Known Unknowns #2: Envy, The Silent Killer

Here’s what I never know: When will envy next creep in and possess me? I don’t know when it’ll appear, I don’t know where it’ll come from, I don’t know how long I’ll be out of commission. The only known is that it will reappear, same way I know this about the moon.

Every now and then I believe I’ve got envy beat, that I’ve learned to read news of a former classmate’s success and be happy for them. And sometimes I am, and those are the times I draw on my Hugh Beaumont pipe*, crease my evening paper, and chuckle to myself, “Isn’t it silly how I used to feel about these kinds of things?” But then, on a third or fourth occasion, envy suddenly appears like the guy in the black rubber gimp suit on American Horror Story and together we murder Hugh Beaumont yet again.

Because here’s the thing about envy: it’s a close, personal friend of paralysis. In fact, they went to Duke together. When envy sets in, I’m stuck.

Here, by the way, I’m talking about the envy you feel as a writer for what others are doing — their successes, their output, their dedication, their discipline, their lifestyle, their cool office space. In the comments on Known Unknowns #1, Judith said:

Other people’s writing always seems to have sprung complete – a delusion, like pain free childbirth. For most if us delivery is long, scary, hard work and at times agonising!

First of all, kudos to Judith for recognizing (or recognising) that this is a delusion of sorts. Or maybe it’s not! There are probably people for whom it does seem to flow like absinthe at a steampunk bar. On the other hand, how do we know those same people aren’t spending all their time between writing, walking around like weird, mumbling zombies as they piece together their thoughts ahead of time while violating nearly every social contract? There really may be someone who just pours it all out onto the page in one go — and beautifully — but chances are, that person is a weirdo in real life. So there’s a trade-off.

Note: Just last week I was standing at the sink in the men’s room at my local public library, washing my hands and worrying about some story element in the novel I’m working on. Then a thought slid into my head and I looked up and said to my own reflection, quite loudly, “WIZARD OF OZ.” There was no one else in the bathroom at the time, but if there had been I’m sure I still would’ve done the same thing — that’s how in-my-brain I was at the moment — and they’d have been right to laugh out loud.

There are two ideas that help me, either when I’m lamenting how goddamn long it’s taking to revise this goddamn novel, or when I’m looking at someone else’s book being held up in the media as The Greatest New Thing Ever. (And make no mistake that these are both cases of envy. I’ll get to this in a moment.)

Idea #1: It takes as long as it takes. I tell this to my students constantly, but I also tell it to myself constantly. Now: This is a phrase that, at first glance, sounds suspiciously like the world’s most useless piece of faux-Zen information: It is what it is. That phrase is terrible because it’s what the excavation contractor standing in your front yard says to you while a broken pipe spews raw sewage everywhere. It means: “Eh, what can you do?” And the answer is, you can always do something. That’s where you say, “Yeah? I guess it is what it is, and what it is is, I’m hiring a new excavator.” And then he hits you in the mouth with a pipe or whatever, but at least you spoke up, right?

It takes as long as it takes really is different, though. It means: This may take you a long while to figure out, or some amazing solution may come to you that shortens the job for you. Either way. With myself, I also use the phrase to remind myself that typing 90,000 words would take a long while if all you were doing was typing 90,000 words. But here, dummy, you’re not just typing, you’re thinking and rethinking and going back and fixing things and adding all kinds of new stuff, while doing this for 60-90 minutes a day because, well, that’s what your schedule will allow. So of course you’re not shitting this thing out in three weeks like Mr. Jack Kerouac and his magical teletype roll. WHICH I’ll be addressing in a moment.

By the way, It takes as long as it takes applies to both the writing of a thing and the moving-forward of a writing career. You have your Michael Chabons, and then you have your Donald Ray Pollocks. And your Grace Paleys. And your Larry Browns. And your…you get the idea. Amazing young authors are news because they’re the anomaly. And Jesus, good for them!

I said there were two ideas that help. Idea #2: If you’re not satisfied now, you’ll never be satisfied. Do the work, love the work, do the work some more. Because what happens if you finish and no one wants it? You at least want to be able to say to yourself: I loved this, and I had a great time doing it, and I’m compelled to do it some more. As Richard Bausch says, “At the end of the day, ask yourself: Did I write today? If the answer is yes, then no further questions.” Likewise, when I feel envy creeping in as I’m reading about my former classmate’s new book, I try to remember he has goals that he wants to meet, and he’s wondering when he’ll get there, and maybe he even has people he hates reading about.

A lot of envy comes because we form crazy-ass ideas about The Unknown. I mean, if you really think about your own ideas about “successful”/accomplished writers, I think you’ll find you’ve actually made up a good amount of information based on what you expect of yourself. And how is this any different from deciding that the rain is God’s tears? Or that a Tsunami happened because of homosexuality? So here are a few of the myths that I know I’ve certainly held as fact over the years:

MYTH #1: Writing is easier for other people!

No, it’s not. It’s not easy for anyone, otherwise everyone would be doing it and everyone would be good at it. How many bad books have you read just in your adult lifetime? Now imagine how many people tried to write books that were as bad or maybe even worse, and either gave up on page 2 or wrote 200 pages and suddenly realized they had no dialogue and no distinct characters? And those are just the (imaginary) bad books. A lot of potentially great books are also sitting on a lot of hard drives out there, not being brought to gestation, because this is really, really hard work.

Oh, and let’s talk about the Great Kerouac Teletype Myth, shall we? I’ve known way too many people who believe that Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road in a three-week stretch on a single roll of teletype paper, and that that is the book we know today. I believed this myself for a long time, and I’ve read printed accounts of the Beats where Kerouac’s contemporaries were all too happy to keep the myth alive. And it’s a dangerous myth, because people wonder why they can’t do the same thing and have the beloved novel of a generation come out of it at the end.

First of all, the “roll” was individual sheets of tracing paper taped together and collected in a kind of scroll as he went. Secondly, Kerouac was working from notes and journal entries he’d begun taking years earlier. Finally, there’s the fact that On the Road was massively rewritten and edited over the years, and didn’t find publication until six years after the “teletype roll.” I’m not saying it’s not a great book, I’m saying it, like all books, took a lot of work to become any kind of book at all, never mind a great one.

MYTH #2: Other writers have the luxury of being able to write full-time!

Also ridiculous, especially in 2011, but probably in most times in our history. Best-selling authors, if they have regular best-sellers, and providing they’ve made good deals for themselves, can write full-time. So can people who don’t mind being dirt fucking poor. Everyone else, sorry to say, has to have another source of income, especially when publishers are paying around $10,000-20,000 for a first novel. “$20,000!” you say. “I’d love to have $20,000!” Okay. For two years’ work? And with 15% of it going to your agent? And still more of it going to taxes? How’s that sounding now? This, weirdly, is one area in which I can say I’m envy-free. Some author gets a six-figure advance or a development deal with HBO? I’m psyched for that person. It’s the rare author who’s getting what she’s worth. And again: Even with $200,000 and whatever HBO’s giving: divide it by the number of years it took to write a thing, and don’t forget to subtract the agent fees and taxes!

But those are the exceptions. Every single published, accomplished writer I know is doing something else for money. Teaching, freelance writing, working non-creative jobs. Read the interviews, read the book jacket flaps or the Amazon bios. They’re all working somewhere, guys, and they’re not doing it purely for fun and charity. Thus, they’re saying to themselves, same as you, “How am I supposed to write this thing when I have to _____?”

MYTH #3: If I only had time and money, I could get this thing finished!

This is related to the first two myths, frankly, and it’s a bunch of horseshit. If you had 12 hours a day free to write, do you really think you’d use all 12? I’ll bet you wouldn’t. Either way, it’s probably not a possibility, this free-time-and-money scheme, so why not just do good work now with the time and circumstances you have? Larry Brown wrote his first book standing at the counter of the convenience store he ran while also being on-call as a fireman. What did you do today?

So what is envy? It’s an excuse. It’s us externalizing our own insecurities/perceived shortcomings and throwing them at some other writer. So now you’ve been a dick to yourself, and a dick to someone else. Here’s what I propose we focus on instead of envy: 

1) Improve as writers. There is no perfection, there is only improvement. This is why some people play golf, this is why we do this. Put your time and energy into doing better work. Be a hard critic of your own writing, show it to others for their opinions**, stop being afraid to mess with your own precious writing.

2) Enjoy the work of others. Visit a writers’ workshop, or conference, or MFA program, and you may hear some people being negative. “[Author] sucks. That book was totally overrated.” Really? Read it and let’s figure out what someone else saw in it. Or, if you did read it and didn’t like it, challenge yourself to understand why you reacted the way you did. And then challenge yourself to do better.

3) Be happy for people’s accomplishments, whether you know them or not. Any book that gets published today is a goddamn miracle. A book that gets published and is rewarded with critical rapture and/or good sales is whatever is better than a miracle. Either way, remind yourself: This is some hard work. Someone, even if it’s James Patterson, had to put the work in — not just the hours, but the thinking and the second-guessing — to get it done. (I pick on James Patterson because he’s a not-great writer who uses a lot of “co-writers” and cranks out approximately 130 books a year. If you haven’t read one of his books, see if your mom has a copy.) There are certainly bad books, there is plenty of lazy writing, but there’s no such thing as a lazy author.

4) Stop measuring yourself by the achievements of others. This is basic human reflex, so it’s gonna be tough to beat. But if you can turn that impulse from a point of envy just a few degrees to a point of inspiration (aka Inspirado), it’ll do wonders for you. Next time you walk into a Barnes & Noble and look at that sea of books, don’t think: Why them? Think: Why not me?

Thanks for reading! Now go make something.

Matt

* Did Ward Cleaver smoke a pipe? It’s there in my memory, but I can’t find an image of it on Google. Does a cultural memory actually exist if it’s not on Google Images?

** Next post will be more craft-based, about crucial methods of self-trickery. There will also be a segment on who and who not to show your work to.