Fear of Writing

This is writing for the sake of writing.  Over Memorial Day weekend my family had dinner with my wife's college roommate who is a successful writer.  While I can't claim to be her target audience, I can claim envy of her success.  Her latest book, Area 51, spent over 14 weeks on the New York Times best sellers list, which is one of her agent's prerequisites to represent a writer, and is on course for a television series.  Prior to this book she wrote for the LA Times and published another book for a smaller publisher.  One of her comments the other night alluded to Gladwell's 10,000 hours finally paying off.  She sounded humble and sincere with the implication that a best seller is not easy and requires enormous effort.  She also didn't balk when in later dinner conversation I piped up with my claim to want to write.  Rather she smiled and offered the same advice nearly every other writer offers:  set aside a specific allotment of time on a regular basis and just write.  She offered 20 minutes three times a week, echoing Dorothea Brande's advice to just write.

Oddly I find writing fairly easy.  The hard part is writing something that will have an audience.  After all, what's the point in writing if it's going to sit in a notebook unread?  There's certainly the therepeutic part of getting thoughts out in a linear fashion; to write feelings is to make them real so they stare back at you.  Sometimes what ends up on the page doesn't seem right and further honing and editing can help clarify what you think is inside.  And this is good.  Still, the ultimate reward is having someone read your story and get something out of it.  A little compensation would be nice as well so it can become a fulltime endevour.  It's also, for me anyway, the most difficult challenge.  It's really not that hard to jot down some words.  The hard part is throwing it out there to see if it sticks and open it up to criticism.

Fortunately I know I'm not the only one. To wit:  two of my Amazon reviews of relatively small press books resulted in retaliations by their authors.  One is for a book about Burma Shave signs I purchased at Reno's automobile museum after a long Burning Man weekend..  The author writes of my review:

I don't like criticism--most people don`t, I suspect--but I take it to heart, search through it, think about it, and if I find it credible, use it to improve my writing. That's how I've survived as a fulltime freelancer for the past 33 years. However, in this case, I find this review without merit: a hastily-written, poorly-thought-out put-down of a book the reader obviously did not understand.I don't like criticism--most people don`t, I suspect--but I take it to heart, search through it, think about it, and if I find it credible, use it to improve my writing. That's how I've survived as a fulltime freelancer for the past 33 years. However, in this case, I find this review without merit: a hastily-written, poorly-thought-out put-down of a book the reader obviously did not understand.

While any sting from the author's comment faded after re-reading my brief review (it still sounds about right), the author's defensiveness is completely understandable.

A more entertaining author rebuttal is of a backpacking food book.  This guy takes defensiveness to a new level, to the point where the reviewers felt compelled to reviewing the reviews and not the book.  The unfortunate part is that the author rebuts nearly every low to mediocre review.  I feel badly for the guy.  Clearly he believes what he writes, and one would hope that would be enough.  As I wrote in my reply to his sarcastic rebuttal, "It is unfortunate that you feel the need to defend most (if not all) negative reviews of your book. If you cannot stand to have your baby subject to criticism then I would recommend another line of work."  And therein lies the rub.  It's the hardest part of the transition from writing in notebooks that you know won't have an audience until your kids find them in buried in a dusty box in your estate.

When the fear grabs hold, it can be helpful to refer to encouragement from other artists (this word is used loosely and only as a catch-all for those who put their work into the wild).  The following from Steve Albini's entertaining Reddit A.M.A. rings true - just pretend it's about writers and not musicians:

“The most destructive thing a musician can do is start worrying about whether or not other people will like the music. … They’re not in the band. Just make music that stimulates you and don’t second-guess yourself.”

And with that one more of Gladwell's 10,000 hours is clocked.

Book review: "American Junkie" by Tom Hansen

American Junkie by Tom Hansen is powerful autobiographical memoir of a Seattle heroin addict who not only tells a harrowing, self-destructive story, but also is a demonstration of finding a calling in mid-life following years of searching.   On the surface Mr. Hansen provides a gritty and real glimpse into the drug dealer underworld in Seattle, my back yard, in the 1980's and 90's.  Prior to reading this book it was difficult to imagine just how much damage heroin can do to a body.  The book contains enough personal graphic detail of self-inflicted wounds fed by narcotic addiction that it could almost be used as a text book for young teens about why, as South Park's Mr. Garrison would say, drugs are bad.  My suspicion that the area around 2nd and Pike is ripe with drugs was also validated.

Beyond the above, which are fascinating on their own, the book's greatest strength is Tom's struggle to find a place in the world.  The book tells two parallel stories: one of his recovery following a 911 call he barely managed to dial, the other his life story from the fourth grade through his downward spiral culminating in a skeletal, barely alive 30-something junkie.  I would argue that not only is this struggle is not unique to Mr. Hansen, but it is not unique to heroin users, dealers, or the seedy underworld in which they belong.

The author documents hurdles in his early years that may seem typical, but toTom were deeply significant.  Most of us have them.  Tom discusses two such events - the death of his father and learning he's adopted.  Many do just fine under these circumstances, even excel, and many don't.  There's no point in beginning to psychoanalyze or point to easy scapegoats to explain why this young boy grew into a disillusioned young man who nearly self-destructed.  The point is he uses a select few childhood and teen memories paint a picture of his timeline.  It's not like one day he broke up with a girlfriend, went on a binge, and was forever owned by the needle.  Rather, the reader can see his character and personality easily gravitate to a world dominated by others who, like him, for one reason or another never found a place in the world.

While reading the book it became clear that Tom's struggle is not isolated to those who become junkies or pimps or hookers.  There is an abundance of the same disillusionment in the white collar world, walking carpeted hallways in high rise buildings and working in cubes daily.  And, according to my primary care physician, some of these people are also customers of those like Tom, secretly numbing their life with heroin.

In Tom's case his struggle is to finding meaning in the world, or at least the immediate surrounding he found himself in.  The world of 1980's Pacific Northwest suburbia in Edmonds as a quiet kid.  At one point at around the age of 15 he finds himself in Norway visiting his uncle Sverre on a farm.  While there he was put to work doing manual labor, spending hours collecting grain in fields and then shoveling it into a hole in a floor that drained into trailers waiting to take it away.  It's this point in his life that Tom remembers "a strange feeling, a sense of being in tune with the world".  He writes it was a "feeling that this was what people were supposed to be doing in this life, surrounded by family, part of a community, just doing what they had to do, rather than being faced with a thousand meaningless choices".  Over the course of the book he refers to this memory several times.  At one point he likens his life as a dealer with a similar sense of satisfaction, one where he's in tune with his surroundings, performing work that doesn't incur significant stress and serves a clear need.  It's easy to take argument with the last suggestion of a dealer's life not being stressful, but Tom's picture of a dealer driving around town making deliveries on his own schedule, never exceeding the speed limit, is convincing enough that he probably actually experienced this brief job satisfaction.  He also had to contend with constantly looking over his shoulder for cops and concern that one of his customers or sources might rat him out as part of a deal with the law.

The key takeaway above his desire to live in a world without "a thousand meaningless choices".  One could say this is a burden on those who haven't found their calling, their purpose.  Without that, how do they know what to choose to do?  On the other hand, for those who are blessed with knowing what their passion is, and then the courage, will, and support to act on it, to actively choose to pursue that passion, this world, or at least the world you and I are in, as opposed to areas on this world where those choices simply don't exist, like North Korea (read "Escape from Camp 14" by Blaine Harden if you don't believe such places are real), is a playground.  It's a world with limitless possibilities where the happiness and joy of doing what you want to do can actually happen.

Not all who find themselves lost in this world with a thousand choices gravitate to the world Tom emerged.  There are thousands of these people pursuing other people's dreams, rather than their own, who are unable to find the joy they were lead to believe would be at the end of their path.  Those who allowed their parents or the world around them make their decisions for them.  Those who expect happiness from a job as a project manager because a large corporation not only rewards them handsomely with money and a false sense of purpose, but those around them smile with approval when they see their name on a business card.

This isn't to say that all in the corporate world are shills.  Many are happy, fulfilled, and look forward to getting up and gong to work.  As my writer friend Sydney Salter wrote to me the other day, "sometimes envy those blissful souls who never even consider a creative life."  This is from a person who actively decided to write because a life without a creative outlet is one in which she discovered she doesn't fit.  Her words reflect Tom's desire for a world without decisions, full of blissful souls who are happy and find a zen-like sense of purpose in a life of manual labor.

Despite the horrors, the cringeworthy detail of Tom's heroin induced wounds, and the sadness conveyed about those in the drug world, "American Junkie" has a sliver lining that is apparent from the first few pages.  Tom made it.  He survived.  Not only did he survive, but he found a calling to write, to put his experiences on the page.  He actively made a choice in this world of so many choices for himself.  I don't think it's spoiling the book to quote the following from the book's second to last page about leaving the hospital.  "I have no clue what I'm ring to do once I walk out that door. … Maybe I'll crawl into a hole and finish dying.  Maybe, I'll write a goddamned book."  I, for one, am glad he opted for the latter.

Destroying the Page with Words

The hardest part is the blank page.  With those seven words the page is no longer blank.  Ha!  One hurdle down!

As long as I can remember there's been something inside trying to be heard or seen.  In my obsessive record collecting youth it was the former.  Records accompanied me home under my collegiate arm, usually well worn by their previous owners, but cheap.  The grooves in the vinyl contained the creative output of (almost always) men and they (almost always) were older than me.  Buried in the pleasure derived from placing the needle on the record and hearing the warm, if not a bit poppy and scratch, sounds was a hidden hope and desire that one day i would be one of the men making music that went on vinyl and that I would be the older person inspiring and making someone happy.

That was over twenty years ago.  During that time the dream was never realized, though there were semi-close brushes two or three times removed from a few folks who for a brief moment had it within their grasp.  Four years at public radio station KCMU provided a peripheral experience.  There those who volunteered could put together four-hour long stretches of musical collages, forcing a fucked up genre mixture for which I will always be thankful.  The volunteer DJ's weren't making the music to be heard (not always true:  this was Seattle from 88-92 after all), but they were responsible for making it heard over the airwaves and blending the disco with the dissonant jazz with the industrial noise with the beautiful power pop from New Zealand with the enchanting sounds of Africa.  Only after leaving did I realize what a creative experience those four years were.

A few years later I enjoyed about a decade of playing bass in an all-improv group where magically I wasn't the person playing the songs but one of the people making the songs.  Sunday evenings in the summer of 1996 or 1997 the music happened.  We had a practice space on Capital Hill where we met around 7pm.  The chemistry of anywhere between three or four guys (or drum machine) clicked after two to four beers.  I didn't know what I was doing, but it provided an outlet.  A release on the valve to get something out, to get something heard.  Never mind that rarely did anyone ever hear it (live shows happened infrequently), but being there in the present, letting my fingers put together some messed up riff that I never thought anyone would contemplate working with, and having others lay down music on top of it, then hearing it then in the here and now was a rush.  A buzz well beyond anything the beers offered.

From the improvised band I moved to one who played real songs and a recording actually happened, as did a few shows.  However, like countless other good bands, this one never rose above the occasional show and halfway decent demo before the flame went out. By the fourth year practice as a weekly boys night of beer and playing the same old songs in a dark room.  Sure it was fun, but the potential and fire were gone.  And unlike most other similar good bands, we were middle-aged in our 30's, 40's, and 50's.

Fast forward to now.  In the twenty plus years since I started obsessively carrying home cheap used stacks of records I became older than nearly all the musicians who I elevated to hero status were when they put out the records that moved me.  Pete Townshend, Ace Frehely, Joe Strummer, Keith Richards, Mark Arm (and several other grunge musicians in my back yard).  I'm 44 going on 45.  Pete Townshend just turned 26 when Live at Leeds was released, Ace Frehely was 27 when my parents gave me his Kiss solo record for Christmas, Joe Strummer is dead by natural causes, and Keith Richards was about 35 when Some Girls came out.  The most entertaining output by Mr Richards since are the crazy adventures put on the page in his autobiography, Life.

The musical urge, while not dead, is fading along with those who inspired it.  Perhaps one day, like the prolifically creative aged men who I still adorn with hero status (Julian Cope, Jah Wobble, Mike Watt, Buzz Osborne, Thurston Moore, Fred Cole) something I record will be played by a young kid.  And perhaps it will be an electronic, intangible file rather than a hefty chunk of vinyl.  Perhaps it's as likely to happen as my 24 year old fantasy chatting up King Buzzo in downtown Olympia and him asking me, "Hey, we're replacing Joe Preston.  Do you know any good bass players?"

Back to the now.  The musical urge cross-faded with the writing urge.  Both are outlets, a way to get something out, to make something that didn't exist before, hopefully with an audience.  And fortunately the writing urge requires only two investments:  a device (computer, check) and the will (uh, checked, then erased, then checked again in pencil just in case to avoid commitment, then erased, and now once again checked again, though digitally so it's permanent but can be deleted).

My best friend from high school is married to a writer, Sydney Salter.  I congratulated her the other day on accolades she received by another writer on a writers' blog.  She responded saying the hardest part is the empty page.  She wrote, "My guess is that if you're even thinking about writing, you're meant to write".  The voice deep inside me said, "Whoa, how did she know?".  The voices on the surface, the ones that are always trying to get out, said perhaps he'll finally do it.  She also wrote, "Get some words down".  Destroy the blank page.  Ok, she didn't say that sentence - I did.

Well, mission accomplished.  This page is no longer empty.  Some of the voices swirling inside searching for a way out are set free.  A creative outlet is tapped and, like the jamming in the late 90's, even if it does't receive an audience, it's still a healthy release feels really good.