A NOVELIST TAKES TO THE ROAD, AND
WRITES BY NOT WRITING.
July 1988
Good morning, boys and girls.
Good morning, sir.
And what a glorious morning it is! Here I am, standing up in front of you and conducting this class (or, if you want to be painfully literal about it all, sitting at my desk writing this column) on the morning of Super Bowl Sunday. The sun here in Fort Myers Beach is shining brightly enough to gladden the hearts of the tourists, not to mention the local Chamber of Commerce. As they say in the cat food commercials, it doesn’t get a whole lot better than this.
By the time you read this, however, some of you may have to stop and think for a minute to recall who won the Bronco-Redskin face-off this afternoon. And Fort Myers Beach will long since have faded in my rear-view mirror. Four days from now, we’re out of here. We’re taillights. We are, like, gone.
Where are you going, sir?
Anywhere and everywhere, Rachel. But I suppose that’s a little vague. That’s not entirely inappropriate—our plans are deliberately vague, in order to allow plenty of room for the unexpected, but we have a fair idea of what’s on our immediate agenda, albeit it’s subject to change without notice.
When we leave here Thursday morning we’ll be heading north as far as Buffalo, Alabama. (We’re collecting Buffaloes this trip. I was born in Buffalo, New York, and there are a lot of other towns in America named Buffalo, most of them the merest dots on the map, and we want to see how many we can get to. Don’t ask why.) Then we’ll cut down to Mobile, and then up to Meridian, Mississippi, to check out the Jimmie Rodgers museum, and then across to Natchez, and then down through Buffalo, Texas, to visit a friend in Austin. And on into New Mexico to see kin in Roswell and Albuquerque, and on to Santa Fe and to Denver, where we’ll be taking a seminar.
Then we fly to New York to participate in the Mohonk Mystery Weekend Donald Westlake produces every year. Then off to Egypt for a two-week spiritual retreat on the Nile. Then back to Albuquerque to pick up the car and a quick trip west to Sedona, Arizona. Then back to Santa Fe, where well conduct a two-day Write for Your Life seminar at Sunrise Springs. Then out to Anaheim, California, for the American Booksellers Association convention, and then—
Sir?
Yes, Arnold?
I hate to bring this up, sir, but the question does arise.
I’ll bet it does.
So I’ll ask it. When are you going to be doing your writing, sir?
Ah. I’m glad you asked me that. (There was a President once who said that to give himself time to think of an answer.) But I really am grateful for the question, because it’s one a great many people have been asking me upon hearing about the trip, and it gives me a chance to make a point.
I’ll be writing all the time.
Or, more accurately, I’ll be pursuing and advancing my writing career all the time. Because, the way things stand right now, the best thing I can do for myself as a writer is what I’m setting out to do—going new places, seeing old and new people, taking seminars, expanding psychic and spiritual horizons, and letting all those elements flow into me that will, sometime in the future, find expression in something I come to write.
When will I do my work? This is my work—to recharge those creative batteries that have been quite properly exhausted in my work to date. Or, to vary the metaphor slightly, there is a time to drive and a time to fill the gas tank. You don’t reach your destination faster by running on empty; indeed, you may not get there at all.
Sometimes the most important thing a writer can do is write.
This is most often the case at the onset of one’s writing career. Many of us start out not so much wanting to write as wanting to be writers, and published writers at that. I had a note the other day from a friend of a friend, explaining that he was 40 pages into his first novel and wanting to know what agent to send it to. He had no prior writing experience, he had ten or fifteen percent of the book done, and he was in a rush to get it sold. I told him to finish the book first, and this was by no means what he was hoping to hear.
For most of us, the thing to do when we’re starting out is to write. It scarcely matters what we write, or how well we write, and it certainly doesn’t much matter what we do with what we write. In fact, the less we focus on the whole idea of publication, the better off we probably are. What’s important is that we write a lot, and on a daily basis.
But there are other times when too strict a focus on production is an impediment to growth. Writing every day keeps one writing much the same thing every day.
An example from my own career comes readily to mind. I spent my first several years as a writer turning out soft-core sex novels for a couple of paperback houses. I produced a lot—a book a month minimum, and sometimes as many as 20 books a year—and I can see now that I was using the quantity of my work to keep me from focusing on the quality of my work. As long as I was producing salable pages every day, I didn’t have to try something more ambitious with the attendant risk of failure and embarrassment. The more I wrote, the less opportunity I gave myself to grow and develop and extend my success.
If I had any doubts about what I was doing, I told myself I had no real choice, that I needed the sure money that was mine if I wrote what I knew I could sell. I have since seen a great many writers make this kind of choice at one or another stage of their careers; they tell themselves they can’t afford to take risks, or to write less, or to stop writing one kind of book and move on to another, because they need the money.
Similarly, I watched a friend of mine use that sort of excuse to avoid being a writer altogether. The author of several published novels, he kept insisting he wanted to quit his hated job in advertising and write full-time. His wife finally made him believe she meant it when she said they could both live on her salary while he established himself as a writer; the next thing you knew, they were expecting a baby. As soon as she was ready to function as a working mother, and once again prepared to support the family while he got going as a freelance writer, he moved them all from an affordable apartment to an expensive house in the suburbs. He kept insisting that financial considerations kept him from taking the plunge, but in point of fact he kept creating financial considerations to keep himself safely out of the pool.
There’s a process we sometimes recommend at the Write for Your Life seminar. You do it every night before going to bed. At the top of a sheet of paper you write: Five Things I Did Today to Advance My Writing Career. And then you list them.
The point of this process is two-fold. First, it lets you acknowledge yourself for actions you’ve taken during the day on your own behalf as a writer. This is always valuable, but it is especially so on days when nothing got written. The poisonous guilt with which we afflict ourselves on nonwriting days is lifted somewhat when we allow ourselves to see that we have indeed been busy as writers, even if no words got on the page.
Second, the process allows you to program yourself subconsciously; during the day, a part of your mind is busy leading you to perform actions that will belong on the list you’ll be making that night. Thus you’re that much more likely to do things to advance your writing career.
Sometimes you’ll have the sort of list Isaac Asimov would be proud of:
On other occasions your list will require more in the way of imagination, and calling it things to advance your writing career may seem like the best fiction you’ve written all day:
The point is that, on the worst of days, you will have taken some positive actions (or avoided some negative actions) on behalf of your career and identity as a writer. Decided not to smash my typewriter. Thought about killing myself but didn’t. I have had days when these items would have been on my list, and a good thing, too; where would my career as a writer be otherwise?
Writing, like just about everything else, is a holistic pursuit. You don’t do it just with your fingertips. You use your entire body and mind and spirit. And you don’t do it just when you’re putting words on paper. You do it every minute of every hour. If you are a writer, you are literally writing whenever you are being yourself. And, of course, the more completely you are being yourself, the more effectively you are writing.
When will I write during my travels? All the time, obviously. And when will words get onto the page?
I don’t know. Some words will get onto some pages once a month when I write this monthly letter to all of us. The typewriter will be in the trunk of the car, and barring bumpy roads it will continue to function. And, bumpy roads or no, so will I.
It is my sense that it will be a while before I’m ready to write my next novel. Random Walk drained my batteries, and it seems nothing less than appropriate to let them draw a long charge. But at the same time I have come to know that changes happen very quickly sometimes, and that books can suggest themselves at a moment’s notice. When it’s time to write the next book, I’ll probably know it; knowing it, I’ll probably do it.
In the meantime, I’ve got things to do. There are a lot of Buffaloes out there.