How Alone Are We?

One of the reasons a community of writers and artists is important, even a virtual one like our Writing Wednesdays, is because each of us is, in our work, essentially ALONE.

Compare the writer/artist to an auto mechanic (or even a brain surgeon). If they get stuck on a problem, they can always call over a master mechanic or a senior surgeon and get advice and counsel.

Jung could always ring up Freud. Einstein could look to Niels Bohr. Even Steven Spielberg could always reach out to George Lucas.

But you and me? We’re orbiting in space with no other stations within a thousand miles.

Nobody’s gonna solve that second-act nightmare but you and me. Is Scene 22B working? How the hell do we get out of the corner we’ve painted ourselves into in the final thirty pages?

There’s a famous (no doubt apocryphal) story about James Joyce and Ezra Pound. Or maybe it was Joyce and Hemingway. Joyce had finished a near-final draft of Finnegan’s Wake. He gave this monster to Hemingway to read and offer advice. The stack of pages was so big that the only place Hemingway could find to hold it was on his staircase. He stacked part of the manuscript on one step and the next two on the next steps. 

He never got around to actually reading it.

Suddenly Joyce phoned. He needed the manuscript back. Hemingway was too embarrassed to admit he hadn’t read it. He grabbed the stacks off the steps but when he put them together into one, he mixed up the sequence.

A week later he ran into Joyce at the cafe. “Thanks so much, Hem! I love the new order you’ve set the chapters in.”

In other words, brothers and sisters, you and I are on our own.

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