Make my day.
I used to have eczema, one of the more stately writer rashes, but I haven’t been writing enough for years to produce a single flake. My other writerly infirmities include fingers stripped of their cuticles with occasional blood, poor eyesight of almost Miltonic magnitude, I don’t go to the bathroom or I go too much, my head throbs, and my hands are hairy. Did I mention that my back hurts? That my tears are very salty? Oceanic. Why shouldn’t writers complain? Everyone hates us? We hate ourselves! All this sensitivity and for what? Giving up Coke Zero and for what? And cigarettes and percodan and Kanye: for what!? Writers beware: your writing sucks and then you die.
What hurts?
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How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Structure, structure, structure. We’ve talked about it before and for fuck’s sake we are going to talk about it again. When there is a problem with a manuscript, when it’s “not working,” when the material is good but the flakes don’t fly, it’s usually because the structure is flawed and by that I mean it’s fucked. What is structure, asks the simple son? First, slice a seedless rye in even slices. Butter every other one. Thematic? Chronological? A dovetail of the two? How good are you? How many plates in the air can you successfully spin? How devout are you? How unpredictable? If you have no idea what I’m talking about, mark up your favorite book and track the changes, the breaks, clock the way time moves. Pick a tense and stick with it unless you know how to drive a stick. Yo, what up? Is structure organic or something you apply to a work, asks the silent son, silently. For me, it’s organic. I subscribe to the idea that the choices you make in the first pages are more than clues, they are the dead sea scrolls, the shroud, the grail. You set the tone, style, syntax, pace, point of view, etc. It doesn’t mean you can’t make adjustments. It doesn’t mean you can’t turn it on its head. And sometimes it isn’t until you get to the end that you see the beginning. And that is the place to start.
A lot of people fuck off between Thanksgiving and New Year. Writing routines, diets, exercise, sending work out, etc. It all gets subsumed by the holiday, by family, by suicidal ideation. It’s really difficult to stay on track, to keep getting up at five and cracking a few pages out of your ass. Is anyone out there? Does anyone care? Who am I writing for? Myself? Philip Roth? Moshe Pipick? You have to be your own hole. You have to wonder how Mick Jagger does it? You have to attack attack attack. You can not rest, can not let this moment result in the sad realization that you suck. Take the brief case. Take the hammer. Take the lost tribe Ireland. Do not let people laugh at you. Do not be deterred. Do not quit. Not now. Not yet.
Holiday schmaliday. Who really gives a shit? For most writers spending time with families is hell. One year, I went on strike and didn’t go home. I went to the movies and ate entire baguette with sweet butter in my apartment. I watched the parade and I cried. This deep streak of sentimentality really scares me. I can start bawling at the first sight of a chubby majorette in white vinyl cowboy boots swinging a baton with confidence. So much joy just destroys me. So please, pick a fight with a relative and park yourself in some grown kid’s room turned into a den. Stretch out on the corduroy covered bed with matching bumpers and take a nap.
I was thinking about making a YouTube about rejection and film people as they receive bad news, like getting rejected by an agent, or getting publisher’s rejections, or not getting on The Colbert Report, or not winning the National Book Award. Then there’s all kinds of other rejection: looking at yourself in the mirror, standing on the scale, having a door not held for you, no sweet smile from the cashier. What does it look getting passed over, pissed on, forgotten, dumped. Let’s just be friends. Not my cup of gumbo. The good part about being a writer, if there is a good part, is that for the most part your rejection is somewhat private. At least that’s how I feel. The dark circus is mostly in my head. Forgot to chalk my palms.
Is it me or is it weird that the NYT reports in a front page article that Philip Roth has decided to stop writing. I guess they report it when a sports figure decides to retire or a Supreme COurt Justice steps down. Most people just fade away, and by most people I mean writers. I’m an avid Roth fan. I think I’ve read pretty much everything he’s ever written and I’ve defended him to feminists for years. I’m just not digging the public au revoir. In fact, I’m pretty certain he’ll write another book once he gets bored playing with his iPhone. According to the article, Roth has a post-it note on his computer that says, “The struggle with writing is over.” Why stop there, it sounds perfect for a headstone. “Writing is frustration — it’s daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It’s like baseball: you fail 2/3 of the time. I can’t face any more days when I write five pages and throw them away. I can’t do that anymore.”
Do you know why you write what you write. Why you write poems, or journalism, or humor, or blog posts? Or fiction or plays or articles or works of scholarship? Is it like wearing corduroys or blue blazers or ponchos or espadrilles? What made me turn to poems in the tenth grade, why did I trust them? What do people like unreliable first person narrators? Sometimes I think we have almost no control over what we choose to write: that it chooses us. But that sounds so douchy to me. When I was very young, I compared a field of corn stalks pushing through a bed of snow to a whiskery beard. My mother explained that I had made a simile. Did that Hallmark moment brand me? I like to think so, I like to think that I pleased my mother in that moment. And that I had a special relationship to poetry books, those anorexic volumes, with their visible secrets. If I was a mark, I was made.
There was an article in the paper the other day about how the 
Betsy Lerner 