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I’m Here To Watch You Be Free
A good writer is like a pickpocket
My first short story almost never happened.
I was, of course, writing it in the middle of the night. It was due in 10 hours. I was doing this not because I wanted to be some kind of daredevil, but because I was genuinely so afraid of putting one word after another that I had put it off and put it off and put it off.
“Maybe I can call my professor in the middle of the night and tell him I have to drop the class,” I thought. It didn’t occur to me that professors very much don’t need to be informed in the middle of the night that you’ve chosen to drop their classes, but in a classic bit of undergrad solipsism, I imagined Hilary Masters across town in his gorgeous Mexican War Streets brownstone, watching me write the way people watch sports.
I also considered driving into the woods and never coming out. That is how strong my desire was — to not make a mistake, to not finish the story.
Writing fiction, making up a world and then having things happen in that world, felt like trying to push a wheelbarrow through a wall. Just … how? How to do it? Description, yes. I wrote about a couple on honeymoon in Hawaii, which is funny because I was not married, had never been to Hawaii, and maybe this is why I had a hard time figuring out what should happen, although I don’t actually think so. I think whatever is interesting is the thing to write, and that was interesting, somehow. I wrote a scene where a stack of pink napkins at their hotel fell off a table and were scattered like petals in a breeze. Good, I liked that. But then what? And then what?
I had surrounded myself with books I had read recently. Here was proof, in spite of how it felt to me in that moment, that fiction could be written. I flipped through them sort of amazed, sort of angry.
And I might have stayed on angry, quit the story, dropped the class, driven off into the pines (what pines? Oh dramatic 20-something mind), and thought of myself forever as a person who couldn’t write fiction except I then picked up Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson.
