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WRITING SUCKS
The first thing you need to know is that writing sucks.
It’s horrible.
Expect it to suck. It’s meant to.
Here’s what writing is not like: You sit under a tree with a moleskin notebook and a fountain pen, so engrossed in your brilliance and so enthused by your project that your hand can’t keep up with your scintillating mind. You are so delighted, thrilled and amazed by your ideas, perfect flow and searing insights that you forget to eat and don’t even hear your phone ring: you miss a call from your publisher – she’s offering you a six-figure advance for the manuscript you sent her yesterday. You didn’t expect her to get back to you for at least three weeks, because she’s on holiday enjoying a drug-induced coma in Switzerland. (Yes, that’s how publishers take holidays. All publishers. Don’t ask me how I know.) But your manuscript was so riveting she sensed it from deep within her soul; the power of your genius pulled her out of her pharmaceutically assisted unconsciousness and compelled her to unstitch her sutured eyes, rip the tape off her mouth, pull out the IV, chew through the straps restraining her, fish her phone out of her bag, find your number and call to say, ‘Money is no object!’
Ah, no. Writing is not like that.
Writing is awful. It’s like pulling teeth. Your own teeth.
Once, in the back of one of those little white transfer vans writing festivals use to pick up ‘the talent’ (or, as I call them, the meat puppets) from the airport and drive them to their accommodation, I was sitting next to prolific author Shane Maloney. We started chatting, and I asked him, ‘Would you prefer to read or write?’
He turned to me with a look of horror. ‘Write?’ he gasped. ‘Prefer to write? I would rather dig a six-foot trench through turds with my tongue than write.’
Well, that was awkward.
‘Prefer to write?’ he repeated as he shook his head while rolling his eyes. ‘Prefer to write …’
He spent the rest of the journey staring out the window muttering, rolling his eyes and scoffing in my general direction.
This was a few years back. I emailed Shane to ask if he minded me quoting him. I put the email subject as ‘Feel free to tell me to fuck off’. This was his response:
Dear Catherine,
Fuck off.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, no probs about quoting me, but our memories vary slightly. If I recall righter than your good self, I quoted and concurred with Thomas Harris (Silence of the Lambs, etc) – ‘I’d rather dig 6ft of trench with my bare fingernails than ever write another word.’ No tongue or turds required. In fact, tonguing turds seems easier, if more nauseating, than trench scrabbling.
It’s the big stuff – a 90,000 word novel – a massive structure of plot lines, multiple characters, dialogue, sustained pace, ultimate reconciliation of threads, grand finale, etc that really do my head in. More than once, mid-novel I have felt like I am trying to clearfell a forest with half a brick. But like Bismarck and his sausages, the process does not bear examination.
Cheers
Shane
I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and conf ident.
ANNE LAMOTT
Dorothy Parker said, ‘I hate writing but I love having written.’ Snap! I know exactly how she feels.
I hate writing this. Now. This thing I am writing to encourage you to write.
You know what I would prefer to be doing? Anything.
I would rather be browsing Facebook, reading the paper, sleeping or even packing the dishwasher.
Actually, as I write this, I really want to be crumbing the schnitzels. I hate crumbing schnitzels. But the schnitzels are not going to crumb themselves and it’s raining, so I can’t be bothered riding down to buy pre-crumbed ones from the butcher, and even if I could, the kids would whinge because ‘they’re not as good as yours, Mum. And anyway,’ they’d ask, ‘Why were you so busy you couldn’t crumb them yourself? What were you doing that was so important? More drinking coffee and talking about your emotions?’ ‘If you must know, I’ve been writing a book to encourage people to sing from their hearts and not die with their music inside them. A book telling them writing is shit and torture. A book to sell to make money to buy the chicken for me to turn into schnitzels to shut you whingeing bags of shit up.’
And the schnitzels are just the start … Here is a short list of some of the thousands of things I would prefer to do than write this book:
Clean the pantry.
Run – even though it’s cold and raining and I have a sore knee.
Visit my grandmother (who has been dead for seven years and who I hated).
Tidy the backyard. (I don’t even know if we own a rake. Or a backyard.)
Go to the dentist.
Untangle all the cords behind the television.
Clean under the bed.
Have a colonoscopy.
Take the dog to the vet to check the weird scabby rash around his mouth, which he’s had for over two years (the dog, not the vet).
Do my tax for the last seven years.
You get the picture!
Even when you are a professional, writing sucks. When we say we have a passion for writing – that it’s the thing we most want to do in the entire world – you need to understand that actually we would rather clean out the sludge in the bottom of the vegetable crisper with our tongues than write. And then along you come, saying you want to write – even though you don’t know what it is you want to write! It reminds me of an old Jewish joke: Sol walks in on Abe having sex with his wife. Sol looks at him and says, ‘Abe, I have to, but you? Make a run for it while you still can! Save yourself!’
So, if it’s so hard and thankless, why do we write? Why do we feel this longing? What is this urge? This feeling that we need to write?
All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention.
GEORGE ORWELL
What is it that makes brilliant, prolific authors like Shane Maloney – who has written ten books and dozens of articles over almost fifty years and been translated into numerous other languages – keep writing despite the fact they would rather dig six-foot trenches with their fingernails?
I run. Go with me, people. I run. This comes as a surprise to most people, because I am a fairly voluptuous, size-16 wench who has what is known as a ‘reader’s physique’. But I run ten-kilometre charity runs twice a year. (Well, when I say ‘run’, let’s put it this way: little old ladies on walking frames overtake me. What we are really talking about is wearing running gear while walking, sweating, huffing and puffing, swinging my arms fast and coming home telling anyone who will listen that I have just come back from a run.) Between these ten-kilometre runs, I always slack off and get out of shape. I think: ‘I ran ten kilometres on Sunday morning and raised $17.30 for the Dogs With No Heads Foundation, so I’m sure no-one will judge me if I don’t run until two weeks before the next run, in six months’ time.’
Between runs, I don’t have a lot of motivation to keep up my running, because I’m hot. I have the opposite of body dysmorphia; every time I look in the mirror, I think, ‘Fuck, you’re gorgeous. I can’t believe you aren’t a model.’ And my boyfriend likes big bottoms and big boobs. So if I’ve been eating in the good paddock, getting stuck into the pies or spending quality time on the couch, all I get is encouragement: ‘Oh, lordy! Baby got back! That’s what I’m talking about! Bring that booty over here, baby! Then I’m taking you out for burgers and milkshakes!’ And despite how pudgy and out of shape I get, when I get back into training I invariably can run at least six kilometres with no problems on the first day. (Please keep in mind the little old ladies on walking frames.) Consequently, I own a wardrobe full of stretchy clothes that fit me whether I am size 12 or size 16.
Anyway, one day in winter I realised I was ten days away from one of these ten-kilometre runs. I’d put on my running gear and grabbed my iPod, but I couldn’t quite get out the door. My then ten-year-old son was watching tv. I stood in front of the television. ‘Charlie. Help me. I have to run. I have a ten-kilometre run in ten days and I haven’t run in five months. It’s raining, I’m hung-over and it’s the last thing I want to do but the thing I most should do. Say something to make me go on the run.’
Without taking his eyes off the screen, Charlie said, ‘Mum, imagine how good you’ll feel when you’ve finished.’
That’s it!
I run because it makes me feel better. My body feels better, my mind clearer, my heart lighter and I’m happier and less grumpy. Starting the day with some cardio makes me move faster for the rest of the day; I end up getting more done. But at the beginning, I always have to remind myself how good I will feel after a run. I even have a saying I repeat to myself: ‘No matter how slow you are going, you are lapping everyone on the couch.’ I first read it on a toilet wall. It’s true! But running is not really about other people – it’s about being better than the other ‘you’ who would choose to be on the couch.
It’s the same with writing.
Writing is about how good you’ll feel when you’ve finished.
Yes, I’ve told you that writing is horrible, thankless torture, but it’s also true that some of the greatest moments in my life have resulted from writing. In the process of writing, I find happiness, completeness, satisfaction, enlightenment, peace, insight, escape and triumph. Writing is time with just me and my words. It’s control. Yep, I love the control. I love being in my own world, able to write whatever I want.
But I never feel joyful when I start writing. And I’m not talking about when I began properly writing in my twenties. I mean any time I ever begin any writing session, including the one I started to write this chapter today. I do not know any professional writer who does. We just get on with it because we know how it makes us feel – eventually.
Motivation follows action. Don’t expect to bounce out of bed full of ideas and raring to go. Expect to feel sluggish and distracted. Expect your head to be full of dozens of things that were irrelevant or unimportant yesterday but that you now feel you must do immediately. Expect to feel like a fake, an imposter. Expect to feel like everyone will hate you and think your writing is shit. Expect to have to force yourself.
Okay, okay. Sometimes writing is fun. Sometimes it is the most magical, satisfying and empowering way you could spend your time. But you cannot expect it to always be like this. Most of the time it’s not. It’s gruelling. You cannot expect to ‘feel like’ writing or ‘enjoy’ writing, any more than you feel like or enjoy exercise, cleaning or getting your tax done.
Writing satisfies us.
You hear all this stuff these days about how to find happiness, but what about satisfaction? Let me tell you a story. A couple of women I knew had children at the same time as me. We decided to have a holiday when we stopped breastfeeding (our kids, not each other). So when the babies were all weaned, we went on a bit of a ‘Girls Gone Wild’ weekend to Queensland’s idyllic, tropical Hamilton Island. I said to myself, ‘Let yourself go this weekend. Eat and drink what you want. Spend what you want. Sleep in. Stay up late. Do whatever you want.’ So we landed in this warm tropical dream. It was magical. We had long boozy seafood lunches on the beach, drove around the island on a golf buggy, swam, snorkelled, and browsed in the shops. And we booked in for a group massage.
As I lay on the table enjoying the massage, enveloped by the blissful music, I thought, ‘You know, people always say, “If I won Tattslotto, I’d live on a tropical island, eat and drink what I pleased, go out for long lunches, swim, snorkel, have massages with my friends in the afternoon – that sort of thing.” And you know what? It’s nice. It’s pleasant. It’s enjoyable. But would doing this every day really make people happy? Does this make me really happy?’ I took a moment to think about what had really made me happy in the past. (Do keep in mind the dolphin/Enya/hypnotic ‘please buy our overpriced products on the way out’ soundtrack and the champagne in my system.) I closed my eyes and a montage of my happiest moments ran through my mind. Swimming twenty laps when I hadn’t thought I could push myself to get out of my nightie and to the pool. Making lasagne, soup and curry for a mate who was having a rough time. Finishing my tax return. Finding something that someone I know really wanted and was having trouble finding and popping it in the post. Writing that thing I didn’t think I could write. Doing that thing I didn’t think I could do. Having that conversation I didn’t think I could have. Finishing high school and then uni. Getting through that double shift when I was working as a waiter. Finally nailing those tricky chords and being able to play that song on guitar.
Satisfaction. Doing something meaningful. That’s what makes me happy. Champagne, massages, beachside lunches after shopping with the girls. Fun? Sure. Cliché? Absolutely. But they don’t make me feel satisfied – or truly, deeply happy.
When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.
KURT VONNEGUT
What Vonnegut describes above is normal. Expect writing to feel like that.
I’m going to keep saying this: if it were easy, everyone would do it.
It’s not easy, but it is simple.
Writing will make you strong and happy, I promise. And you can do it.
Turn the page. Go on, I dare you.