It used to be so easy for me to sit down in front of a computer and write for like 5 hours straight - you know: "generate a draft" - without caring if it was any good.
And then fix it later. But you've got a draft! Complete from beginning to end.
I could do that - write for 5 hours with music playing loud in the background and some caffeine getting cold in a deli cup - because my first writing job - one of my first jobs after college - was churning out smut books at a porn factory on 3rd Avenue and 36th Street, in the top floor of a 4-story walk-up near the mouth of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel.
I was 22. I saw an ad in the *Village Voice*, "Creative Writers Wanted," I thought, "That's me!" I was living with my brother and his college pal Harry in a big apartment on West End Avenue, above 96th Street, my bed was a sleeping loft up near the ceiling in what had been a maid's room.
Harry had the big back bedroom, and my brother had built a sleeping loft in the front room, livingroom/diningroom/kitchen, he made it out of barn beams from our parents' house in New Jersey. He could make things, I could only lie on the floor with a cat tucked under each arm - they were brothers: Darth Vader and 2B (the number of the apartment) - and roll my head from side to side thinking, "Oh no, I'm gay!"
My brother, who was working the night shift editing stories for *News 4 New York*, the local NBC news affiliate, would come home late and say, "Are you ever getting up?"
So when I saw the ad in the *Voice*, I walked down Broadway from 103rd Street, all the way to 42nd Street, then down to the address on 3rd Avenue - walked because I was too broke even to afford subway fare, which was 50¢, am I remembering right?
It was the spring of 1981. Ronald Reagan was newly President, Ed Koch was Mayor, AIDS had come into town the previous fall, maybe on the same plane in which I'd landed at JFK that October - I got the JFK Express to Rockefeller Center, and my brother met me in lobby of the RCA Building, where he worked, "You can stay with me and Harry for a while," he said, he charged me $100/month rent, which he let me pay in $25 weekly increments. My brother is a nice guy.
The porn factory was called Interconnecting Media. The name was on the buzzer. I walked up narrow creaking stairs to the top floor, where a guy named Crawford with a blonde pony tail and a southern accent - was he from Tallahassee? - said, "Do you understand what the ad said?" and I said, "I think so," and he said, "We write adult fiction," and I thought but did not say, "Oh, like DH Lawrence?"
*Women in Love* was my favorite novel. "Sure, fine," I said, and he said, "Can you type?" and I said, "90 words a minute," which was true, I had lately taken a typing class at the Betty Owens Secretarial School, best investment I ever made, and it's why I got the job - if only I had gone to Betty Owens instead of college, I could've saved myself 4 years and my father a bunch of dough.
Crawford sat me at a sort of prehistoric word processing terminal - it was an electric typewriter with no monitor, but hooked up to a big console into which you plugged a sort of 8-track tape, and the marks you made on the page - page after yellow page - were somehow transferred onto magnetic tape; and then they pulled the tape out of the console and plugged it into another typewriter that printed out every word you had written, producing it in manuscript form.
He said, "Sit here for twenty minutes and write some erotic fiction."
"Sure, fine," I said, trying to act like I knew what sex was, I'd never had it, I had never read pornography, unless DH Lawrence counts, but I remembered that a woman in my dorm in college had written a porn novel that got passed around; she had misspelled "tongue" for 200 pages; "He stuck his big hot flat went tong in my mouth"; and there was a scene my roommate had read out loud about a woman in thigh-high white boots; and so I typed out that scene, I remembered the thigh-high white boots, but not much else; I set it in a shoe store; a woman had gone there to buy boots, it started in the front of the store but ended downstairs in the stock room, you can make up the rest, and Crawford read my 10 pages and said, "Can you start tomorrow?"
And so that was my job off and on for a year. For a while, I worked the lobster shift, midnight to eight a.m. It was a 24-hour smut factory, you had to write 30 pages a night to meet quota, which was a book and a quarter a week, 180-page dime store paperbacks, except they weren't sold in dime stores, they were sent out to the Midwest in brown paper wrapping, where guys read them one-handed, *Tight End* and *Babes in Bronxville* and *Center Court Stud* and *Hot Little Bitch*, which was a dog novel, they had a bestiality series.
I based *Hot Little Bitch* on one of my mother's dogs. She raised Irish Wolfhounds, giant dogs, I gave a copy to her, she cut off the cover and re-bound the book in grey electrical tape and gave it to my father to read on his morning commute, which I'm sure he never did. I hope! Anyway, he never mentioned it. Though my mother told everyone. For years afterwards, I'd go somewhere with my parents, run into some of their friends, and one of them would say to me, "Tell me about that dog book, heh heh heh."
I don't know how I got all caught up in all that ^^^ just now. But just to say, the best thing about the porn job was there was no question of writer's block, if you didn't write they didn't pay, and I learned to sit down at the keyboard and just write whatever came into my head.
I didn't care if anyone read it. I didn't want to *know* who read it. The formula was, every chapter had to be "60% all American boys and girls, 40% graphic sex," and it was easy to write when you knew where everything always ended, there was no question of "What should happen next?" What happened next was porn.
I learned a lot from that job, I learned how to write dialogue, I learned it didn't have to be good, it just had to be done, I learned to immediately start writing about whatever had happened to me that day - my bike got stolen once, there's a porn novel somewhere out in the universe about that - or to imitate whatever I was reading - I rewrote *The Sun Also Rises* as porn, which it sort of already was - or remembered seeing on TV. *I Love Lucy* provided several plots.
All of which is just to say: I could do that once, sit down and write without stopping, when the stakes were low and I wasn't as precious about every sentence as I am now!
Plus, I wasn't writing what I knew. I was writing about what I didn't know! It was trash, of course, but I got paid: $210/week, if I met my quota.
It's useful not to care if anyone ever reads your stuff.
(John Weir)
