KEEPING THE FUN IN WRITING
October 1989
This past spring I spent an hour that will, I trust, pay off handsomely in terms of my spiritual growth and development. My wife and I were guests at Mohonk Mountain House a couple of hours north of New York, where Don and Abby Westlake were conducting their annual mystery weekend. A year earlier Lynne and I had attended as suspects, playing roles in the emerging mystery plot and submitting to grilling by the relentless guests. This year we were back in an even more exalted capacity, that of Freeloader. We toiled not, neither did we spin, but boy did we eat.
The crew of suspects and hangers-on at a Mohonk Mystery Weekend always includes a generous handful of writers, most of them notables in the mystery-suspense field. In the course of the weekend, three or four of these worthies are called upon to give hour-long talks to the assembled guests. Then, on Saturday afternoon, all of the celebrated writers make themselves available in the lounge, where guests can bring books for autographing. A generous selection of books by all the guest authors is on display throughout the weekend in the hotel’s gift shop, so books to be autographed are by no means hard to come by.
At the appointed hour, we all of us assembled in the lodge and seated ourselves at separate tables, waiting for book-bearing guests to descend on us. We were, I must say, a reasonably distinguished crew. The Westlakes were on hand, of course. So were Christopher Newman, author of several well-received New York police novels, including Sixth Precinct; Mary Higgins Clark, author of A Stranger Is Watching and other bestselling thrillers; William Bayer, author of Peregrine and Pattern Crimes; and, borne all the way on wings of glasnost and perestroika, Julian Semyonov, the Soviet Union’s Robert Ludlum, author of Tass Is Authorized to Announce.
There was also a chap from Maine who has made something of a name for himself writing horror novels.
Well, let me tell you. I’ve had humbling experiences in my time. Indeed, it sometimes seems as though my life has been specifically designed as a whole series of humbling experiences. But this one copped the biscuit.
In the course of the hour, perhaps half a dozen good people came up to me with books for me to sign. About the same number more or less presented themselves to Bill Bayer and Chris Newman. Mary and the Westlakes drew a few more, and there may have been two dozen people in all queueing up for Julian.
I’m not sure of these numbers. I wasn’t counting. What I was mostly doing was staring open-mouthed at the line the fellow from Maine had drawn.
It ran all around the room and down the hall and, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn, out the building. It moved quickly, because the fellow doing the signing was pretty quick with a pen, but even so the line seemed inexhaustible. The hour for autographing ended at 5 o’clock, but the lad from Bangor stayed where he was, signing hundreds upon hundreds of books, until past 5:30.
I had never seen the like. But others who had were quick to assure me that what I had witnessed was nothing out of the ordinary. It’s always like this, they said, when Stephen King does a signing.
Of course Stephen King is an enormously popular writer, and deservedly so. He has essentially created modern horror fiction as a commercial category. All of his books sell in the millions. He is enormously productive, and his fans wish he wrote twice as fast as he does.
Even so, this somehow fails to explain that endless line of autograph seekers. Mary Higgins Clark is also immensely popular, with her every novel an immediate entrant onto the bestseller list, but she doesn’t have King’s astonishing crowd appeal, which seems to me to extend beyond the books themselves. The people in that line wanted the books, but they wanted something more. They wanted to carry a piece of the author home with them.
I know of one other writer who elicits a similar response among book buyers. When he is available to sign books, people turn out in droves; other writers, witnessing the phenomenon, grind their teeth down to nubbins.
The author in question is Isaac Asimov.
What do these two gentlemen have in common? They’re both successful, to be sure, and hugely popular. Both are extremely personable fellows, although I don’t know that most of the folks seeking their autographs would know this, or not until they got to the front of the line.
I can think of one unusual quality the two writers share. Both of them absolutely love to write. They are pure fools for writing. It’s a source of pure joy to them, and they’d rather do it than anything else.
Can it be that simple?
I do not want for a moment to suggest that that is all there is to it, that if you enjoy your work others will enjoy it, and vice versa. That’s simply not true. There are quite a few writers I could name who find writing a painful chore, who have to force themselves to their desks each morning, and who liken the whole creative process metaphorically to the sweating of blood. And many of them do very well, and the books that provide them with so little pleasure are a source of considerable enjoyment for a legion of loyal readers.
Conversely, there are at least as many writers who take unremitting delight in the hours they spend at their desks, getting no end of pleasure and satisfaction from the pastime of putting words on paper, whose work is unfortunately pleasurable to no one but themselves. There are those of us who hate writing but who nevertheless write like angels, and there are those of us who love it but who haven’t the talent to write our names in the dirt with a stick. It doesn’t seem fair, but then what does?
All that notwithstanding, I must say that I don’t think it coincidental that Stephen King and Isaac Asimov love to write. I suspect that their delight and enthusiasm is somehow instilled in what they write and somehow communicates itself to their readers, touching off a corresponding delight and enthusiasm not only for the books but also for their authors.
I don’t want to belabor this point. I don’t even want to argue that the first step in getting other people to enjoy your work is to enjoy it yourself. Let me merely suggest that experiencing the act of writing as pleasurable rather than painful would probably do us no harm in the marketplace, and might even do us some good.
Even if it didn’t, you’d think we’d already have every incentive to enjoy it. We seem to be stuck with it anyway, sentenced to spend the rest of our lives making up stories and jotting them down. If writing is inevitable, why not sit up and enjoy it?
In other arts, such an argument would probably not be necessary. Painters love to paint. Musicians love to make music. Why should scribbling or tapping a keyboard be more agonizing and less pleasurable than rinsing out a brush or blowing through a reed?
I think the answer, or a good part of it, lies in our propensity to get fixated upon the ultimate result of our work and to regard the actual process of writing as a means to an end, an arduous and time-consuming business that must be endured if we are to wind up with a finished book in our hands. With our eyes so firmly fixed upon the far horizon, how can we possibly take delight in the journey itself?
For an actor or a musician, the process is really all there is. When it is finished, nothing remains other than what lingers in the mind and memory of the audience. The sonata and the soliloquy echo for an instant and are gone. (This is not altogether true if the performance has been filmed or recorded, which may help explain why many performers find less pure joy in film than in stage work, in recording sessions than in live performance.)
For a painter, the canvas is transformed bit by bit from a blank expanse into a finished work. Throughout, the artist can look upon the emerging whole even as he concentrates on the particular. The work on a given day may go well or poorly, but in any event the artist is involved with the process.
There’s something different about a book. The process is a lot less demonstrably fascinating. A painter in a public place invariably draws a crowd, but it’s hard to imagine anyone getting much satisfaction out of observing a writer at work. The writer himself can’t really see how he’s doing, or get a real look at the emerging work. All I can really tell is that I’m making progress, and I can determine this by watching the stack of finished pages to the left of my typewriter mount ever higher. (Folks with word processors don’t even have this for reassurance; they have to take it on faith that an ever-increasing number of words is stored somewhere in the mysterious recesses of their machines. Some writers have taken to printing out each day’s work at the day’s end, not so much because they have any real use for words on paper at that stage but because they need tangible evidence of their progress on a daily basis.)
Whether or not we print out as we go along, the fact remains that a book is not a book until it’s finished, and for many of us it isn’t really a book until it’s printed and bound and somebody’s actually reading it. Our pleasure is thus postponed until long after the work itself has been completed, and even then we can’t find much enjoyment in it, because by the time one book is out, it’s out of mind as well; we’re busy working on a new one, and hating it.
Is there a way out of this?
I think there is. The trick consists of becoming as completely involved as possible in the process of writing and correspondingly less concerned with the future. In a sense, this may be as simple (and as tricky) as staying focused in the present and taking the book one day at a time.
For my own part, I can say that I’ve enjoyed writing more during the past couple of years, and that this seems to be the result of allowing myself to enjoy the process.
This is not to say that I have grown less eager to complete what I’ve started. I’m writing my books as rapidly as ever, and I begin each writing day with a goal in mind, a specific number of pages I intend to complete before calling it quits for the day. I don’t really know that I do anything differently these days. Whatever change there is seems to be largely attitudinal. More and more, I find I’m able to enjoy the act of writing. Not just the magical creative bursts, when whole pages compose themselves at the speed of light and all I have to do is type them out. But also the more tedious times, when the brain seems to be composed of Jell-O and words flow like sludge. And, sometimes, I can even experience something close to pleasure when one false start follows another, and I rewrite the same damned scene time and time again, until the wastebasket overflows while the stack of finished pages stays the same.
All of this is part of the process. All of this is writing. And all of this leads, eventually, to the moment when someone plucks the finished book from the shelf and carts it off to the cash register.
All of it, too, is something that can involve me totally, something that can take me magically out of the prison of self and let me fly away on wings of thought, on gossamer strands of words. My God, if I can’t enjoy that, what can I enjoy?
I’m writing these lines in a friend’s house in the Poconos. I’ve been here for almost a week. It’s spring, and the weather’s gorgeous, and in the late afternoon a herd of deer comes within 20 yards or so of our windows. I finished a book two months ago, and I’ll be starting the next one in August, so all I really have to do is enjoy the weather and the deer and the fresh air.
I’ve been going nuts. Everything’s fine in my life, and I’ve been anxious or depressed for the past ten days or so. Sometimes both at once.
I don’t know why, and I’m not sure it matters. Part of it very likely derives from the fact that I’ve been agonizing over the book I want to start in August. I know a little about the book, and I spent a few weeks in New York scouting locations and doing background research, but I don’t know anything yet about the plot or the characters. And of course I’m afraid that, come August, I’ll be holed up in a writers’ colony with a fresh ream of bond paper and a dozen film cartridges for my typewriter and no book to write.
It’s happened before. It could happen again.
On the other hand, there’s nothing intrinsically alarming about the idea of not knowing in April what I’m going to be writing in August. I don’t have that much advance information about other aspects of my life. Why should my writing be different? I have to have faith while I’m writing a book that it will all make sense at the end. Why can’t I have similar faith beforehand, when I’m getting ready to write a book?
For the most part, I do. It’s when I don’t that I have weeks like this.
And maybe they’re necessary, maybe they’re part of my own particular creative process. Last night, after a couple of days of abject moping, of sleeping all day and reading all night and being such rotten company that even the deer were beginning to avoid me, I Got An Idea. It’s just an idea, it’s not an entire plot, but it’s the kind of idea that feels right, the sort that seems likely to develop to the point where, by the time I’m encased in my studio in August, I’ll know what to write.
If I ever really get the hang of this, I’ll learn to enjoy all of it. Not just the time I spend at the typewriter. Not just the part when the idea begins to form and the plot and characters take shape. But the whole thing, the whole kit and caboodle. Including the depression and the anxiety and the days when I think I’ve written my last book and the nights when it all seems hopeless.
Because it’s all part of being a writer, and all part of the process of writing. And that’s all I really wanted when I first signed on for this voyage, years and years ago, and, when all is said and done, it’s still all I really want.
So it looks as though I might as well learn to enjoy it.