Collaboration

I think one reason I'm having trouble surrendering myself to this book is that I'm just burned out on the loneliness of the writing life. When I was a kid I was really isolated and had a lot of social anxiety, so pulling into myself and making things up was a great comfort. This, obviously, had a great deal to do with my decision to devote my life to writing.

      I climbed out of my hole in my early twenties, and as part of that started collaborating with another young writer, Will Jacobs, on humor books, light mysteries, fan-boy non-fiction and comic books. That was a true joy: We'd spend days at each other's houses, brainstorm and plot together, go off and write separate chunks and pass them back and forth, and read a lot of our stuff to our friends. Books got written, but it seemed to happen through play. And when I began to move back to solo writing, the doors I'd opened with Will led me into other collaborative work: comic books, where most of my artists and editors wanted to be real creative partners, and screenplays for hire, where regular meetings with eager young development execs punctuated the stretches of solitary work.

      At first it was a relief when I started carving out time to write my own books. Days of uninterrupted thought! The freedom to make huge structural changes without having to persuade an editor! I even took some comfort in retreating back to the solitude that had gotten me through anxious times as a kid. And even then there continued to be collaborative efforts. In researching Killing Monsters I did storytelling workshops with kids in classrooms, about as far from a quiet, lonely experience as I could get.

      Then, before I'd even started the writing in earnest, I began getting invitations to speak at conferences on media and child development, and I found myself part of a sprawling international conversation. Men of Tomorrow required a tremendous amount of face-to-face interviewing and regular email conversations with other comics historians. Big parts of that book felt like massive multi-player collaborations.

      But The Undressing of America, set further in the past (the heart of the story is the 1920s, and the principals were nearly all dead by the end of the '50s), allows for a great deal less interviewing. Although there are other students of the tabloids, the confessional magazines, and old health crusades, there is no vibrant subculture constantly arguing the details. There's a lot of library research, and I do like library research—but dear God! To fly to New York and walk through midtown and spend the day in that windowless room with those effing microfilm machines (whrrr—klak—whrrr—klak) when I could be out drinking coffee with my snappy Manhattan friends or looking at the spring light flashing on the Empire State Building? Whose idea was that?

      Fellow writers can be a huge comfort. Being able to talk about all this with my pals at the Writers Grotto has kept me sane and gotten me through some of the worst resistance on the book. But here's a perverse twist: When I'm having trouble with the writing, I find it hard to show up at the Grotto. Or at least be open about what I'm going through. Part of it's that I don't want to be the whiner in the room. And part of it, as my cohort Jennine Lanouette helped me see recently, is that I punish myself by isolating. I get down on myself, feel like other people don't want to hear about this shit, tell myself I'm better off just staying home and working at the kitchen table where at least I have my dog to keep me company, and so I hold myself in that juvenile space where I resent the book and resist entering it. (I'm at my kitchen table, not the Grotto, as I write this.) It's easiest for me to be at the Grotto when I'm washing dishes after a party or leading a meeting of the goal-support group some of us have formed. Collaborative efforts again.

      No shock, then, that I seized on the chance to start collaborating with Will on humor again. Or that I find it easier to blog about writing my book, with the payoff of quick comments from other people, or at least being able to imagine readers out there the instant I hit "Publish Post." And I make comments on other people's blogs, post other writers' humor pieces on our Friends of Will and Gerry blog, and...collaborate with the blogosphere.

      So here's the big thing for me: For 35 years I've been running on the unexamined assumption that I'm basically a loner who should be happiest when he's producing personal work in solitude. In fact, I think I'm a lover of people and a natural collaborator with some moderate social phobias who got set on the wrong path when my mom—in her alcohol-muddied anxieties—pulled me out of the world at a crucial moment. And who has been able to ignore that disconnect because most of my writing career has, in fact, been far from solitary. The idea that I would someday be a Real Writer (which in my mind has meant the generation of work from some lonely internal singularity) has sat there like a vision of manifest destiny. But really: It ain't me.

      This is a good book I'm writing, and I believe that the people I'm writing about deserve to have their stories told. I think it will add something to our understanding of how we as a culture got where we are. And suddenly I realize I'm doing it a disservice by making it "my book." How do I get it out of my head? How do I make it into a collaboration? And with whom?