~a column by Colleen O’Brien
The hard work of writing (writers are always complaining about it) is this: it’s hard to pull your gaze away from the squirrel on the telephone wire outside the window.
This does not endear complaining writers to physically hard-working folks at all, but our whiney ways are all a part of the profession.
A writer avoiding writing is a cliché, but like most clichés, true. A procrastinating writer is similar to another cliché that might better explain us: the 8-year-old boy who will do anything not to take a bath. In other words, we are immature.
One of the reasons for this procrastination in the writing business has to do with pure folklore — the literature about the literati: the starving poet in the garret; the wild-living alcoholic novelist; the head-in-the-oven or the rocks-in-the-pockets suicidal author. These icons are prevalent in writerly circles, and the drama, romance and mystery of them, not to mention the supposed fame amid the jet set once one becomes published, are compelling to think about and a complicated way of keeping you from writing because you’re romanticizing; you’re daydreaming yourself into visions of accepting Pulitzer prizes for best editorial or Nobels for literature or being eulogized in the New York Times for a sad end to a stellar career on the best seller list . . . anything rather than actually putting pen to paper.
Once, years ago, on deadline with nothing in my head to write about and assuming it was terminal, I wandered into the living room and idly began to dust the leaves of my ficus plant. In the process I kept my eye on the antics of a squirrel bopping from pine tree to pine tree. I of course wound up writing about him. Blessed little critter, saving my fanny like that.
I believe this might be the third time I’ve used him.
It’s not only a squirrel’s amusing antics that entice writers away from their words but that writers are so like squirrels. It’s therefore fascinating, perhaps narcissistic, to watch them carefully. Squirrels make amazing leaps. Writers do this a lot — with ideas, logic, assumption, plot; sometimes these leaps work. Squirrels hoard nuts. Writers hoard books, scraps of paper with quotes on them, lists of ideas. Squirrels chase one another around, I assume for amusement and or procreation. Writers don’t do this any more often than other humans, at least for those reasons, but writers do chase the ideas, many of them feeble; and the words, always looking for the right one. Squirrels bury many acorns, never to find them again; I understand it’s luck if they unearth a nut. Writers are ever thus — if they succeed, it’s often because they’re having a lucky day, not because they know what they’re doing.
I’ve read that the average income of a writer is $4,000 a year. This leads quickly to the realization that rich writers, the one or two of them out there who might be jet setting, are making the rest of us writers, we who have to take the bus, look good. This bit of information just adds to the conundrum of why anybody wants a job that’s often torture and pays poorly.
The over-the-top quotes about writing add fuel to the woe-is-me-this-is-too-hard job of writing:
“A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it is to be God.” No attribution; and I can see why — sounds like some writer who thinks way too highly of himself.
“One day I will find the right words….” Jack Kerouac, who wrote many words while On the Road
“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” Mark Twain, our national writer as famous internationally as he is here
“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” Stephen King, one of the best story tellers who ever lived
“The most important things are the hardest to say.” Stephen King
“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” E.L. Doctorow, who has never published anything that didn’t wind up on the top of the charts
“Writing is easy; you just open a vein and bleed,” attributed to Thomas Wolfe, Red Smith, Paul Gallico, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernest Hemingway, Gene Fowler, Jeff MacNelly and the renowned Anonymous. That so many writers have been said to have said it is enough to lend it total veracity — a lot of masochists over the years opening veins to make the leap from idea to essay, novel, poem.
“It is better to have writ than to have to write.” Colleen (although I could have heard this from someone else whom I can’t remember)
Now, to get back to the squirrel, here’s a final line from me. . . . Oh, to be a squirrel rather than a writer.
