Is It Ironic to Write About Not Being Able to Write?

I hate writing. Except that I love it and can’t live without it. Ergo, it had better not leave me—never ever ever!!!—do you hear me?—not, that is, if it knows what’s good for it. It’s like Joey Buttafuoco to my Amy Fisher, but just around the edges and only if you squint really hard and from a very great distance.

Whenever I settle my ass down in order to whip me up some kick-ass literature--I’m talking some real Dostoevsky-grade shit—my mind travels a circuit of distractions, large and small, ranging from the philosophical, as in: What does It, whatever It is, all mean?, to the pragmatic, as in: When was the last time I cleaned out the litter box? Then my mind, after a while, gets all muddy so there’s really no point any more. I inevitably start describing the weather for a paragraph or two—the shifting purpled clouds, antsy winds, a raw and keening chill. And nothing but nothing, as we all know, cranks a prospective reader’s knob like a full-on meteorological report. I think Shakespeare sort of closed the book on climate-as-omen in Macbeth and King Lear, leaving a better writer than I the challenge of somehow eking portent and doom out of, perhaps, dew point and barometric pressure.

I have never wanted to do anything but write, except for a brief, ill-fated flirtation with acrylic paints. (Don’t ask. All evidence has been destroyed.) Consequently, when I am unable to write—or, more importantly, to write well—my net value, as openly traded on my internal stock exchange, plummets, and then foreign markets are affected as I tumble into full-blown grumphood. Which is understandable, I guess. You try misplacing your raison d’etre and see how you feel. It’s as if you’re a plastic Aunt Jemima-shaped bottle with all the syrup gone out. An opaque husk of a once-jolly stereotype.

Writing about writing (or about not-writing, as the case may be) is even worse than just-plain-writing because it reflectively, in that very hip, very now, very postmodern way, calls attention back to the writing itself, to the writing-as-product. The process becomes naked and welcomes any and all attention that its curdled tuches receives. If you read Proust, for instance, you can get all swept up in his reveries about high-calorie biscuits and what-have-you, but if I mention that I must write, as a Categorical Imperative, a number of you peanut gallery types will needle me, as you are wont, to keep my day job. Which I have and will. But my day job just isn’t my syrup; this is my syrup, this strange, difficult, nauseating writing thing.

Do you see what I’ve done here? By assuming that my writing, vis a vis writing-on-writing, will make you hate me, I’ve made you love me, haven’t I? Or if not love, then not want to kick me and call me names. Or if not not-want to kick me and call me names, then not want to aggravate my depression because my surviving family members might find a good lawyer and sue your naysaying bloomers off.

In other words, if I’m off moping in the corner, eating Paxil like Skittles and chugging Dark Eyes vodka by the triple-swig, then what does it say about you, and, transitively, about the meanie-pants of your ilk, that you can’t fucking lift up your snarky-ass hand, set it on my shoulder, and say, in a voice of damp intimacy, “There, there.” And then pause for effect before admitting that, ere my writing, impenetrable darkness reigned and the human imagination was snuffed beneath a thick, funereal pall. (I mean, would it hurt you to toss out one mere ort of nourishing praise every now and again?)

I had celebrated the advent of the quote-unquote Postmodern Age because I had hoped that, within this new paradigm, where form takes precedence over substance, I would finally be liberated. I could be a writer without actually needing to write a damn thing. I could be the image of a writer, wedged tightly, and forever without resolution, between the seminal moments of inspiration and the humdrum drudgery of pecking at a keyboard in the fluorescent LCD-haze of early morning, vibrating doubly, from the caffeine and from the fear of being a writer who isn’t one. (A writer, I mean.)

But if not writing then what? I suppose I could go to the zoo. I like to look at the animals, although (1) I’m afraid the llamas will spit at me (either instinctively or as a matter of taste), and (2) I have an emotionally hazardous tendency to anthropomorphize, which lends itself to visions of liberating the petting zoo, Che-style. Or I could masturbate for a while. That always burns through a fair-sized block of time, but too many consecutive rounds at the maypole, as the frequent flier knows, whittles the poor thing down to little more than a throbbing nerve within a rime of slough like an onion skin. Or I suppose when all else is lost, there’s television… although it gives me the icky, contractive feeling that my brain is drying out like a rotten fruit. Ever since, as a child, I was accosted by the syndicated sitcom Small Wonder, about a ‘tween girl named Vicki who was actually a robot and always wore a frou-frou red-and-white Baby Jane dress, I have largely distrusted the medium. It’s something like finding out your wife of thirty years has been sleeping with Abe Vigoda on the sly.
Speaking of the halcyon days of youth, I remember my first foray as a writer--an inauguration which intersects the theme of crappy television very nicely. I was inspired to write my first aimless, suitably idiotic story after watching a television movie starring Gary Coleman as an angel sent back to earth to redirect the spiritually wayward. As most of you will recall, Mr. Coleman played the poor black boy, with the depressed pituitary, who was adopted by the wealthy, white Upper East Sider Mr. Drummond (Conrad Bain) in NBC’s Diff’rent Strokes. If your fond Proustian recollection requires another go with a cattle prod, you may remember him as the sayer of the oft-repeated query: “Whatchoo talkin’ ‘bout, Willis?” If you are too young to remember any of this, then just go to hell. You’ve missed out on all the finer things in life anyway.

This sublime Gary Coleman angel flick, along with an admixture of equal parts Catholic education, Star Wars, and Clash of the Titans (Ray Harryhausen), coalesced into a serial narrative under the title Herald’s Wings, authored by yours truly circa the age of twelve. The plot, insofar as there was one, involved a band of vigilante angels called Herald’s Wings who, in hyper-Miltonian bombast, attempt to keep a band of devils and auxiliary no-goodniks from invading Heaven proper. We all, with a keen eye for resale, know what happens to property values when a demon or other postmortal malcontent moves into the neighborhood and puts his Monte Carlo up on blocks in the front yard.

Many of the villains came in the form, as dictated by my developing young naughty bits, of succubus—a demon in an expressly womanly receptacle, preferably in a black rubber bodice and patent leather jackboots. (One of Herald’s Wings antagonists was named Kristie but was physically derivative—however shameful it seems in retrospect—of Kirstie Alley as Lt. Saavik in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. But that was back when the cocaine, in lieu of Jenny Craig, was keeping Kirstie thin.)

To single out Kristie as one derivative element in this ragout of a thousand purloined ideas is a bit like eating only one potato chip or accusing only one priest of tossing a boy’s salad. Herald’s Wings was essentially a run-of-the-mill good versus evil adventure dressed up with hokey celestial art direction, i.e., billowy clouds and white satin robes. But the point of this digression is that, back then, before my own fall from Eden, it didn’t matter that the story was steaming horse shit, coiled high like a fecal ziggurat. I wrote it for myself and only for myself and, although I never reread any of the episodes, I enjoyed creating them, enthusiastically and unironically, without regard for future readers, future critics, or the future me, who is now hurling figurative rotten tomatoes.
Why can’t I recapture that writing innocence? That inhibited pleasure derived from telling stories that only I wanted to hear? I guess part of the problem is that it’s lonely speaking only to oneself especially when oneself never shuts the hell up.

But we—the greater community of accomplished writers, so-called writers, and even Nicholas Sparks—can take some small comfort in the realization that no matter how derivative, uninteresting, and/or all-out stupid our writing may be, we will likely never conceive of a prose so clumsy and stilted as V.C. Andrews’s. (Here, I am speaking of the stuff she wrote before she died.) The comparative value of her fiction is always the consolation prize at the game show of literary life.