Storytellersunplugged

Last month I spent a few days hanging out with a friend I hadn’t seen for, crikey, maybe going on five years, give or take. It’s always welcome when the stars align and permit a thing like that to happen. Except I’d learned some time ago, during the interim, via his wife, the alarming news that he’d picked up a really bad habit, although I was relieved that I didn’t see him engage in it during our time together.

He started writing.

I don’t know if he’s any good or not, although I’ll certainly give him the benefit of the doubt, because he’s a fun guy to be around, witty, and observant in a quirky way, with enough seasoning of cynicism to potentially hone a cutting edge along one side of his work.

But I just don’t know. I’ve never read any of it. He’s never asked, and I’ve never volunteered, figuring that if he gets to the point of thinking it’s important, he’ll ask. Which he hasn’t yet. Fair enough. I can respect that. Early on, I kept a pretty tight lip too. Not around my friends, who knew all about the master plan and were, I realize even better now, a buoyantly effective moral support system; but among most general acquaintances and all strangers, people with whom I had little to no emotional investment, not a peep. Why tell them what they might not take as seriously as I did, and dismiss with a condescending “That’s nice” and a pat on the head.

Call it the Tuco Strategy, for you fellow fans of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: “You gonna shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.”

Even so: That last day before their departure, I did ask my friend how the writing was going. Because I’d heard via the grapevine that he had questions he wanted to ask and he hadn’t brought any up yet, and since we were approaching the now-or-never zone I thought I’d furnish an opening. Which he didn’t take.

It was going fine, he said. And a couple of other things that pretty much explained everything else.

He said he only wrote when he really felt like it. Inspired, I took that to mean — you know, when that fairy-muse that follows you around decides it’s time to bing you in the head with her wand again.

He also said, in something of a corollary to the first revelation, that he didn’t want to write 20 or 30 pages just to get a few good ones. Hence, I gathered, the only-when-inspired policy. So he could write just the good pages and bypass the not-too-bad pages, the half-assed pages, and, dismay of us all, the downright sucky abortive excuses that we have a lot of nerve calling pages.

Such a time-saver, that! I’m ashamed I never thought of it before.

Talent he may have, my friend. But of the essential ingredient, for lack of which the entire soufflé collapses, the air was devoid of the faintest whiff: desperation.

Every writer I know, who’s done even the bare minimum to merit the label, is a desperate person, the equal of any bandito hunched in the saddle and firing bullets over his shoulder. It may not be obvious on the surface, but if you were to peel back some layers of dermis and psyche, you’d find a roiling cauldron of impulse, fretting, compulsion, and flame. It’s there. It has to be. Forget inspiration, which is the most unreliable thing in the world this side of cola-based birth control methods. It’s desperation that is the true progenitor of creative accomplishment. When all sense of optional recedes and you find yourself in the immolating grip of must.

Desperate people do dangerous things, amazing things. Like lifting cars off trapped children.

Desperate people do everything, or at least everything that counts, like that — as if it’s a matter of life and death. Because, to the desperate, that’s exactly what it is. And for desperate writers it all comes down to recognizing the fork in the road that demarcates the life they ache to lead from the living death of what they’ll be forced to settle for if they find it more convenient not to try … then making the only choice that’s truly there.

And then? That’s when, even if they can’t quite define desperation in a manner to do it justice, they know it when they see it in the mirror.

It’s the whip at your back to finish the story before it leaves you and decides it would rather be written by someone else.

It’s the next pot of coffee when all the rest of the world is asleep.

It’s the midnight trip to the post office, even though you know the package won’t be going anywhere for hours.

It’s driving 1000 miles nonstop to the convention or conference that the voice inside tells you just might change your life.

And another 1000 miles nonstop back home because you can’t wait to get to work.

It’s the twelfth draft when you know in your sinking heart that eleven just ain’t cutting it.

It’s the sixth novel when nothing about the first five would, to a saner eye, remotely seem to encourage you to write it.

It’s the acid in your belly as you start novel #20, even though everyone told you how great the first 19 were, because you know that #20 is all that matters now.

And, yeah … it’s 30 pages of rancid bilgewater in search of one page of honey.

Now, since we’re tossing all these numbers around, it should be as obvious as an elbow in the eye that it’s poundingly hard on body, mind, and soul to live like this 24/7/365. The highways and alleys are littered with the flaking husks of those who’ve tried. If you’re in it for the long term, desperation inevitably has to die down at times, like embers banked beneath the ashes to wait through the renewing night, and flare again when hit by the poker and a fresh dose of morning air.

It’s a moment that the genuinely desperate relish by virtue of their glorious and malignant natures.

So glad to feel you again, they tell it, in the same intimate terms they would use with an old friend. And it is. What else could you consider the thing that’s driven you to so many instructive lows and compensatory highs? Now let’s get moving. Because if we stay here one day longer, I’m afraid we’re going to die.