The Bungee Boo Dance
Partly in response to Sarah’s August 22nd posting regarding Donald Westlake and Charles Willeford’s WORDS OF WISDOM, and partly because this same subject has been on my mind recently, I would like to share my own experience with finding balance in my approach to writing.
For years, when people asked me when I first knew I wanted to be a writer, I knew exactly what to say. I was proud of the fact that I had come to writing almost coincidentally, and I had carefully cultivated a backstory to sustain this myth. I would launch into a well-rehearsed narrative of how, after a night of drunken scheming, I’d gone out and bought a computer. How, three months later, I’d finished my first novel, a neo-gothic, ghost story, bodice ripper, piece of trash. And how, after cutting my teeth on the pure pulp of romance, I decided to take on a genre I had always loved.
I say ‘myth,’ but there was a lot of truth to my story. I had, in fact, written a romance novel on a drunken dare, and the experience had turned me into a writer. Yet the reality of what had happened and why was much more complex than I liked to let on.
As much as I might like to deny it, the evidence suggests that I’ve wanted to be a writer pretty much my entire life. I wrote (and self-published) my first book when I was in third grade, an elaborate and gruesome mystery involving a dead bank president and a flock of flesh-eating crows. By fourth grade I had my own publishing empire, creating semi-pornographic magazines involving my black lab and my best friend’s dachsund. By high school I was the Sylvia Plath of my class, churning out dark and angry poetry which, I am now embarassed to admit, was a regular feature in the school literary magazine.
And then, sometime in my early twenties, something happened and I quit writing entirely. I had dropped out of school by then and was living what I thought was the life of an artist. Late nights of bartending and even later nights of drinking, miserable jobs and miserable apartments. I was still calling myself a writer—afterall, how else was I to justify my entirely aimless existence—and yet, for a good number of years, I didn’t once put pen to paper.
“Writers write,” the father of an ex-boyfriend of mine once said, commenting on his son’s similarly aimless lifestyle. He was correct, of course, and yet on the rare occasions when I actually contemplated writing, my own twenty-something self-conciousness always got in the way. I couldn’t just write A novel, I had to write THE novel. And of course THE novel would have to be inspired by the existential misery of my own experience.
Writing a romance novel freed me from all those pretensions. After all, I told myself, I was just writing trash, so who cared whether the writing was gem perfect or the characters totally believable? Stripped of the self-consciousness that accompanied “serious writing, ” I was actually able to get some writing done, and to learn a phenomenal amount about the craft of writing in the process.
Later, when I began writing thrillers, I stuck with my carefree attitude, telling myself that, even though my new novels were more heavy-weight than the first, they were still just entertainment. This approach worked well for me, and I completed and published three novels with this mindset. But eventually the pulp label I’d found so freeing became a shield behind which I could hide my own fear of failure.
Instead of challenging myself to stretch and write something of real quality I stuck to what I knew. I “finished” novels when I knew they could have been better. I got sloppy and I knew it. And I let myself, and others, believe that I was “just” a pulp writer. For if that was the case, if what I was writing was essentially trash, then I wasn’t putting myself or my talent on the line. To put it bluntly, I had become a chicken.
I’d like to be able to say that I came to this realization on my own, but the truth is that I didn’t. It took an entirely external cataclysm to make me face the fact that my writing had become more than just trash, that I needed to take the risk of becoming “serious,” and that it was my own fear that was keeping me from doing so. This cataclysm was September 11th.
I knew from that very first day that the aftermath of 9/11 on our country and our politics was something I would not be able to ignore, and it wasn’t. I was finishing up my third book at the time, and I realized quite concretely that my next book would be an answer to the paranoia and fear that had gripped our society. I simply could not stand by and say nothing while everything I’ve always loved about this country was dismantled in the name of national security. And so I didn’t.
Of course “serious” writing has its drawbacks. I am now finishing my second of these novels, and I can testify to the fact that there is fear and more fear to be overcome on a daily basis. The trick, and one easier said than done, is to find a balance, to keep it light and heavy at the same time, to realize that what I’m doing is only what I can.
Fortunately, in my case, fate intervened with yet another antidote to taking myself too seriously. Not long after my fourth novel was published, I was lucky enough to give birth to a daughter. It’s hard to take anything too seriously when you spend a large portion of your day on your hands and knees picking cheerios out of the carpet. Or when your bedtime reading is Goodnight Moon. Or when you’re up at five in the morning watching the Boobahs do the bungee boo dance.