I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

by Harlan Ellison

I mean, what do you do, when you find that things are not what you were taught they’re supposed to be? What do you do with the desperation that boils up from your stomach when you know there’s a road out there with your destination at the end of it, but it’s too damned dark to even find the road? You turn and turn and turn around like a dog trying to escape. Shrieks in the cavity of your head that so urgently needs to be filled with facts and challenges. Until you get grabbed up by the back of the neck, and something’s got you that points you off into the murk. Run like a muthuh! And one day it gets lighter and you see you’ve managed to escape the slammer and bad scenes, and you’re heading toward being a Writer of Stature, or something equally as lovely. Then you turn around and you yell back in the direction you came. You yell, hey! Thanks! Dammit, thanks!

Back to the point. Writing consumes me. It is truly what Mailer calls it, the bitch goddess. Or maybe Irwin Shaw pinned it more precisely when he said: “The explanations a writer gives himself for having written any particular book are more often not the real reasons why that book has been written. Honesty is not the issue. Understanding is. A man does not write one novel at a time or even one quatrain at a time. He is engaged in the long process of putting his whole life on paper. He is on a journey and he is reporting in: ‘This is where I think I am and this is what this place looks like today.’”