Why I Write...Today

 

Every few days, especially when the deadlines come faster than the words, I ask myself why in the hell I ever decided to write for a living. A rhetorical question, of course; except that I recently made the mistake of asking it in front of my therapist, who immediately responded, “Well...why did you?”

        Any simple answer seemed inadequate. That’s the thing about a long career: what drove you to pick it up in the first place may be entirely irrelevant to what keeps you doing it now. A great deal of disenchantment can grow in that gap, especially if it’s unacknowledged. I have to ask myself not just why I made that decision but why I keep making it over and over again, every day that I don’t decide to do something else.

        It was fear that got me started. When I was fourteen my mom pulled me out of school, inspired by one of her alcoholic delusions; I was ashamed to talk to my friends, and pretty soon they forgot about me, leaving me with no companions but my dog and my fantasies. Right before I turned sixteen it dawned on me that sooner or later I'd have to enter the adult world and make my own living, an idea I found horrifying. What did I know how to do but read and make up stories? So I made what I can now pass off as a daring decision but was in fact the only safe one I could think of: I was going to make my living as a writer of fiction.
        Within a few months I was back in school, although not the same school I'd left. I wanted to make friends, but I felt like such a freak that I needed something to hide behind. My new aspirations were perfect for that. To my peers I became that weird kid who was always writing, which was better than being just that weird kid. To my English teachers I was that weird kid who deserved special attention. I was very productive for my age, mostly because I was afraid to stop.

       But things started to get better: my writing intrigued a cute and only slightly nerdy girl, who became my first girlfriend, and eventually my wife; then it led me to take a job at a used bookstore where wannabe writers were not only approved of but even given a sort of dusty glamor. Another guy at the store, Will Jacobs, talked me into collaborating with him for the hell of it, and we started reading the results to our friends. Pretty soon we were hosting parties just to give readings. Our humorous stuff went over best—I think that’s where my giddy new love of existence came through loudest. By my early twenties, writing had become my greatest source of joy.
         Fortune just kept turning her wheel in my favor. Will and I landed an agent and sold a humor book. It sold well and got us interviews and reviews all over the country. The editor of the National Lampoon called and asked us to write for him. I even quit my day job. Joy and love were rewarded.
        The trouble with Fortune is that she never knows when to stop the goddamn turning. Our second book tanked. We couldn't sell the third. We broke with our agent and couldn't get another one. The Lampoon burned us out. I couldn't even get my old day job back. Writing had become all about frustration and anxiety; but it was also the only way I could imagine to get back to the joy.

      The way back turned out to be, of all things, one of my favorite old escape routes from adolescence: I started writing comic books, and apparently I was pretty good at it. Suddenly writing meant flights to New York for editorial meetings, collaborations with great cartoonists, fans lining up at comic conventions, a strangely sweet power over the fates of my childhood heroes. My comics attracted attention in Hollywood, so now writing also meant flights to L.A. for development meetings, agents buying me breakfast, and more money than I’d ever expected to make. I don’t know if that was quite joy, but it felt good.
         Money's sneaky, though: it wants you to spend it. My wife and I bought a house, she quit work for the first five years of our son's life, then we put him in a private school. When the work slowed a bit, I was hooked like a trout; the writing had to be mainly about money. But I learned pretty quickly that I couldn't write just for money.

I wish I could claim that at as an ethical stance, but no. I just didn't know how to write well when I didn't care about the work. So the work started to suck, and people stopped hiring me, and finally the answer to "why do I write?" became "desperation." I went kind of crazy with it, actually. I took on writing jobs I felt contempt for. I tried to make up for writing bad things by writing worse things. I discovered old child-of-alcoholic patterns I didn’t know were there. My marriage hit the rocks and so did a lot else.

         Some of us are slow learners: I was in my early forties when I finally realized that the only way to write something good was to write something I believed in. What I believed in most was my son. His mom was now working full time, and for a while not living with me, so I did a lot of hands-on parenting. Watching him deal with the struggles of kindergarten, thinking about my own childhood, I decided I had to write a book about fantasy, growing up, and symbolic conflict. 
        That book came out under the name Killing Monsters, and soon I was giving interviews, engaging in public debates, and writing articles to say things I believed about children and imagination. For the first time, I could answer “why do I write?” with “to say something that matters.”
        I decided to reorganize my life around that answer. The new work wasn't paying all the bills yet, so I kept the least demanding just-for-money work and refinanced the house to pull money out of my equity (there was a time you could do such things). I joined the San Francisco Writers Grotto to build a professional network. I wrote another book I believed in and sold the proposal for a third. I thought that by the age of fifty I might be making all this work.
        Then my son got sick. He’d been suffering from periodic migraines since second grade, but in sixth they turned chronic and disabling. He had a few respites over the next couple of years, but in high school the migraines came down like an avalanche, sweeping his whole life away. 
        I let them sweep a lot of me away, too. Yes, there were other issues: marriage again, money as ever, having to rethink the book after someone else published one too much like my original idea. But it was the parenting that carried me over the edge. If I wasn’t trying to help my son get to school or catch up on his work, if I wasn't talking to neurologists and homeopaths and psychologists, then I was worrying obsessively about everything I wasn’t doing. “Why do I write?” became “why can’t I write?”Which, as we all know, becomes a spiral in itself.

        Which is when I learned how much I need other people. A little band of us at the Grotto confessed our productivity issues to each other in a group we called Ass-Kickers Anonymous. I also went to real 12-step meetings for "compulsive underearners." I lined up friends to offer me incentives or threaten me with punishments for getting my work done or not. I started another book with my old friend Will Jacobs to remind myself that writing can be more play than work. I even let another Grotto member talk me into teaching classes, where I was reminded how much writing means to people who are still trying to master it.
        Bit by bit, with a lot of help, I started turning the spiral the other direction. I began to get rough paragraphs down, then rough chapters. Ideas that had once lain strewn across the chaos of my brain began to come together, and every once in a while I'd discover that a graceful sentence had somehow slipped through. Still, though, if you’d asked me why I wrote, the best answer I could have come up with was just that not writing was too frightening an option to contemplate.

       Then, this past fall, near the end of a long, hard draft of the new book, I participated in the Grotto’s group reading at San Francisco’s annual literary block party, LitCrawl. I can’t quite tell you why, but I decided to read a piece from The Beaver Papers, the humor book Will and I wrote thirty years ago that became my first published work. Reading it gave me a sense of the totality of my career, the most joyful times and the most grueling.
       Later, the Grotto gang came together at the LitCrawl after-party. At first I drifted toward a conversational clump, but I kept feeling pulled toward the dance floor. Holly Jones saw me wavering and pulled me out onto the floor. Soon a bunch of us who’d read that night were out there, celebrating our rare moment of glamor and blowing off our tension. We didn’t say a word about writing; we sang crappy pop lyrics and whooped for each other’s more ridiculous moves. But that night I had no questions about why I wrote.
       Like I say, that’s the thing about a long career. I chose writing in the first place so I could avoid other people, but I keep doing it now so I can connect with them. Tomorrow I may finally wake up and realize I have no reason to keep choosing this job. But just for today, I know why I’m here.