WHAT IT'S LIKE

Every now and again someone asks me what it's like to be an author. I'm never sure how I'm supposed to respond. After all, what's it like to be a surgeon? Or a plumber? Or a soldier? What's it like to be a fisherman or law clerk or stuntman? What's it like to be a financier or work at a soup kitchen? You can describe the details of your training and your everyday work-life in minute detail, but you can't really convey what it truly means to do the job unless you've actually done it.

Because describing what you do for a living presents such obvious difficulties from the start, it's probably best to simply say that before I am an author, and indeed after, I am also a human being. It is on that point that you and I are most likely to have a place of contact, something in common, a frame of reference from which we can operate. This is why I generally don't mention my status as a writer to people when I initially meet them – and sometimes, not for months afterwards. But I occasionally enjoy a challenge, so I am going to try to explain what a writer's life is like, at least at my particular level. (What it's like for Stephen King I couldn't possibly tell you.)

First and foremost: the writer, if he is a real writer and not a hobbyist or a poseur or dilletente, is always a writer. He is always on. Nearly everything he sees, observes, thinks about, or experiences is filtered through the lens of his creative faculty. What I mean by this is that reality, everyday reality -- walking around town, driving to the grocery store, jogging, watching a sunset -- has to pass through a kind of screen which lets the forgettable stuff pass but allows the interesting fragments to accumulate in what I call The Writer's Place, a portion of the brain which stores things that might later turn up in a story. Nothing, now matter how trivial or tragic, not even his dreams, are immune from this process. The writer is constantly gathering material, and this is process never stops. There is no "off" switch. In this sense he is both blessed and cursed. The blessing comes from the fact that he can take trivial incidents that others would certainly forget and turn them into pieces of mosaic; he can create art from the most random thoughts, ideas, glimpses, and happenings. The curse is that this faculty, never resting, intrudes on all of his experiences and emotions in the most vulgar and tasteless way. In the grip of terrible grief, the writer is still a writer. Part of him, a part without any sense of decorum or human feeling, is recording and filtering his own pain, evaluating it for its utility as source material for a future book. There are times that the writer cannot help but despise himself for this. As Thomas Harris wrote in Red Dragon, "Graham regarded his own intelligence as grotesque but useful, like a chair made from antlers. There was nothing he could do about it."

Actually writing a novel, or even a short story, is a very difficult thing to describe. The process by which the idea, or set of ideas, comes to a writer may develop over years or come in a single flash, and there is no set ways by which one arrives at the flashpoint. Sometimes a single image, a line or two of poetry, a bad dream or even a misheard lyric can result in a 400 page manuscript. It a species of magic, and like all magic suffers from explanation. But the other process, the one where the idea becomes the 400 page manuscript, is totally different and much more relatable to the non-writing, non-creative person, because it is simply a job of work. Granted, it is a job of highly peculiar work, but it is work nonetheless, a mechanical process. When the idea within a writer's mind takes on sufficient power and clarity to spark him to actual effort, the mechanical process finds its beginning. He begins with the obvious: the first sentence. But again, we are dealing with a commonplace which nonetheless has several hidden facets. The first sentence in any story is always the most difficult point in the whole process, with the exception of the very last. A boring or mediocre first sentence can kill a good idea in its cradle, and so the writer often spends hours, or days, staring at a blank screen or a blank sheet, considering and discarding various openings. Once he has selected the one he feels is right (notice I did not say "the right one") the words generally begin to flow more smoothly, but "more smoothly" is something of a trick phrase. More smoothly than what? Burlap? Sandpaper? A porcupine? When one is writing, one is extracting ideas which within the mind seem concrete and obvious, but when transferred to paper seem to consist mainly of smoke. What you see in your mind never entirely translates onto the page. Something is always lost, and yet at the same time, something is always gained: new ideas form over the old ones rather like creepers over an iron-wrought fence, leading to a final product which is neither what you originally envisioned nor anything entirely new and different. The baby is a hybrid, a kind of bridge between idea and action. I don't suppose any writer in human history has made a 1:1 translation between idea and draft. The whole undertaking is in essence as difficult as exactly relating not only the substance but the actual specifics, the dialog and colors and sounds, which occur within a dream.

During the writing of any piece, regardless of length, there are moments when the writer loses either his enthusiasm or his sense of direction. He either cools off on the very ideas that motivated him in the first place, or reaches a point of creative fatigue, or simply temporarily runs out of ideas. He may also end up writing something so different from what he intended that, like any unfortunate who finds himself lost, he stops and tries to take his bearings. Either way, progress ceases, and the dreaded "half-finished draft" is born. What separates the professional from the amateur writer in this case is simply the ability to power through these inevitable stoppages until inertia is overcome and momentum regained.

(Every self-styled "writer" has drawers full of scripts, plays, novels, and short stories...and none of them are finished. Until he comes to the point where he can complete his works, or most of them, he is a hobbyist, not a writer.)

This momentum may be regained in a few days, or it may take weeks, months, or even years. I have novels that I wrote in ten months, and other novels, of the same length, which took three times that long. I have short stories I finished in a week or even a day, and short stories that took two decades to complete. Unless I am working under a deadline, I rarely judge myself for this. The important thing to me is that the draft be finished, not necessarily the timeframe in which it is. And you must remember, writing is a steel cage death match with no rules, any means or methods used to cross the finish line on a story are fair play, and it hardly matters if the first draft is written in the blood of the saints or an unreadable piece of shit so long as it is complete.

The emphasis on completion at any cost, regardless of quality, is not a fetish. Once you have a draft in your hand, you can do anything: there is no limit on the number of drafts a story can be put through, and no idea so bad that it can't be fashioned into something better, or at least something different, rather like the proverbial knife that has had seven blades and five handles. But you can never get to that point if you keep stopping and going back to the beginning and starting again. A professional will see even what he comes to realize (or believe) to be a bad idea to its conclusion, because it can always be salvaged later. Nothing whatever can be made of a half-finished story...except a completed one. But knowing this and getting to that point are two different things, and so the writer is often haunted by his own half-finished works and damnably sensitive about them. Nothing rankles a writer so much as when a non-writing friend blithely, or perhaps contemptuously, asks, “That book of yours – when is it going to be finished?”

Because writing is a solitary process, the ordinary writer probably deals with more loneliness than most people, but it follows that this too is more faceted of a statement than it sounds. Writers being artists, they live in a constant relationship with their art which most others cannot understand. The process I described above separates them from other people, but this is not the only obstacle to forming and maintaining human relationships. Writers are often some form of introverts, comfortable only on their own ground and within their own sphere of interest. Writers of the Hemingway or Hunter Thompson type, who are life-devouring raconteurs and bon vivants, are a relative rarity and even they may be faking it to a degree. Writers make-believe for a living, so it is only natural that they are more comfortable in make-believe worlds than anywhere else. No writer worth anything has not fantasized regularly since childhood about living in some other universe, be it fantasy, science-fiction or something else entirely. This is not mere projection: it is a reflection of the discomfort they feel as human beings in a world that does not understand them, and which they themselves do not understand. It is a curious phenomenon indeed, for the true writer is a student of the human condition and of life itself, and he makes it his business to be an expert on worldly life; yet he is generally at odds with both humans and what we would call everyday reality. Perhaps it is this very alienation which allows him to make the observations, the deductions, the conclusions which escape those who are happier and better-suited to this world. Perhaps only one who is "in but not of" can truly understand the world. But this ability, like the other, comes with a price. Writers probably fantasize about being "normal" almost as much as they fantasize about being Captain Kirk, or Harry Potter, or Bilbo Baggins, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yet they can never be normal: normalcy is the one thing they may never be and still hope to be writers.

Because most people do not understand the writing process, writers are often unintentionally insulted by those around them. J.K. Rowling humorously observed that the movie studio suits she dealt with regularly seemed to act as if the Harry Potter books were crystals, or mushrooms, or slalagmites, forming by themselves almost independently of Rowling herself. Trapped in an endless series of meetings and conferences, she was continuously asked why the book wasn't further along – as if somehow it could write itself (magically, one supposes) while she was away from her computer. Nor did the suits grasp that writing is work, very hard work indeed, and that a novel, particularly a lengthy one, may take years to complete even if the writer scarcely takes a day off. Writers involved in lengthy projects often hit stumbling blocks or waste time proceeding down false paths, and these futile asides can absorb them for months, even years. In my own life, I have often noted that most people not only do not understand this, they take the opposite view to a logical absurdity. I have been told by more than one overweight computer programmer that what I do does not compare with what they do; when I point out that we both sit in chairs in front of computers all day, but they don't need any imagination to do their job and I require an enormity of it, they stare at me as if I had just insulted their mothers. But it is a fact that writing is not only imaginative but utterly exhausting work. To constantly tap the creative faculty requires from me more energy than I expend when swimming or hiking or going to the gym. I was never so famished after an hour in a martial arts studio as I was after three hours of graduate school classes devoted to the study of writing popular fiction. Brain work is hard word, and when you throw the creative side into action alongside the logical one, the energy drain is enormous.

There are factors which effect writers which many do not fully appreciate even within the writing community itself. George Orwell once remarked that we live in a political age, and that it was folly to believe writing in any form could not be affected (or tainted) by politics. This sad fact is more true today than it was in his lifetime, and this weight is felt by every writer intelligent enough to feel the contours of those forces which press against him and try to squeeze his thoughts and creativity into pre-arranged shapes, or worse yet, censor them entirely. Many novels, during the editing process, are filtered through "sensitivity reads" to screen for potential "bias, racism or unintentional stereotypes." This sounds reasonable on the surface, until one realizes that such things are often very difficult to quantify and come down to subjective judgments made by people with their own biases. One senstivity reader may find bias or stereotype in a novel; another may regard its depictions as spot-on accurate. Whose judgment is correct? The question and the answer are equally subjective in nature and so the writer finds himself hoping he lands the "right" reader, i.e. one who sees no evil in his work. This may seem only an inconvenience, part of the game so to speak, but the effect of this in the larger sense is to make many writers avoid certain topics entirely, or to bastardize their writing to please certain specific people within the industry rather than their readership. This has the most chilling possible effect on the writers of fiction, and the existence of social media, particularly Twitter, have only served as an impediment to freedom of thought, expression and creativity. There are a whole legion of creativity police who troll the net constantly, trying to impose their constipated views of race, ethnicity, sex, gender, politics, religion, and God knows what else on the rest of the world. These people are so full of contradictions and hypocrisy, and so nakedly confused as to their final object, that they would be figures of pity were they not so effective in murdering books, writing contracts, and movie deals.
The dilemma of a writer of my sort – straight, white, middle-aged, male – can be summed up in this simple exchange which I made up for your benefit, but which, I'm sad to say, not an exaggeration:

TWITTER: Put more black people in your novels.
WRITER: Okay.
TWITTER: What makes you think you're qualified to write about black people?

These sort of obstacles, of course, vary enormously depending upon whether the writer you know is traditional or independent. The traditional author has enormous advantages over the indie: he gets paid much better, is provided valuable services like editing free of charge, and is freed from the time-consuming and exhausting task of marketing himself. His reach is much greater and his books will probably be in physical bookstores. He may get a movie or a TV deal based on the success of his work, which will bring with it a hefty set of paychecks and possibly an entire second career as an executive producer. He also has the prestige associated with having a publisher. On the other hand, once he signs that contract, he is no longer his own master but is owned and operated by that publisher almost as a piece of machinery. What he writes, how long his book is, when it will be released, the subject matter of the book and even its cover art, are all decided by others. The writer becomes a mere employee instead of an artist; a draftsman rather than an artist. But it actually is worse than that. A mystery writer who also loves science fiction will not be allowed to publish that fiction under their own name, less they damage their brand by “confusing” their audience with this creative diversity. And God help the traditional writer of mysteries if he loses all enthusiasm for for mysteries. They will spend the rest of their contract, and possibly their entire career, cranking out lifeless hackwork for money.

The indie author has just one area of superiority over the traditionalist, but it is a large one. He can write anything he wants and publish it whenever he chooses. This freedom is what attracted me to the indie life and it is an intoxicating one. My “brand” is omni: I write whatever the hell I want, and should I happen to offend someone, efforts at punishing me would prove futile. I can't be boycotted, I can't lose my contract (I don't have one) and any attempt to subject me to public ridicule would simply raise my profile and increase my sales. On the other hand, my audience is smaller, my profile is lower, and my bank account very considerably lighter. I have eight writing awards in my trophy case, but you could spray a fire hose off a marquee in Times Square on New Year's Eve and not hit a single person who has heard of me or my works. There are months I can pay my rent on my royalties, and seasons where I can barely pay for my coffee with them. I live in a kind of gilded anonimity, with my integrity and self-respect fully intact, and my imagination as free as a wild animal; yet I remain dependent on a day job for the majority of my income, and am constanly wishing there was a third path open to me, one which gave me my freedom yet also allowed my work to reach, and be judged by, a much larger audience.

The problem of reach is an especially frustrating one, because it is circular in nature. In order to make money I have to sell books; in order to sell books people must be aware of my work; and in order for people to be aware of my work I need money to promote myself. Nothing is more galling than booking a promotion, seeing sales skyrocket, and then watching them plummet the moment the promotion ends, knowing your advertising budget is now exhausted. Beyond that, there are the constant, annoying demands of people for free or massively discounted copies of my books (autographed, no less). These demands would not bother me if the people in question were willing to write reviews of my books on such platforms as Amazon after the books had been read, but I have found that getting people to follow through with reviews is nearly impossible. Back in the days when Goodreads allowed authors to host book giveaways for free, I ran five in quick succession and had 2,844 people enter for a chance to win the works in question. Of the 45-odd winners, I would estimate eight, or perhaps ten, actually bothered to write reviews. I was very annoyed by this at the time, especially considering I was paying, in some cases, for book deliveries on the other side of the planet; but this review ratio, which is about fifteen or twenty percent, is much higher than the one I get from readers who buy my books online. My most-reviewed novel, Cage Life, has a review ratio of maybe three percent. The reviews are generally very good, which is of course pleasing, but honest to God, I wouldn't mind more critical or even poor reviews so long as the total number increased.

By now you may think the writer's life nothing but a litany of complaints. This is not the case, but I'd be remiss in my duty to the truth if I tried to paint more roses into this picture than actually tend to bloom. The life of any artist is full of frustrating contradictions and painful, even humiliating concessions to reality. This is true of the musician, the comedian, the painter, the actor and the poet; why not the writer, too?

Still, if there is no actual rose garden for such as me, there are roses, if only of the wild-blooming variety.

The first, I suppose, is the sheer pleasure that writers take in the selection and arrangement of words. Any writer worth his skin has a deep and abiding love of the language in which he writes and takes immense satisfaction in exploring its potentialities. Related to this, but separate from it, is a passion for the power of words as things in themselves. A writer is more aware than most of the power he possesses not merely to provoke people's emotions with words, but to establish a sense of atmosphere, or going further, an entire fictional world which (if the writer knows his business) may be as real to the reader as the one in which he physically exists. There are huge numbers of people, literally millions or tens of millions, for whom the worlds created by J.R.R. Tolkien, Frank Herbert, J.K. Rowling, George R. R. Martin, or Anne Rice – just to name a few – hold considerably more charm than the real one. I don't have millions of readers, in fact it took me a very long time to have thousands, but I know, because I have been told, that some of them have lost themselves in worlds of my creation, if only for a few hours. This is a very heady experience indeed.

The power to create characters is an awesome one, but not merely for the obvious reason that the author controls their fates and thus assumes a god-like power which is entirely absent from his real life. Conjuring a really good character, by which I mean one which is not only real to the reader but deeply memorable, is a pleasure almost nobody living understands, but it carries with it the curious, contraidctory, perhaps completely indescipherable secondary power of creating something you cannot control. A fully realized character can be defined as that which can't be forced to act against its nature. More than once I have created a character who I intended to be brave, or cowardly, or treacherous, or noble, or this, or that, only to discover that said character had taken on character-istics which ran contrary to my plans; and having taken on these characteristics, could not be induced to act against his or her nature. This is frustrating, but it is also delightful, because it means that writing the novel contains as many surprises for the author as it will for the reader. We tend to think of Dr. Frankenstein as a cautionary example because his creation ran amok; but what if Frankenstein's monster had gotten up off the table and then invented the longer-lasting lightbulb, or learned to play the violin, or become the best damned mayor Ingoldstadt ever had? My point here is that we tend to think of losing control as an inherently negative experience; in fact it is nothing of the sort, a fact may writers eventually discover.

Seldom-discussed perks of the writing life are those moments in which a complete stranger contacts you to relate the joy they experienced while reading your works. Or a website, magazine or blog asks you to do an interview. Or some agency bestows upon you an award. Or you (coughs) look yourself up on Amazon and see that someone has written a lengthy, thoughtful review of one of your books, and you realize that you have effected them very deeply indeed. Even bad reviews can be tremendously heartening. A friend once pointed out to me that my black comedy novelette The Numbers Game had a scathing notice from a reader who found it deeply depressing; my friend then observed, “Wow. You really got under his skin, didn't you?” I thought a lot about this remark, and the more I thought about it the happier I became. I never write anything simply to shock or provoke, but if someone is emotionally affected by my work, even if they also happen to hate it, well, so much the better.

In addition to this, there is also the deep-body, I-just-drank-brandy-and-smoked-a-Cuban pleasure of getting notifications of sales in places like Mexico, Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany or Japan. The idea that people on the other side of the world are reading my books is as intoxicating, in its own way, as any award I could ever receive. Being asked to autograph something, while not exactly an everyday occurrence for yours truly, is also a large if admittedly very shallow enjoyment.

There is also a species of wild rose known as the royalty check. I do not know why, but a royalty check, even a pathetically small one, carries with it a wonderfully illicit feeling of having gotten away with something – even more than that, of being rewarded for having gotten away with something. We are often told in our teenage years that we must give up our dreams and accept “real life,” as if “real life” by definition meant accepting that you will never get what you want. Every time I get one of these checks reminds me that it is possible to live in the “real world” and still accomplish goals others consider unrealistic or even fantastic. James Marsters, who played Spike on Buffy and Angel, once remarked in my presence that he felt he “stole the prize money” by landing the role that he did. Well, whenever a check shows up in my mailbox (electronic or literal), I feel as if I have made off with a fat sack of cash and jewels, like Errol Flynn in Captain Blood. There is part of me that will always wonder at the idea of people handing over hard cash for the product of my imagination; but it is a happy wonder.

And then there is this. Sometimes I will look down at a stack of my books and realize that I did this. I made this. I had ideas and the discipline and passion to bring them into physical being. I slaved over my keyboard for weeks, months, even years to bring this tight little bundle of paper pulp into a physical existence and offer it for sale. It began as an image in my mind, and now it exists. It's real. It has height, width, dimension, weight. And it will still be here when I am not. They say all we leave is bones, children and a tombstone, but authors leave something else. Fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty years from now someone may enter a dusty secondhand bookshop and spy a dog-eared old copy of one of my books on a shelf and take it home with them, and I will live again, through my characters, if only for a few hours. To write a book is in a sense to extend a middle finger to the grinning specter of Death. He will get my body, but so long as one copy of one of my novels physically exists, he cannot extinguish my legacy.

Looking back on these passages I see I have probably failed in my object of answering the seemingly simple question of what it's like to be an author. The truth is the answer is different for everyone and no doubt many authors, reading this, would disagree with my opinions and conclusions, or point out the areas I have failed to illuminate. And this brings me to my concluding point. To be a writer is to attempt to do the impossible on a daily basis. Using only words on a page, one must create sights, sounds, smells, tastes and tactile experiences which are vivid enough within the reader's mind to supplant reality. Using only ideas, some of which may be contradictory, incomplete or incommunicable by language, he must nevertheless weave a story which is not only coherent and logical but interesting, even compelling. Using only his petty store of personal experiences, he must convince the reader that he, the author, ought to be taken seriously when he assumes the viewpoint of the hero, the monster, the martyr, the madman, the saint. All of this is functionally impossible. We, the writers, achieve it only because, as Carl Sagan once observed, writing is a species of magic, and magic by its definition is the achievement of the impossible through impossible means. So if you truly want to know what it means to be a writer, my suggestion is to try and pull a rabbit out of a hat, or make an elephant disappear, or saw a woman in half without breaking her skin. It can't really done, but I think you'll discover that's most of the fun of doing it.