Out of Sheer Masochism

Some of my friends are jumping on me as I talk about my procrastination: "Snap out of it! Quit complaining and write!" What they don't understand is what a strange pleasure it is to be caught in that suspense: haunted by the book, putting notes and words down, throwing them away, never quite able to pull that trigger, say "This is it." It's an electric place. Tremendously alive. Full of possibilities that can't be grasped, ghosts in the corners. Agonizing—but sweet.

     It's not the high of pouring out good material, but a lot more fun than just doing work. And things come out of it too. All those insights I had in Ojai, about Bernarr and Mary Macfadden acting out the 20th Century drama of the Self, which shifted the orientation of the book and keep opening to new ideas—those came because I was fretting about the book but wasn't in a flow working on the book as it was. As much as I grind my teeth and say, "I should be months into the actual writing of a draft," the truth is that the draft I would have started months ago may not have been nearly as good as the book I'm still building up to.

      My favorite book about writing is Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage. Which is actually a book about not writing. Dyer told himself that he was going to write either a critical biography or a novel about his literary hero, D. H. Lawrence. What he actually did was squander years of his life, and a significant amount of his publisher's money, "researching" the book and frantically, angrily, insanely procrastinating. The title comes from a quote of Lawrence's, who went through similar agonies trying to write about his own hero, Thomas Hardy, before finally writing it "out of sheer rage." But Dyer's rage—although it builds relentlessly and poisons every last experience—never even drives him to write the Lawrence book. It only drives him to write a book about not writing the Lawrence book. And it's funny as hell. In a nauseating sort of way.
     

      This is the single most-recommended book about writing among the writers I know. But never quite out loud: it's never assigned at a writing workshop or listed on the website of any writer trying to sell his services as a coach or teacher. It's whispered about at intimate parties and passed from hand to hand in communal workspaces, like The Gulag Archipelago in the USSR. Because it tells a terrible truth about the writerly personality: we don't just have terrible neurotic blocks to getting our work done. We love having terrible neurotic blocks to getting our work done. The pain just feels so good.

      But of course that doesn't make our suffering seem noble, or even like just a minor neurosis to be banished by "shut up and do it" homilies. It makes us look like a bunch of freaky masochists. So please...don't tell anyone!