I've been very lucky. I know that.
(Before the cannonade of angry comments comes–and it will come–know that I know I've been lucky.)
And off we go!
It
happens at every reading. It happened in St. Louis. It happened in
Portland, Maine. Someone comes up to ask about becoming a writer, about
the ways and the hows of it.
And
I go all at once into a feeling of protectiveness, of pity. I’m like a
boxer who, having miraculously survived the terrors of his sport, wants
to keep the innocents from lifting the turnbuckle, from stepping into
that ring. Don't do it. It's hard.
I'm not talking an occasional stalker hard. Nor people-come-after-you-merely-because-they-don't-like-your-author-photo hard. (Though these particular people ended up being nice; actually, and kindly, they’re now having a book club reading of my novel). Anyway,
I don't mean even that it's hard to face what Martin Amis has called
the "veritable dunceiad" of American book criticism.
I'm
talking, instead, about the impossible balancing act–being
thick-skinned enough to shrug off the snark that finds everyone who
puts himself out for criticism in the public sphere, while at the same
time being sensitive enough to stay awake to all the human cues, to the
peculiarities of our world that it's a novelist's job to notice, and
keep on noticing.
Every
writer I know secretly thinks she deserves every bad review she gets,
and at the same time is furious that her publisher is failing to do more
to get the word out about the most brilliant book of the year–hers.
Maybe
that’s insanity. But it’s a particular kind of insanity. To be a
fiction writer–like probably any non-improvising artist–you need
to be a bifurcated person. You have to be both clinically arrogant (to
think anyone would care to read your take on things; also to have the
confidence to get your prose peacocking across the page), and you have
to be unusually humble (to have modesty enough to accept criticisms
from the better angels of your friends; to have the ability to see what
crap your first draft really is, and in what fixable ways). You have to
be Bruce Banner; you have also to be the Hulk.
And
yes, I know it’s easy for me to say these things; I’ve been
published. I’ve made it over the fence. I’ve even been on national
television. But it’s not a career I’d wish on, say, my sons.
I really think if you can find a trade, do it: it beats writing. This
job does wonders on who you are: you become inert, most yourself when by yourself, and, in Amis’ wonderful phrase,
you become weirdly “self-tasting.” One clue that I’m telling it
straight is: in what other field do so many success stories bitch about
the job? Amis, again, complains about the “cloistered quiddity” of the
writing life. Bernard Malamud talked about writing for a living as a
kind of psychosis, like a mental illness. Cheever, too, called a “a
dangerous profession.” Philip Roth says: “The difference between being a
famous writer and an Olympic swimmer is that the swimmer doesn’t think
she’s drowning every time she jumps into the pool.”
I don’t mean to be discouraging. If you want to be a writer–want and need to write–then no one and nothing can stop you. But just think you should know these kind of things, going in.
