For a long time, I tried to figure out how I was going to get started as a writer. I knew that a writer was what I wanted to be—though it wasn’t clear exactly why. Surely it was in part because I was certain I’d never be very good at anything else. But how was I going to get started?
All right, I’d done some writing. I’d composed some essays for my college classes and those had been received well enough. But assigned writing wasn’t really writing. Writing, I thought then (I was about twenty I suppose), was something you did because you wanted to do it, maybe because you had to do it. It was a form of self-expression and it was self-initiated, not commanded by anyone else. Writers were “self-begot, self-raised, by [their] own quick’ning power.” Or so I believed.
I began carrying a notebook with me everywhere I went. I was waiting for lightning to strike. And sometimes something did strike. Though on examination it always proved to be something that didn’t really qualify as lightning. I’d get an idea for a story, some lines for a poem, a concept for a movie script (I wasn’t particular; I’d start anywhere). But then I’d think about it. This? This is going to be the first entry in my writer’s notebook? This is how I’m going to get my start as a writer? It’s too thin, too clichéd, too boring, too trite, too something or other. This can’t possibly be the way I’m going to start.
Is it possible that I was thinking of posterity? Could I have conceivably believed that future scholars would find my first scratchings and connect them to my later work? Maybe I was thinking of Keats, whose juvenilia has traveled with him through literary history like a broken can on the tail of a dog. Vanitas. Vanitas. I had a bad case of it. What more is there to say?
But how bad could these early ideas of mine have been? I can show you, because as it turns out I remember one. It came in the form of a “poem.” I concocted it sitting on the front steps of my parents’ house in Melrose, Massachusetts. And on first consideration, I thought it pretty darned good. I had my notebook with me at the time. (I had my notebook with me at all times.) I even had a writing implement, a pencil as I recall. I reached into my pocket, pulled out the notebook, which was not imposingly made. It was not a leather number with my name engraved on the front, or even one of the sternly bound black items they sold at the bookstore of my college, where they were much in demand (for many of my contemporaries were poets; some were visionaries). No, mine was a much-sat-on pocket-sized once-royal-blue notebook, with a spring across the top that had sprung loose and looked like a strand of unkempt hair from a very curly head. Had it been red, it would have been a spring of Raggedy Ann’s. My pencil was a pencil.
I drew forth the notebook and flourished the pencil and there, sitting on the doorstep of my parents’ home in Melrose, I took a long breath and tried to begin to begin as a writer. It was just before dinner. The sun was more out than not, but it had put in a solid day’s workmanlike performance and was ready to set; the grass had been cut (though not by me—allergies and indolence); and the birds from the cemetery down the street were gathering (they must have been, since they did this every fair-weathered day at the same time) in a massive oak tree beyond the cemetery wall, a tree that no doubt knew the secrets of the ages, having seen (maybe) Pilgrims and Indians and even a stray Salem witch or two.
Nature held its breath, or at least I did. I looked down, addressed the blank page, the white ghost-like page that haunts writers, or haunted them constantly until its job was taken by the screen of a computer that contains inside it news of the world, sports clips, pornography, and many other diversions: I addressed the page and I wrote absolutely nothing. That’s what I wrote: nothing.
And it’s not hard to understand why. What I had in mind was a poem. It was an untitled poem, inspired probably by all the existentialist philosophy and fiction I had been reading in college. The poem, or anti-poem, or non-poem (yes, I think that’s it), ran this way: “There is a deity at the essence / of which, of what, I know not. / Only this: that the essence is lost.”
Somehow I was both very proud of having concocted this and fully aware that it was abstract, boring (if you can be boring in three lines you truly have a gift) and ridiculously pretentious. Yet I was proud of it. And yet I knew it was vile. Knowledge defeated narcissism—and I wrote: nothing. A few days later the empty notebook disappeared and beyond school essays, which were tough for me to compose as it was, I wrote nothing for oh, two or three years.
The moral of this story is pretty clear. I should have torpedoed my doubts and written my pompous lines. I should have made those words my beginning and the hell with it. Starting takes guts. It usually means putting something down, looking in the mirror that is judgment, finding yourself ugly, and living with it. If a fool would persist in his folly he would grow wise, Blake says. And sometimes he is right. But I looked and I was scared and I ran away like the timid kid in the horror movie who manages to get slashed or gobbled up anyhow. I went cold and icy and dead. He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence, Blake also says. I ducked down that day and bred a little pestilence in myself, the pestilence that comes from wanting to do something worthwhile and being too timid to stay at it.
It’s surprising how rarely accomplished writers are willing to talk about their initial efforts. Or maybe it’s not: sprinters are never game to tell you how hard it was for them to learn to walk. Robert Frost tells a melodious story about how he “made” his first poem. He spent all day making it he says. He became so transfixed that he was late to his grandmother’s for dinner. “Very first one I wrote I was walking home from school and I began to make it—a March day—and I was making it all afternoon and making it so I was late at my grandmother’s for dinner. I finished it, but it burned right up, just burned right up, you know.”
It’s well told. (Frost always tells his stories well.) But it smacks a bit too much of the Immaculate Conception for me. I like Frost’s other earthier story of where his poems come from. It’s as though, he says, you’re walking down the street in your hometown and coming toward you is a fellow you’ve known all your life. You and he are fond enough of each other—though not too fond. What you usually do when you cross paths is to exchange insults. And this time you see him before he sees you, just a moment or so, and on the back of your tongue (I elabor-ate a bit here) there arises the taste of the most tangy, civilized but nasty insult you’ve ever conceived. And it feels good and when the time comes the delivery is a perfect strike. You score, 1–0: point, game, match. They tell you that you don’t have to score, Frost says. But you do. Today, with your insult you do. And that’s what it’s like to make a poem. “It’s him coming toward you that gives you the animus, you know. When they want to know about inspiration, I tell them it’s mostly animus.”
That day sitting on my parents’ porch, watching the grass go golden green in the twilight and aspiring to Keats-like thoughts, I imagined that writing came from the impulse toward sweetness and light. That’s the impulse Frost seems to attribute to himself in the first example. I wanted to summarize the world for the world and lament its sorry state in detached and compassionate terms. A deity at the essence! Alas, the essence is lost.
But I should have realized that writing doesn’t always come out of pure motives, at least not at the start. (Though I think that finally it’s best when it does.) Writing can be analogous to playful insult (or semiplayful), to invective, to curse, and to rant. Milton, Blake says, wrote best when he wrote from Satan’s vantage. The Puritan poet was of the devil’s party without knowing it. It’s necessary early on not to idealize the process too much, or to idealize yourself. (Though later on there’s room enough for high aspirations.) You want to get a sail up, even if it’s a ragged one, and plunge into the bay. I jumped in, Keats says. Rather than staying on shore and taking tea and comfortable advice, I jumped in and maybe made a bit of a fool of myself with Endymion. A critic named Croker laughed at Keats. But who has heard of Croker now, beyond knowing that Keats’s friend Hazlitt called him “the talking potato”?
I think that eventually writing should be about truth and beauty, right and justice and that it should seek to profit others more by far than the writer himself. But get in by any door you can. Keep composing the lachrymose sonnets, full speed ahead with the “proud bad verse” (Keats again, though from the later, better Fall of Hyperion). Forward march with the inelegant essays; spring off the line on the first hut with the miserable rewrites of Les Miz. As long as you can in time recognize that they are bad and need work and that you must (and will) get better, you are triumphing. Virginia Woolf said that you should never publish anything before you are thirty anyhow. But get rolling now, even if you are thirteen (or seventy).
I wonder sometimes how many aspiring writers there are wandering around in writer limbo, hoping to make an august start, unwilling to touch pen to paper or finger to keyboard until they have achieved the inaugural mot juste, the Flaubertian word for just exactly right. I wish I could reach out to them and pat them on the shoulder and tell them it’ll be all right, and that there is no time for starting like now. Take some courage from me. Take some spirits. And if you’re truly desperate, I have some inaugural lines never really used that I offer gratis. Start with them if you want. “There is a deity at the essence…” From here, there is nowhere to go but up.
So how did I start? How did I get to the business of writing? I owe it to Hunter Thompson and to the invention of the electric typewriter. And oh yes, to drugs: I also owe it to drugs.
At a certain point in college I became enamored with the writing of Hunter S. Thompson. Thompson was the gonzo journalist par excellence who steamed himself up on drugs and wrote wild, scabrous, trenchant pieces on Richard Nixon, the Hells Angels, and other outlaws in American life. (Nixon and the Angels really do belong on the same page.) The archetypal photo of Thompson shows him bent like a vulture over his typewriter, long neck in a downward curl, bald head poised over what looks like a meal of bad meat but is really an exposé on Greedheads or that swine of a man and jabbering dupe of a president Richard Milhous Nixon. In his eulogy for Nixon he averred that the former president’s body should be burned in a trash bin.
Everywhere Thompson went in America he experienced fear and loathing and tried to create some, too, through the engine of his prose. He was a mannered fellow, actually a bit of a dandy, with his cigarette holder and his tinted yellow sunglasses and his bald dome before bald domes a la Michael Jordan became the thing. He looked manly, more manly almost than Hemingway, who did all he could to fuse writing (a lady’s parlor game, the fellas feared) with grand-safari masculinity. Hunter even had the right name: he pursued big game with the avidity of a trained woodsman.
He also spent much of his time high as a monkey, or at least his persona did. He suggested that without a closet full of drugs—uppers, downers, sliders, smackers, and blasters—there would be no writing from Hunter S. Thompson. He wrote the way Andretti drove a race car—full out, balls to the walls, into the wind. Later on I’d learn that Hunter was a bit of an eleven-year-old, living off and alone near Woody Creek, Colorado, getting high and shooting off guns and going wow. And I’d also learn that when he was just starting out as a writer, he spent his time copying page after page of Faulkner and other writers to see how it was done. Nothing especially gonzo about that.
But what my twenty-three-(or so)-year-old self got from Hunter Thompson was the image of a guy who fueled himself like an expensive engine with high-octane drugs, threw himself down in his writing chair like a bull rider hopping on the brahma, then opened the chute (which is to say wrote a word) and let the bucking start. Thompson (my Thompson) wrote the way Rocky Marciano fought. Full out, throwing everything he had into it until covered with sweat and maybe bleeding from the nose, he flung his hands over his head—victory!—and collapsed in a winner’s heap. The man went at it.
I was not Hunter Thompson to be sure. And even then I had an inkling that Hunter Thompson was not Hunter Thompson either. But I followed his lead, or what I imagined to be his lead, and threw myself into writing sessions the way I had thrown myself into playing football: all out, head up, and body on the fly into the tide of the oncoming.
I had a Hunter Thompson sort of subject at my disposal, too. I was working as a stagehand and security guy at rock shows outside of New York City at the time and my life was full of rock bands and drugs and bikers and girls who stood up in the crowd partially clothed and danced to the music the way serpents do to the charmer’s pipes. I’d seen riots and backstage fistfights and a knifing (maybe). I’d watched (from under the safety of the stadium eaves) as a Hispanic street gang heaved down lumps of concrete on my front-gate security crew, like the denizens of a medieval town fighting off attackers. (Get under the eaves, you dopes!) We had refused to let the gang in for free (or I had), even though the concert was taking place on their turf and so they were expressing their sentiments. To complete my Hunter Thompson experiential bacchanal, the Hells Angels turned up for our Grateful Dead shows. One show got canceled because of foul weather even though it said “rain or shine” on the back of the tickets. The Deadheads rioted. (One would have thought they were too stoned to manage anything as active as rioting, but they proved proficient at it.) The Angels ascended to biker heaven when it became clear they were expected to put down the riot through any means they wished. The image of a large Angel standing at the front of the stage urinating down on the Deadheads clambering to get up and destroy Jerry Garcia and his guitar and steal his drugs (presumably) is one I won’t forget and one that seemed sent by the gods when, a few weeks later, I sat up late in my linoleum-floored room on West 187th Street, up near the George Washington Bridge, trying to get it all down.
I pulled a complete pseudo–Hunter Thompson. I opened an envelope full of white powder—which might as well have been talc from the pool room, so potent were the powers of suggestion alive in the air—laid out a long sequence of lines, turned on the electric that had been willed to me by my writer buddy Michael Pollan, and I went to work. I wrote for seven hours running—Thompson hours—flying full force, headlong breakneck, amok in drug and sports imagery. I did not stop typing except to roll in another slice of yellow paper. I hit the keys so hard I blew holes in the yellow sheaves where the o’s should have been. It must have sounded like an all-night gun battle.
And from time to time I’d look down as if from a great height and say to myself, “I’m writing. I’m writing. I am writing!” It was like learning to ride a bike. It was like nailing three-pointers one after the next from the corner. It was like getting the hang of sex—if one ever gets the hang of sex. It was like magic.
I was so happy with what I’d done that a few days later, after a cursory redraft, I sent the manuscript—spilled on, fat, and sloppy as a pile of old bills—to George Plimpton at the Paris Review. (Michael and I had taken turns working there, basically failing to sell ads for that distinguished journal.) I knew for certain that Plimpton would love it. He’d been into the experiential journalist thing before Thompson even, though he was a bit too much of a white man—Exeter, Harvard, Hasty Pudding—for my newly fledged wild self. I did not think much about the response that was coming from Plimpton. I more or less figured that after my burst, publication was a done deal. I could now get some more ideas and write more.
What had happened? How had I finally—if a bit absurdly—done the thing I so much wanted to do and could not? How had I managed to begin, or at least begin to begin? Well, I’d made myself into something like a battering ram—a heavy, fast-moving force—and I’d rammed my way through my inhibitions. The inhibitions were a well-made, heavily cemented wall of rocks and even boulders. I was quite simply afraid that my stuff would be terrible. I was afraid that I’d see that I had no talent. I was afraid that deprived of my writing ambition I’d have no other ambition remaining and be left wandering in the void.
So it took a lot of horsepower—some of it manufactured, some of it absurd—to break through. I had to pretend to be a guy I was not. And from what I could tell, he himself spent a good deal of time working on his gonzo persona, pretending to be a guy he was not. I had to counterfeit a counterfeit. I also needed the audience of my two roommates who stayed half-awake that night in awe of my amazing dedication to the craft. And the drugs! Later on in grad school I’d settle for coffee to get my writing done—so much of it that in time it part ruined my stomach. But this time I needed the devil’s dandruff, as Robin Williams illuminatingly called it. Though I expect it was more the outlaw feeling of cutting those lines and laying them out that amped me than the drug itself. My roommates turned up their noses at it—which meant it was poor quality indeed. And perhaps it was truly nothing but talcum powder. (But coke: a deathtrap. We didn’t know that then, so stay away!) To write what I thought to be the truth (my truth!) I needed fictions, fabulations, creative swerves from reality, dreams! But I started writing that night and from then on knew I could at least participate in the game. I might never be a writer like Hunter Thompson, but I would write.
So many young aspiring writers out there—or older or simply old straight out—escape the trap of silence any way they can. One guy I know did it by putting a woman’s name at the top of the page and running free; one by dictating his tales; one by three days’ meditation preliminary to the first, first draft; another by putting the pencil in his left hand, his off hand, and grinding it out. To get started you can use any means necessary, though crazier means probably won’t work over the long run. Pretend, pretend, pretend, if you have to, in order to get to the real.
You’re breaking out of jail. If you do it digging with a spoon, that’s fine; if you trick the guard that’s OK, too; maybe you simply have some rich friend buy the dungeon and turn you out. By any means necessary. Because once you’re out, you’re out. A toast to you—my hand greets yours.
The rock-and-roll piece? A month later I got a letter back from George Plimpton beginning with the words: “It’s not very good. At least not publishable.” I walked around in misery for a while, feeling as put-upon and resentful as the Count of Monte Cristo when he left the dungeon after the years of wrongful imprisonment. But like the Count I also felt free. I was out and I was on my own. I was writing.
And Plimpton was wrong (give or take). My riff about the Grateful Dead show and the Angels anti-riot rioting did get published, albeit after a bit of revision and some patient reconsidering. It’s in the first chapter of what in many ways is my favorite of my books, The Fine Wisdom and Perfect Teachings of the Kings of Rock and Roll. So what if it took thirty years to see the light of publication!
Often a benign invisible hand presides over these matters. Hey, there’s a deity at the essence, right?