One thing I learned from my recent “Intro to Fiction” class, where they teach the absolute basics of attempting to write fiction, and which I took as a last ditch effort to kick-start myself back into a writing mode, is that what ended up blocking me was “The Business.” Yesterday’s lesson was all about “the business” of writing, and as the teacher went on talking, and also including his own experiences in the business, I began to get increasingly angry, until the feeling was so awful I realized exactly what it was that ended up blocking me from doing any sort of writing for the last 3 and possibly 4 years. It was the relentless hardship — and, more importantly, jealousy — caused by wanting to be a published writer. It was the hardship, the jealousy, and probably a kind of life-despair — a feeling I had always hoped I’d never have: that I should have lived my life differently. I had a wacky old therapist, now dead, who used to say, “Thou shalt not should on thyself.” Shoulda woulda coulda. That’s what he says in the back of the taxi in “On The Waterfront.” I could’ve been a contender.
I could’ve been a contender. It’s what every drunk stooped over a beer in a bar says to the bartender or the guy sitting next to him. In Brando’s case — his character threw a fight which ended, forever, his boxing career. He had to for some reason I can’t remember. He had no choice. That’s why he is able to pin the blame on someone for the life he didn’t get.
For me, there is no single point like that, where I could blame my failure on a person or a day when I made the wrong choice. It’s something more along the lines of what Fran Leibowitz once said about the loss of so many gay men to AIDS: that the greatest artists (and the greatest audience) all died of aids because they were having a lot of sex. After them came the 2nd tier, 3rd tier, 4th tier. So in that scenario, because I didn’t die of AIDS, I am 4th tier.
Except I never really got past the first round of a televised contest. I’m not even sure I got into the contest. I’ve been watching Top Chef Seasons 9 through Infinity and the first people who are told to pack their knives and go almost always say that they didn’t have a chance to show themselves. Well, wrong. They did. They just lost. But along those lines, basically, I stood in line for hours to audition and never made it past the first gate keeper.
In my case, there’s several additional issues that I think maybe other, younger, writers don’t have to face. And I’ll get to that.
This is the “homework” I wrote for our last class, which I thought we were meant to turn in. But it turned out it was for our benefit only, so I made it a tiny bit longer than 500 words.
GWW homework for 6/17
Although I’ve been ridiculously busy in the last year for a reason very similar to your story “My Mother Eternally Reheats Her Coffee,” the class illuminated several things for me that I probably was never able to consciously grasp since I developed writers block about 3 years ago.
This block didn’t happen suddenly. I was taking novel workshop courses with Susan Breen for a number of years and I had about 70 pages drafted of a novel I titled, “People I Don’t Talk To Anymore.” But I started slowing down – coming up with fewer and fewer pages until my last submission when I only turned in about five pages. After that I gave up and I had no idea why.
But in the class I realized that “The business” of writing caused me a great deal of anger, stress and something I didn’t want to admit: the monster of jealousy which, for me, is a feeling worse than guilt or remorse, and probably something I suppress if I ever feel it. Gore Vidal claimed to have said, “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” I had always wanted to believe something more Buddhist about myself, like, “A friend’s happiness is a blessing.” Proust wrote extensively about jealousy, but he also took it as something that helped intensify love – that enhanced competitiveness and focused our desires. Maybe it does, but for me it is a terrible feeling and leaves me feeling depressed – even more than someone who doesn’t like my work. It makes me physically sick.
I also realized from a remarkably small comment, that people will interpret actions in exactly the way they want to interpret them, whether or not there is anything on the page or even, sometimes, in contradiction to what is written on the page. In this case it was a throw-away line the protagonist made about a former “utterly forgettable partner.” Many people interpreted the partner’s action as a loving action, without knowing anything about the partner. This, I realized, meant that they did not trust the protagonist to be telling them the truth, which meant that to them, he was an untrustworthy narrator. That was not my intention. That’s something I wouldn’t have picked up four years ago because most people can’t tell you when their own ethics or morality are playing a role in how they interpret what they read. At the same time, it is much much easier to recognize your own experience in someone else’s story, as was the case with “My Mother Eternally Reheats…” In my case, it’s my friend’s freezer full of ice cream which she insists we are not allowing her to eat.
The 3rd thing I realized over the course is that one, or I at least, must absolutely have a place to go, away from my apartment, without interruptions – meaning the cellphone. Any work I was able to do I achieved by disconnecting and even shutting off all the lights except the ones I needed. At an old writers’ space where I used to work (it’s still there, having survived the Covid shutdown), someone who was making comments on a new renovation it had undergone, complained that there were not enough nooks and crannies. “Writers,” she said, “like nooks and crannies.” And she was right. The other thing it didn’t have and which they installed after my suggestion, were side panels that could flip out, kind of like the sun visors in cars, in order to prevent peripheral movement from distracting you.
The one thing they had an endless problem with was the God damned fucking cellphone, and I think that’s because somehow the cellphone has entered our consciousness as something that’s necessary – required – for our safety and for emergencies. It doesn’t matter that there was a time when the cellphone didn’t exist or that, during the great depression, a lot of people didn’t even have a phone. I remember some boys who were horsing around stole a boat in City Island and took it out into the bay around City Island and were trying to take it over to that island where the city buries the unidentified bodies. The potter’s field of NYC. Well they capsized and drowned – I think maybe one of the boys managed to swim to the potter’s field island. The big stink in the newspapers was that there was no cell phone coverage in the bay and that the city was to blame. Little blame was assigned to the young thieves.
In any event, I think “detaching” from one’s phone is going to become, if it’s not already, an aspect of writing.