fake it until you make it.

Dan Brown rises at 4 am to write every morning. If he has writer’s block, he hangs upside down from the metal stirrups of a gravity table to get his blood pumping again. And his sentences are purposefully structured, so that his readers never have to read a sentence twice.

His latest novel has just been released, and I am already tired of the dog and pony show. Man, this guy knows how to stir up the theatrics.

I won’t assume what his personal life entails, or his work routine, or his belief system. I can’t despise the man because he is a multi-millionaire, and has successfully positioned himself in the publishing world so that everyone wants to ride the wave with him, or cash in on a fat paycheck.

So, why do stories like this irk me so?

not my photo.

Maybe because writers who get lucky, who were in the right place at the right time, who sat down one day in a café and decided they could turn out a novel (after never having studied the craft), have given the general public the wrong impression: that writing is easy, that anyone can do it, and you can get famous reinventing the wheel by making it a flashier, tricked out model.

Then later, when these writers are rolling in the dough, they get interviewed and the media and masses want to know when their next book is due, and their agent and publisher begins hounding them to produce, produce, produce. They all want more, more, more. And the author starts realizing, Shit! Writing is actually hard when you have to do it on cue. Writing does take time, especially when done under expectation. And regardless of how many copies were sold, writing that isn’t of a certain level, will almost always be critiqued by the literary experts (devalued by the lack of experience that is so transparent in the author’s work).

Then they disappear from the limelight, or sell flop after flop. But it wasn’t as good as their first, the people will say. Their die-hard fans will continue rallying in their corner, and for the author it makes them believe they are worthy of all the publicity and wealth they have received-- maybe they even rationalize it, maybe they become experts themselves on their version of the wheel.

Fake it until you make it, is a rather funny saying to me. I never understood it, but I know people who abide by this motto, and who lead lives and careers by way of these words.

I wish Dan Brown all the best in his consumer and commercial success. And I in turn, will go back to laboring over my silly stories that have nothing to do with wheels, and attempt to make a living of sorts.

"writers write"

When I first took interest in writing, I kept it to myself. I didn’t do it because anyone told me I could or should write, or because it had been pointed out to me that I had any skill whatsoever.

I wrote because I felt a need to create something beyond what I perceived life to be. I did it in the woods, upon rocks, like a sun-bathing salamander; in my bed, with a book lamp, before the lights went out; and in hidden spaces I would crawl inside quietly, trying to escape the everyday woes of being an eleven year old.

I kept journals, as a sacred form of expression for my pre-adolescent self. My entries weren’t all truth and honesty either, but a construction of how I wanted things to be. I fantasized, I pined, I wrote out my anger, letting my inner-monologue do all the talking. I developed insomnia, because I feared what lurked in the dark; and when I did get to sleep, my dreams were filled with such a vivid kind of world, that at times I found difficult to separate myself from. Some would call this an over-active imagination, but for me it was just part of who I was.

Why this means anything to me now, is what I am coming to recognize in my development as a writer. In my late teens and early twenties, when I really began to take my passion seriously, there was this shift in how I viewed the act of writing; where before it was simply something I enjoyed doing. Suddenly, I started needing assurance of whether or not I was any good. I implored teachers about my grades, and asked for suggestions in making my writing better. I was hard on myself to a fault, and yet I felt inadequate on every level. I gave up, and tried not to think much of it, but really I couldn’t bear the thought of not making the cut.

I went to school for business, then for art education, and finally settled on the social sciences as a last ditch effort (when it was almost too late to choose). I fell in love with a musician, who challenged my choices, who thought I was crazy for thinking about law school, and who could not understand how I could keep living this lie I told myself each day, that was:  I wasn’t any good, that I would never be a writer, and that no one gave a damn about what I had to say.

“Writers write,” he would say to me. And it wasn’t that I had stopped writing altogether, it was just that I was too self-conscious to show anything off I had written.

In 2008, I started a blog (this blog). And at the time, it was a way to “feel out my audience,” in a similar practice as a musician who tries out a new song at an open mic. The feedback was mixed, and it was clear I needed a lot of work. Subsequently, I started a longer project, though I can’t say I knew in that moment that it would become my first attempt at a novel.

I decided to leave my decent paying job in the city, and move home. I applied to graduate school for writing, not actually believing I would get in. And in the midst of all this, my relationship floundered, as I looked for the sort of reciprocity I just couldn't see.

Why I am laying this all out, is because it is the basis for my most recent observations—

“Writers write,” he used to say, and I would get all pissy about the assertion. Now, I see things for what they are, and that is: writing as a one-sided relationship—the real relationship starting with one’s self—the creative one, within.

Before blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, what writers wrote about didn’t require constant affirmation, a “platform”, or a band of followers who praised their every word. What they needed was time, and solitude, and a place to detach, if only for a temporary period, from all the others fraught with opinions, and suggestions, and demands.

Just like in a relationship, we want to be the best possible version of ourselves for our counterparts (or audience), which can only happen after we have worked on who we are first. We love because we are better people for doing so, not because an expectation exists, or is forced upon us. And we as writers (and artists) create, not because someone is telling us we should, or could. But because we must.

Henry Miller, I believe said it best: “Artists never thrive in colonies. Ants do. What the budding artist needs is the privilege of wrestling with his (or her) problems in solitude--and now and then a piece of red meat.”

And if that isn’t a note of reason (if there ever was one), than this may be: Miller’s first real attempt at writing was a book he wrote while on a three-week vacation from his low-paying job at Western Union. It was never published, and seen by very few. For ten more years, he worked on novel after novel, rarely sharing his work with anyone, until finally at the age of forty-two, a piece slipped out worthy enough for print. It was called, The Tropic of Cancer.

untitled.

 

When you talk of us, you recount times and places

we’ve made love. I, lean up against cold brick and smoke behind your flat,

pointing out what we are not. The messages connect then die out in another bout.

And there we are again, slugging up the coast in a rented van. A stretch of glades at our backs, and listening to Paul Simon.

Headlights fanning out through some pinhole obscura—the dissolution sneaking up on us, as we drive on deeper into the groves.

And there we are again, in a squalor bar beneath a blown out tarp, while I hustle

the Cubanos and bikers at games of pool—scratching out new constellations on green felt, and you lit up in neon, with an amp.

That leather skirt I wore, how out of character it was (but wasn’t that just like us, back then?)

Then later, at the hotel—the rush of being high above the city,

the champagne dry and sweet to our eager mouths, and standing both naked at the top of the world, as Miami blazed on like some lucid distant canto.

And I think: yeah, maybe you were right—it was just us,

in those days, back when.

 

 

 

 

voice = essence

interview with Jeff Buckley, Paris

 

my prince.

I got married young, at five, behind a bookshelf. Though I’d told him I was saving myself for Le Petit Prince, I said I would settle for him, the boy with green-gold eyes. His offer was a ring, a milky colored opal stolen from his mother’s jewelry box—the temporary cure for all my melancholia. I had that ring for a week before his mother found out—I had buried it in the dirt of the playground, and pretended it was lost forever. We were divorced shortly thereafter, when I got caught kissing another boy, near the back fence of the school yard beneath the willows.

the limits of language.

"What is the fear inside language?" writes Anne Carson in her meditations titled, The Anthropology of Water. Because I've been wondering the same. Is it the depths of where it can lead us, with our crudely formed philosophies and dissection of inner thoughts? Or the fact that we can not pinpoint everything we experience by applying simple labels. Or that there is no permanence to language, and that as soon as an observation is spoken or recorded, the moment has passed and has become obsolete.

 

Language is indeed broad, a shape-shifting agent of "what is". We can not talk about things we don't have words for. And how about all those things that go undescribed and non-registering--what else is lying there between the letters and lines and phrases?

 

If "there exists an aorist verb system" in other languages, that can not only capture the essence of reality, but the present, present tense, "a man at noon standing atop of his own shadow," then it is proof enough for me to recognize that we are truly limiting ourselves of where language can take us.

 

 

coupling.

it was feeding time at the zoo,
and we went at each other
in some brutal hyperbole,
we couldn't ground,
even if we wanted to,
or could crawl inside its understanding.

satiate is a loose term
for settledness,
and the only bars we've become
accustomed to
is where we drink Madras,
and dark rum,
and enough tart lime juice
to make our mouths pucker
sourly.