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…
