DON’T PANIC
NONE OF US KNOW WHAT WE’RE DOING
I once attended a Stephen Graham Jones talk where he said he’d abandoned 16 novels.
Later, Benjamin Whitmer advised me to never abandon a novel. “Every writer,” he said, “is tempted by an attractive idea for a new project while they’re in the middle of whatever book they’re writing. That’s a ‘pretty little thing,’ and if you run away from your project with a pretty little thing, you’ll find the same problems you’re having with your project come up again.
Ben pushed me to finishing a collection of short stories.
I wish I had Ben to make me write that novel I started my first semester at Iowa, which I stopped working on after reaching 30k words and not being able to overcome or write through a narrative flaw.
I wish I had Ben to make me finish any of the three novels I started over the summer. I have no fidelity or obligation. I go to whichever project is prettier.
I wasn’t always like this.
My Junior year at Thomas Aquinas College, I talked to a Senior who wanted to be a writer. She was about to graduate and just signed a contract to start teaching at an elementary school. She said she didn’t know how to approach a career in writing. “What kind of job would give me the time to write?” I mentioned that there’s many fully funded MFA programs in the USA, and it’s possible to purse an MFA just for time and funding to write.
She said it sounded interesting and asked if I could email her information about it. So, I did.
One year later, she came to visit the graduating students of my class. I asked, “Hey, did you ever wind up applying to any of those programs?”
She scowled at me. “Oso,” she said, “Sometimes when you go out into the real world, things don’t work out how you dream they would. Some things are just impractical.”
Thinking she was mad at me, I dropped it.
This interaction stuck in my head. I was mad at her for being mad at me.
Throughout my undergraduate, I forced myself into daily writing. I tried to write a story a week during the summers, and a month during the school year. I abstained from Friday nights with my friends to read Euripides and write my first failed novel. I faced a wall of rejection letters my first round of MFA applications.
Like her, I taught elementary when I graduated TAC. Meanwhile, I paid tuition at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop to learn to write. I worked 80-hour weeks freelancing and teaching while writing a collection of short stories at night. It took work, and money, but I finally receiving my first publications, awards, and acceptance letters to fully funded MFA programs.
After three years applying to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I was accepted with full tuition and a stipend. Finally, the insomnia and tuition to Lighthouse paid off. I was no longer paying people to read what I had written. I was no being paid to write. I thought I was nothing like this girl who gave up before she started. She was inconvenienced by the fact that she couldn’t make money by writing. I was willing to pay money to write.
However, if Iowa has taught me anything, it’s that writing is much scarier than I imagined. I am horrified. I’ve started writing nonfiction more frequently because the blank page of a fiction story terrifies me.
My first semester at the IWW, I worked on a novel titled The Invented Disease. It was about a man in Mexico who was never able to give himself to his wife because he was too preoccupied with intellectual ideas. It had high octane prose, energetic digressions, musings on Hegelian logic, romantic blunders. But the narrator was a narcissist, and the digressions often intruded on the plot more they added to it. Narcissism and intrusion were two narrative problems I couldn’t explore. Creativity, the invention of plot, could take me nowhere. My imagination just showed me further exhibitions of the protagonist’s narcissism, but there was no artistry.
My imagination got in the way of the story. I needed to abandon myself. I needed, and still need, a muse. That is, I need to forget myself, and let the story speak.
To write fiction, you must embrace contradiction. Fiction is simultaneously the invention a story and the abandonment of self to a story. Characters demand free will, and to be perfect as your lord is perfect, you must oblige, even if it means they crucify you. If the story is any good, your characters will crucify you, forcing you to face the ugliest parts of yourself and display them.
If we as writers do not give the characters the free will they demand, our stories become masturbatory. They exist only for self-gratification, titillation, confirmation bias. When we allow our characters to do the unexpected, to have individuality we could not have planned for, our stories become self-flagellation, a sincere exanimation of conscious, fasting, and produce true catharsis.
But how can this be? How can we as writers be both inventive, and receptive?
Years ago, I disregarded Plato’s Ion as mere proto-literary criticism. Something that ancients came up with without considering the scientific method. I now realize that Socrates was right. The art of the rhapsode, and consequently the art of the poet, is not one of “creating” a story. After that workshop at Iowa, I felt that the art of fiction is totally unconcerned with creation. The art is one of becoming a vessel for the muses. I began to pray before I wrote, “God, let me be possessed by whatever spirits you need to tell this story.”
Stephen King wrote in On Writing that you’re not taking writing seriously if you’re not writing minimum 1,000 words a day if you’re starting, 2,000 words a day if you’re serious. This, of course, is only possible with drugs, but (mostly) stone-cold sober I was easily capable of reaching these benchmarks. I still can with nonfiction, only because I am the subject of my nonfiction.
When my approach to fiction changed, so did daily word count. It went down from 2,000, and 4,000 on a good day, to 1,000, to me questioning myself, asking if I was getting in the way of the spirits that needed the story to be told, down to maybe if I can write at least one word, just one, then I can put this away.
There was somebody else on the page. There were many others on the page. There was the workshop I was writing for. There was Hemingway’s Bullshit detector. There was the character who demanded free will, justice, his/her own story, separate from my voice, free of my intrusion. I was driving myself mad with voices.
Writers’ workshops do not teach you to write. They teach you how other people read. The problem is, you’re the one writing it. It is good to learn these voices, because audiences exist. Ultimately, however, those are not the voices writing the story.
A few months ago, I was filming a friend playing pool at the local writer bar. He was playing against an older man I’d seen there many times before. The man had a good run. He was clearly well practiced. I asked him, “Are you feeling pretty sure you’re gonna win?” He went on a slurred-word night-out monologue that started and ended with the phrase, “None of us really know what we’re doing.”
The man left, my friend walked up to me and said, “What were you talking to Tom Drury about?”
“Shit. That was Tom Drury?”
It’s immature, but I took that chance meeting advice with Tom as writing advice. None of us know what we’re doing.
In subsequent meetings, I’ve asked Tom Drury to be my thesis advisor. Our first advisee meeting was an accident. We were both at the bar. He was playing pool, putting on a show, sinking seven balls in his first turn. He called the eight in the left corner pocket, but it fell into the center left pocket. He lost. Afterwards, he shared a cigarette, American Spirit Light Blue, my favorite. I bought him a beer, PBR. I told him about my writing problem. “My voice keeps getting in the way of my fiction.”
He shook his head. “Your voice isn’t getting in the way of your fiction. Your voice is the fiction. At the end of the day, your voice is the only thing you will contribute to fiction.”
He was right. None of my ideas are original. None of my stories are new. But, I have never existed before. All stories pre-exist their authors, that doesn’t mean authors have no reason to live.
I’ve learned two things at Iowa. The first is that I do not matter. I must decrease so he may increase. I must let the story take over, and I must forget myself. The second thing is that I am worthy of telling these stories. For some reason, God called me to tell the stories, invented, inspired, who cares. Although I must decrease to let the stories speak, I must also breathe and live and bleed to tell these stories. Abandonment of self means forgetting the self, not killing the self.
Writing is horrifying. The prospect of pursuing a career writing is so daunting, we often stop before we start. Sometimes we write sixteen novels just to write one. Our writing problems keep rising up. There are voices in our heads, and we can’t distinguish the muses from the demons from the bullshit advice. It never ends.
But I’m consoled by the introduction of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The book begins by introducing a book that never existed, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and telling the reader that despite the book’s inferiority to Encyclopedia Galactica, it has sold more copies. This is due to two reasons: “First, it is slightly cheaper; and second it has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.”
If there’s ever a “Writers’ Guide to the Galaxy,” the same cover is appropriate. DON’T PANIC should be written on the front of the Dey House, on the acceptance letter to every MFA program, in the syllabus to every class on writing. Fiction is as horrifying as the infinite vastness of the universe. It requires a spiritual gift of self. It’s dangerous, because people live by the stories we read and tell. DON’T PANIC. None of us know what we’re doing. It’ll all be okay, and if it’s not, DON’T PANIC, just pray.