Chasing the Comet’s Tail

Photo by marcellina18 via Creative Commons

When Halley’s Comet appears, there is nothing like it. We are filled with wonder and amazement. We want to be Halley’s Comet. This is the writer’s dilemma, wanting to be something spectacular. The only problem—that celestial body is a one-of-a-kind phenomenon that appears every seventy-five years or so. No matter how we struggle, we can try to be like it but we will never be it.

What am I talking about? Fame, money, mutual admiration, all that.

Years ago writers would write, submit their double-spaced pages to traditional publishers and collect a nice pile of rejection slips. It was a cruel world but at least you knew where you stood. In those days you didn’t hear much about “successful writers” unless you read something in the newspaper. Maybe the Society Page? How about that Arthur Miller marrying Marilyn Monroe, huh?

But with social media we can’t stop hearing about the successes and the big sales and the million Twitter followers. And for all that, we seethe instead of write. It’s maddening, let me tell you.

We need to stop ourselves for five seconds and ask this simple question. Why do I write? Here are some potential answers:

I want to be rich and famous like (fill in your nemesis’ name)
I’m sick and tired of working for a living
I have a burning desire to tell my story and tell it I shall
None of the above

Okay, for those of you who picked d, I think you might be on the wrong site. As for the rest of you, I really hope you picked c. In the end nothing else should matter.

Work-Life Balance is a Myth

The other day I took my family to the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. If you’ve ever been there, you know what a wonderful circus it is—musicians, performers, exotic dogs. There was a guy in the street whose act consisted of stacking plates and bowls on his head, flinging them in the air and attempting to catch them again perfectly using only his head. For me, that is the definition of work-life balance. And am here to tell you it’s a myth.

Why? Because three out of four times, he dropped some of his props. Admittedly, he did eventually accomplish the trick and we were all astonished. The point is, when a writer tries to balance writing with work and family—not to mention sleep—something is going to suffer. It always does. And when it does, you feel kind of crummy about it. But there it is. It’s one of those things you must accept if you’re going to turn this into a career.

The Sinkhole

Writer’s block? Ha! That’s nothing compared to the living hell of social media. We’re constantly blogging and tweeting and hanging out on Facebook and writing reviews on Goodreads and leaving comments on other writer’s blogs because, you know, we need to get our names out there to get our PageRank up. That’s right. There’s nothing worse than Googling your own name and gawping in horror at the search results showing you below the fold.

Now social media is important but it has to be managed. And most of us are frankly not very good at that. It manages us. Just like email. Maybe we struggle with the technology itself. Maybe we aren’t sure of the rules so we blunder forth spewing anything that pops into our little heads. Or maybe we’re really good at it—so good in fact that we spend more time tweeting than writing. Sound familiar?

The Silence is Deafening

Despite the drenching from the Twitter firehose and the hashtags and the posts and the comments and the Likes, at some point we need to face what writers since that guy who wrote Gilgamesh faced—total and utter silence as we put words to paper. It’s something we need to be comfortable with.

Ask yourself this. When you are writing—really writing—and there’s an interruption, are you secretly relieved? Hey, an email just came in, I need to handle it. What’s that honey? Clean the rain gutters? Sure! Yeah, I thought so.

Hey, we’re human. We’re also social animals who don’t like to be locked up in a room banging out labyrinthine strings of words we needed to look up that in our heart of hearts we are convinced no one in their right mind will ever read. Any distraction is better than this.

The Writer’s Shed

I am not one of those fabled writers who labor away on an old Remington typewriter in my writer’s shed on an idyllic farm in Connecticut. I am however lucky enough to have a small office that has a door. But you know where the real writer’s shed is? In your head. Because the secret of writing is that it isn’t about putting words on paper.

For a writer, writing is always going on. Sure, at some point you must record it. But the ideas and the emotions and the wacky characters and the drama and the heartbreak and the sidesplitting comedy never stop. They are always there, churning away in your little brain cells like honeybees in a hive with a queen who won’t take no for an answer, waiting for the moment when they can spill out onto the printed page in a way that makes people want to experience them.

There will always be comets—famous ones. Maybe you will become one someday. But don’t spend your life chasing them. Keep writing. Keep getting better. Oh yeah, and keep reading. Because for all its brilliance it isn’t the comet that’s interesting. It’s the dust it leaves behind. That’s where the truth lies.

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