Storytellersunplugged

By Richard Steinberg

“The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture,” Raymond Chandler

It’s an interesting moment.

Dark and light seem completely balanced in my life right now. Not as if I have finally got a handle on life – far from it – but rather, as if a climactic change is about to take place. A thing whose scope and impact will resound for years.

It’s happened before.

Seven years ago.

Six years before that.

This is the artist’s life, if they’re honest with themselves. Periods of mournful depths beyond description; pain and despair so searing its recounting is a sin.

This is the artist’s life, if they’re honest with themselves. Periods of fairytale glory and Promethean reward that would make a Nereid blush; fulfillment and contentment (if not happiness) so spectacular its living seems a permissible sin.

This is the artist’s life.

But it is not their art.

And here we speak of art.

Let’s start by getting our terms clearly defined. I’m not talking about the high-brow, the elite, or some artificial exclusionary definition of art. Art is simply that which is created with the purpose of provoking a reaction. Art is beautiful or frightening or thought-provoking works produced through creative activity. Art is the channeling of creative visions to elicit a reaction.

This is the crisis I now face; that taunts me in the recesses of my soul.

I am beginning to despise my art.

My work continues to be of high quality; very entertaining, commercially strong, and with meaning. To this point I have been able to separate my crisis from my productivity; will continue to do so for some time to come if necessary. But a longing grows within me, a soul-kiss from a distant being that whispers quietly:

“It’s time for something more.”

I heard the voice for the first time thirteen years ago. I was writing, but for myself. I didn’t seek an audience; I didn’t want to be read. What I wrote, was private, secret, packed away. The benefit of this was simple and absolute: as the only reader, I was also the only critic.

It’s a cool place to live. Whatever you write only you read only you judge. Nice and safe. No matter how harshly you might judge your work – and although I publicly extolled my brilliance, I was often privately deeply critical – its all gold. But as long as I kept that criticism (and the work) to myself I could proclaim my greatness without public contradiction.

But within me burned the writer’s soul. A soul that demanded something more.

I completed my first solo novel – just me naked on the page. In an act of great personal pain I printed it, boxed it, and sent it out . . . to be roundly (and properly) rejected. It wasn’t that it was horrible, I’ve always been a pretty good writer, rather it wasn’t professionally written.

I seriously considered never submitting anything for rejection again. If the world didn’t understand me, their loss.

But some chemical reaction had begun in me, and I returned to the computer. As I wrote, I reread voraciously all of my favorite books. I carefully worked to understand why I liked some things, not others, why some things left me flat. That’s about all I did with any time I had. I read, I analyzed . . . I wrote.

And I set aside my desires or my protective ego as I judged what I wrote.

I wrote every day for at least an hour, often through the night. Literally, a million words in fifteen months. By the end, I was averaging close to three thousand words a day. Writing, reading, analyzing, rewriting, judging . . . growing.

Then, I stopped.

I don’t know why I stopped, it certainly wasn’t a conscious decision, and it wasn’t giving up or burning out. I pulled away for a couple of weeks, the only thing close to writing was rereading a first edition of Olaf Stapleton’s: Odd John: A Story Between Jest and Earnest. For the first time, I understood what it was that Stapleton had done to make me react as I did.

The technique behind the art.

Sadly, I no longer have that book, but I have The Gemini Man, my novel that was its bastard child. It’s been published around the world, read from Spain to China. Critiqued by geniuses (they all loved it and me) and morons (they all disliked it and me) from all walks of life.

For the next six years, I rode that generous, beloved, blessed wave as far as it could take me, and that was far indeed! Novel after novel, I reached my dreams and beyond.

But then, seven years ago, I changed again.

I began to assume that my talent was a gift and not a loan whose payments needed to be kept up. I got lazy and began to us my technical skills to cover-up a lack of commitment to the creative magic. I coasted on my success and assumed my future.

We are NONE OF US guaranteed a future! Futures must be earned, must be entreated and seduced. They are so fragile that simply ignoring them can lead to their end.

The fall began slowly, gently and without notice; although I can look back now in shock that I didn’t see the signs. Gradually the writing lost meaning, lost pith, with excruciating but inevitable slowness I went one way as my gift went another.

I began a seven year existence in a place of dark gray and muffled dissonance. As the career faltered, as the writing became typing, as the assumptions of surety became pornographic jokes with me as the punch line I fell. Not of the body, but of the soul.

Then, somewhere around rock bottom I encountered my talent again.

It floated placidly beside me, not gloating at my destruction (as it had a right to do) but simply asking in nonjudgmental words: “are we learning yet?”

This wasn’t rock bottom – I had and have a few things left to burn away before I can begin the wholly uninsured climb again – but it began to arrest my hadean momentum. I began to heal before the final wounds were even struck. I regained my gift, now integrated with my technique like a couple long, divorced and grown apart, might rediscover each other and be married again until death.

Which now, after a fourteen year roller coaster (that Ilario the Magnificent warned me of many years ago) leaves me here, on uncertain ground.

It’s an interesting moment.

I stand uncertainly balanced on the fulcrum of past success, past failures, and the promise of an unknown future. But it is only unknown because it hasn’t happened yet. I don’t put it that way to be glib but from a sincere appreciation of the fragility of all futures. From a deep respect that I’ve never had for future before.

You see, I know now not to assume future. To never take it for granted or neglect the tender care and hard work it demands. We are, none of us, guaranteed a happy ending. We are all of us gifted with the most profound legacy there is.

Possibility.

“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations,” Anais Nin

I now know that being read by strangers around the world that I will never meet is better, by far, than just me reading my work. That being commercial does not mean I have to abandon art. That taking risks can hurt, sometimes almost beyond measure . . . but its rewards are all the greater for it.

Layers.

Cells.

Constellations.

And it is when we ignore that multifaceted reality to be just one thing – be it bestseller or hermit – we have not been true to our art.

One more thing as well:

Rich or poor, wealthy or not, healthy or not, happy or not . . . I’m going to be okay.

So long as I have, and am true to, the writing.

Believe!

—Richard Steinberg