I
have this Ira Glass quote stuck on my cork board (or, as my inside voice
wankily calls it, ‘the inspiration station’):
“Nobody tells this to
people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative
work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the
first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good,
it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the
game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot
of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do
interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t
have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if
you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its
normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put
yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only
by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work
will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do
this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take a while. It’s normal to take a
while. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
Ira
Glass has obviously never read the novel I wrote when I was in my late teens. Sure,
he’s right about a few things; my work disappointed me, and it definitely wasn’t
that good. And I never got past that phase, because I did quit. I did a lot of
work, but I quit. My work has never been as good as my ambitions, and I don’t
think I’ve ever closed that gap, though I finish stories.
People
think The Shining is about a haunted
hotel. It isn’t. It’s about writer’s block. Jack Torrance, clacking away at his
typewriter, going slowly mad. I wonder if the snowbound Overlook Hotel becomes
a metaphor for the isolation and loneliness of trying (and failing) to write a
book.
Even
when I had three months (THREE!) to do nothing but write, I still couldn’t do
it. There became so many more tempting things to do. But as a teenager, and in
my early twenties, I couldn’t stop
writing. I didn’t have a computer then, so I wrote long hand in wire bound
notebooks, typing up and printing out pages when I had a late shift at my
reception job. I wrote so much that I developed this weird little lump on the
second finger of my right hand (it’s still there, to remind me I don’t write
that much anymore.)
This
massive pile of notebooks and loose sheets was actually my second attempt at a
novel. I am not even sure what order they go in, and I doubt I could tell from
trying to piece together the plot. From what I remember, there was a teenage
girl, an inappropriate relationship with a much older man (MUCH older, don’t
know why I did that.) unrequited love, and two dead rock stars sent to torment
our heroine into sorting her life out. Magic realism written by a 17 year old
isn’t going to be any good, but thanks for the encouragement, Ira.
 |
| 2,000 pages of crap |
 |
| Don't make notebooks like they used to |
I
found this scribbled in an old diary: ‘the only thing I write these days is
shopping lists.’ It's the sort of thing that at the time I think is pithy and witty, but it's really just lame and unfunny.
So
when the muse is failing to crap on my head, or I’m feeling a little spooked
out from the posts about missing people and unsolved deaths, I’ll post a
chapter of the Not So Great English Novel. (it had two titles, neither of which
were any good, ‘The People vs Alice Same, and I Wish My Friends Were Someone
Else’s) E.L James, prepare to surrender your crown as The World’s Worst Writer.
