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The day jobs of novelists

This is an older essay, from 2004, but well worth the read. It's topic is writer's block, but it's really about differing views on the mode of production in writing, or at least the mindset a writer brings to the act of producing.

I've always wanted to be like Trollope, mostly because I find that I'm at my best, in most parts of life, when there is a routine and the quality becomes a result of showing up every day and putting in the work, not having a direct line to the muses or strokes of genius. But that's me. I look to him, because Trollope*, like Faulkner, TS Eliot, Bukowski and others, had a day job of no grand remark. I think it's a relatively late invention, the idea of writers as writers alone. The literature would change, or at least increase in variety, if everyone got over the cabin-in-the-woods image of the writer, which is either a nostalgic throwback to Thoreau, a late 20th century anamoly brought on by the publishing industry's advance business model, or the even newer market economy of the MFA system. I'd rather have mechanics who are poets and poets who can throw a punch.

*What I mean by Trollope:

"Trollope reported in his “Autobiography,” he woke in darkness and wrote from 5:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m., with his watch in front of him. He required of himself two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour. If he finished one novel before eight-thirty, he took out a fresh piece of paper and started the next. The writing session was followed, for a long stretch of time, by a day job with the postal service. Plus, he said, he always hunted at least twice a week. Under this regimen, he produced forty-nine novels in thirty-five years. Having prospered so well, he urged his method on all writers: “Let their work be to them as is his common work to the common laborer. No gigantic efforts will then be necessary. He need tie no wet towels round his brow, nor sit for thirty hours at his desk without moving,—as men have sat, or said that they have sat.”

When last in Paris

It was winter, a week before Christmas. He stayed in a Latin Quarter tenement hotel owned by a Chinese man. The hotel gate had a "secret code." "1...2345," the owner said. He'd just finished a semester at Oxford, and was weary worn. The inkling that he might not want to be an academic crept in for the first time. Going to Oxford had meant ending things with a girl he swore he was in love with. So there he was, alone, drinking a bottle of champagne on his tiny room balcony, thinking, What's this city if you're alone, and what good are books if they leave you lonely.

50 cents per word

For so long, people told me I needed to get my name out there no matter what that entailed. Listy SEO articles, HuffPo posts, tweeting five times a day. Christ, how depressing. I saw before me the new rules of the new game, the whole gamut of traffic and hits, followers and retweets, of developing a platform instead of following a story. All that in the name of making it.

Fuck that. Get a job to pay the bills. Write what matters.

The last day of class

School is out and the possibilities of summer — adventure abroad, sex with a European, your first internship in New York — are before you. You are freer than you'll ever be because you've yet to realize that nothing is required of you except to broaden your own experience of the world. And not contract menigitis.

at The Morning Times

More "Mirror"

Otis picked up his bike helmet and walked out of Bull McCabes. Before the waiter could return, I grabbed the napkin he’d scribbled on and slipped back to my booth. I opened it:

Nostalgia at its simplest. In the back of a station wagon, age eight. Your own world cut off from parents and plans, gas mileage and making good time and the traffic to avoid around Atlanta. Your sister’s blonde, tangled hair peaks over the seat, a soft invasion of your kingdom, a small grace, a ringlet message: you aren’t alone or lost; you can come home from your machinations--your shoot-out with Pecos Bill, your solo exploration of Mars--when you’re ready. Or when you need to pee. And they will be there, sister and plans, gas mileage and the traffic around Atlanta.

The future pulls; you don’t move toward it, in the back of a station wagon, age eight. The world outside a liquid smudge of green and brown, speeding, drifting, slowing, fast then slow, slow then still, still then far, far behind you. Time and space halt. They sit still, the trees, and take on hard edges fit to decipher. That one's an oak. That one, a pine. They fall back, back in line, and dissolve. More green and brown and road and world, all forced to a dot, and then, a distant nothing.

That was the world the summer before my mother died, in the back of a station wagon, age eight.

Geeking out today in the rare manuscript room at #Duke doing research for a short story. #BingCrosby in his early days. #CarolinaTheater (at Perkins Library)

#duke #bingcrosby #carolinatheater

Dream ride. (at The Great Hall)

Sarah Thompkin

(Another snippet from "Mirror")

Books, booze, opinions, the tiny buttons on my shirt -- Jude was quick with everything but his heart. The quickness -- the ease of his mind when he considered a subject, an issue, a feeling -- kept you coming back to him. He was a good guy, maybe, but damaged, by whom or what, I couldn’t say. Probably something to do with his father. That made him forgivable, even as his insecurities began to show, and I began to feel like a temporary suture on a wound that would not heal. He leaned forward when he spoke to me, always kept eye contact, a gesture I mistook for confidence and later saw as over-correction. He frequently wore a tired seer-sucker suit (his “unironic” attempt at being a “true Southerner” he said), one you couldn't help notice went unwashed, like a Kentucky horse bookie down on his luck. I act ask if knew him well. I didn’t. And what of my heart? It was a sad, flimsy, ignorant thing, I'd come to admit, so much the worse for how adaptable it had been for the sake of another, too undependable for its carrier to trust, or maybe I was too weak to trust it. Trust would require facing the truth that I had trained it in the art of self-disregard, not out of humility but fear, fear of what I would find in its overlooked crannies, or worse, what I would not. It was the Christmas gift I couldn't bear to open for fear it would disappoint. I think that’s why I loved Jude, and now, Otis. Jude studied me when I wouldn’t. Otis spent his life studying others. It’s odd, what they shared.

Otis Hillenbard

(A scrap from another project in the works, a short story. Working title: “Mirror”)

I don’t know that you could call Otis Hillenbard heroic. Maybe at one point in his life, before the accident, before the film got in the way of everything, before his wife went insane from it, before the grief washed over him and flooded his mind. But it washed through him too, and eventually, after time and liquor did their work, the grief washed all the sadness out of him, and he became whatever you would call a smile after a decade of madness. He could still love, you know. Love harder than most because he was so smart, not in a bookish way — he couldn’t concentrate on one thing for more than five minutes anymore, which partly explains the short poems — but in the way a person learns to survive in this world, on pluck and empathy and a knack for seeing past all the subtle defenses people construct. That was Otis. He peered right down into your gut. His genius was his sight and his sight allowed him to love. It was what made him so great in his early days; what, when turned in on itself drove him mad; what now, in the ashes of his life, was growing once again.