherited Industry writers, and any combination of a wild mix of these.

The whole point of this blog is to demonstrate, I’m not any of those things. I missed the boat. Went Directly to Jail, Do Not Collect MFA. If I put down a Blame List, it would be very fucking long, and I wouldn’t be exempt, and I would have blame on all sides for those reasons, too.

But when the weight of the stories I’ve written, the ones rattling already done but not written, the ideas that just bubbled up, and the random snippets, quips, and judgments become too heavy from rejection letters, time spent, time spending itself on me, I question what keeps me coming back.

Because I don’t have anything to offer the world other than what I write, and nothing behind my name to show for it, why do I do it?

I’m an anomaly.

I hear it, I hear you thinking “yeah, you’re special, you delicate snowflake, you unique, glowing, shimmering diamond in the rough, what the fuck ever.”

I carried writing with me this whole time, but I don’t have anything professional to show for it. So, statistically, it’s likely that this blog is the only thing that will be seen of what I write.

I have no idea what anyone thinks of my writing, except people that already like me. There are no agents here. No estuaries of writers that are like me. There’s no fucking Dead Poets Society. Oh wait, I forgot, those were rich kids. Scratch that example. Where was I? Oh, only groups that dabble and hobby, or, this one is really great, a guild that you already have to be published to join. We actually have a best-selling book-to-movie novelist from here. But they moved about the time their work started getting published..from their magazine job…after college which came immediately after school. I don’t think we should claim them, personally. Move back next to the crack house, you want some of “hometown’s glory.” Otherwise, we’re not good enough, then we’re just not good enough.

So, a group of writers who take their craft painfully serious with no published experience of any kind. Oh, wait…scratch that, too. I published two short stories. For online publications. For “exposure.” I don’t even post the links for them anymore. No published experience.

What the fuck keeps me writing? Why?

Some days, I really buy that “for the love of the game” shit. And I do love the game. Finishing my first novel was what I imagined the Peace Corps meant when they said “the toughest job you will ever love.” And it was so fucking hard. As soon as I called it done, I wanted to do it again. Taking an idea into a fully realized section of reality, the crafting. Sometimes I think books are really just written for other writers to read anyway, because otherwise, I never would have caught that hat trick if I hadn’t just done it myself. Or put down the book in awe wondering how you got those common, feudal letters to make such profound ideas into concrete blocks. I could go on like Metatron. But I guess I said it. That’s why I do it.

So, this last week is a good example of the word “fraught.”

I work close to forty hours, and that’s a goddamned gift these days. I just got off my first paid vacation in six years. And it was a glorious example of what writing life could be like. Then my Monday came. They’re depressing anyway. I drive over twenty miles for a job that just crests above minimum wage, but not for long, if other business’ have their say, because there are no jobs in my area. I actually predict that in at least fifteen years, the town I occupy will be called officially “dead.” It’s mostly Baby Boomers and addicts. Old houses that are broken down occupied by people who have no money to fix them.

This Monday was actually a small blessing, since I didn’t have to close/open. Retail people know that misery. And with a variant drive time between fifteen and thirty minutes and insomnia, I’m lucky to sleep. My Tuesday was okay, a little hurried. My Wednesday was perilous. It was a holiday weekend, so everyone had to get shit before whatever they do. And we were less than half staff. When I got home, I was too sore and too tired to eat. My Thursday was more of the same, short less people this time, and at the end of the shift, I was dreaming of the Epsom salt bath I could have. But I was too tired to do it. When my Friday came, it was all I could do to remain upright. Even though I spent most of my Saturday sleeping, I still got up and wrote that night. My Sunday is my weekday to get shit done. Taxes are coming up, doctor appointments, car servicing, grocery shopping, cleaning. Right now my days are fixed, but not my shifts, they go up and down, open, close, and mid. I don’t have a routine, I work around work. On any given day, I have to decide, sleep or write? What’s more important to me, health or sanity? If I stay up all hours, I will eventually be sick. If I never write, I spiral.

So when I bitch about Time and Money, it comes from a place where I may never get to do the thing I love. No one will ever see the thing I love. It may happen that the thing I love just isn’t good enough. I have no way of knowing. I may never know.

This is something I think every artist should experience. Being the Emperor with no clothes. Are you brave enough to walk around with ideas in your head and call yourself clothed? Is the craft alone good enough for you? Everything else is transient. I have books on my shelves by writers whose book that made them famous was not their best book, their best book was much more brave. Must have been written for other writers. They may never see the bestseller list again. But I’ve got their autopsy on my shelf, because it cut me open, too. For a moment, they lived the dream. For all the good it did them.

When Publishing fell in love with Technology, handed you they keys of instant access to the whole world like a weapon, and demanded that you be satisfied, were you? Satisfied with Twitter, Facebook, Blogspot, and Google+? Satisfied that anyone can put out anything on public platforms? Satisfied with the demands that all these facets, now created, are needed for a writer to be seen as a writer? Publishing says it must love you, forgives your appertaining rage, do you still rail that Publishing has become the villain? The calm, dishonorable, vile submission to the whims of the masses.

No one is looking for the next Stienbeck.

It’s your job to sell you now, you’re on your own.

Oh, by the way, why isn’t that book finished yet?

Resources

People gravitate, like the stuff of stars they are made of, to what they desire. A middle manager may have a wood workshop, a nurse might have collected as Wilton baking tools and bake her ass off. Cashiers collect historical war books, you get the point.

Even though I spent my youth writing, when I entered the Economic Destiny of the Blue Collar Work Force, I wrote off (haha) the idea that I could write as an adult with any real result. This was my life, as was my mother’s and her mother’s. Work, sleep, whatever you do after your shift, well, that’s just a bonus.

I collected books. At first just a few authors. Then I went through a non-fiction phase and collected those. During that time, a book on the craft of writing had crept in. I don’t know how, or when. But that’s when I started collecting books about writing.

Still, writing was a pipe dream. Work, sleep, clean. Work, sleep, watch a movie. Work, sleep, go to a friend’s house. Work, sleep, read, read, read.

In retrospect, I was writing the whole time. A financial attempt at college, articles and website reviews, little stories, plots and outlines for books. I had never actually stopped using. I just told myself I had. Somehow, I managed to hide it from myself.

Then the bottom fell out. As it did for just about everyone else at the start of the Recession/Working Depression.

Well, this was my chance. I found an angle on a popular theme, and it carved a novel out of my flesh.

From accounting and data, I went to retail. I hadn’t had a standing job for over a decade. But when it comes to work, I’m very Winston Zeddmore, “If there’s a steady paycheck in it, I’ll believe anything you say.” Thanks to whatever or whoever you want to blame, part-time work was all I could get.

A dump truck of shit hit my little life fan, but that’s for another time.

During this time, I had given myself over to Literature as my Lord and Savior.

And I knew no one would help me but me.

So, how do you school yourself in Creative Writing? How do you earn a Faux MFA? How do you teach yourself if you don’t already know?

Those writing books were getting redundant. Like fitness magazines that recommend squats every other month, yoga magazines that feature another wealthy couples unused space into their ashram after the one they visited in India.

Fuck, I’ve only eaten at an actual Indian restaurant once or twice. I’ll probably never make it to India.

I reasoned that there are a few ways to get to the honey ye desire.

Shakespeare. “Classics.” Pulitzer Prize Winners.

That’s where I started.

The public library is okay. Unless you are at a branch office, which has the most recent remodel and “consumer friendly” updates. I used my library card for little else than Great Courses. Those things are expensive. Because they are so fucking good! I already owned a few and bought one for a friend, but the library opened the flood gate of subjects. If I had to recommend just a few for the purpose of this discourse, I would say “How to Listen to and Understand Great Music,” “Reading and Understanding Shakespeare,” and “Books That Have Made History.” (this last title is much longer.) But, please, don’t limit to these three. Great Courses could run a for-profit library on their own.

Chain bookstores are pricey, Amazon isn’t much cheaper, even if you can catch a deal. This is especially true of popular, current classics, and perennial classics. Having constant demand, their price remains constant, too.

However, there is an untapped well, even in the Culture Desert, where people just discard treasure.

Thrift stores.

I’ve gotten more non-fiction, Shakespeare analysis, Cliff Notes, Spark Notes, classic novels, collected works, and textbooks from thrift shops than anywhere else.

Are they dated? Sure. Just like the book of analytical essays on Hamlet that actually had something to say without involving actor’s names. What people throw away. Plato, Hobbes, Erasmus, Faulkner, Hemmingway, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, issues of Psychology Today, on and on.

Where do you go when nobody knows your name?

Your private library, where books are less than a quarter each.

And it’s Paradise.