You would think from the title that this would be some sort of update about my WRITER’S BRAIN and how I am caring for and feeding it lately, now that I am publishing as a freelancer and writing book proposals and getting myself out there in a way that I think is successful. It is? Sort of? (The secret is that the only thing different is the fact that I am writing.)
I’m a believer in the idea that you are a either creator or you aren’t. My whole life has been spent in one sort of creative pursuit or another, save for long and languid dreariods in which I would A) feel sorry for myself and B) produce nothing. No matter how far away I push the act of creation as an earnest pursuit – because it did not work out again, or I am not famous yet, or I just want to Make Money and Be Happy – I always come back to it.
And I always come back to it in the same way that I returned to cigarettes earlier this year – just one or two here and there, it won’t hurt, it isn’t like I’m fucking serious about it or anything, right? And the next thing you know I’m furtively doing it far more than the initial and innocent engagement would have room to tolerate.
A few days ago I was talking to a friend of mine about his little sister, and how she wants to bail out of Harvard and become the next Hunter Thompson because she met Matt Taibbi one night at a bar. I told him that there’s only ever room for one famous writer to re-animate the corpse of The Good Doctor and flog it to pieces, and that right now that room is occupied, smugly and without repentance, by Taibbi. I further said that she would be better off trying to write like herself, to see where that takes her.
This is something heavy coming from me, he who tried to write like no less than 7 or 8 Famous Writers for 11 years – sometimes all at once – before figuring out that it was okay to write something as myself and send it off for proposed publication. It takes a while to get comfortable enough with your own voice that you feel as if you can confidently produce something for consumption. I blame it on my music school experience.
For years, I would ask the question of my professors: when do I get to argue on behalf of what I have made? This question mattered acutely to me since I was continuously being both complemented for my craftsmanship but berated for making music that was too easily accessible.
When I presented a project in which I’d taken a mathematical formula and used it to transform a string quartet waltz into a tango?
This is awfully easy to listen to, don’t you think?
When I’d written a large ensemble piece for percussion and double-bass that had both a five-part fugue in the middle and a rock-and-roll jam at the end?
We are not in the business of writing Beethoven’s 10th Symphony. Not as real composers, anyways.
Diana asked me once a while ago about why I have never written about my experiences as a musician, and I suppose I thought that I hadn’t for some romantic Reality Bites kind of reason, like How The Pain Of The Lost Dream Was Too Fresh For Consideration, but that isn’t really true. Giving up on a music career now feels more like navigating around a detour than derailing a train.
Without the written word, I might feel different. The driving need for me has always been to make things. I can’t draw. I’m no good at whittling. I can’t sing. I can’t act. I can’t weld or sculpt or any other kind of craft that requires me to see an object longing to be freed from inside a hunk of raw material. I have long ago accepted these things as incontrovertible facts.
I can, however, write music; and I can write words. I love doing both but I have abandoned the idea of making a living with one activity, so now I’m trying out the other. Years later, I have finally discerned that when I asked professors when I would be qualified or prepared to make arguments on behalf of what I had created, I was really asking them when I would have permission to create something, period. I don’t need that to write. No one does.
You also don’t have be making a living at art to make art. No one starts out successful and everyone has to make a living. When I was younger, I would be despondent if I had a job I didn’t like because I was too lazy to write when I got home. I would say things to myself like Who can write after working a job like that?!? or other similar nonsense, and would get so put-upon that I couldn’t write music or do anything of worth other than whatever young adult non-career gig I was fortunate enough to have. Stupid.
So now, I am making some decent progress as a freelance writer, and my days and weeks now aren’t any different than a few months ago, other than the fact that I’m writing now and I wasn’t then. It isn’t some adage or axiom like making time for what’s important to me. I’m writing and pitching and querying and proposing like I mean it now because I do. I’m not asking for anyone’s permission to write – I’m writing.
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