Issue number 27
April 5, 2000
Wet humor on the Web since 2000
This issue:
I, Writer
QOO has received an advance
copy of an essay on creative writing to be published as the introduction to the
next book by a major bestselling author. For legal reasons we can't
identify him by name, but suffice it to say that he writes the kind of flashy,
glitzy doorstop-sized novels that you see in every airport and second-hand shop
in the country. Also, when NASA announced that the Hubble Space Telescope
had located the exact center of the known universe, he was very surprised and
disappointed to find out that it wasn't his house.
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You can bring the prisoner down
now.
Tom Swift
Now that I am an internationally
renowned writer, it is surprising that no one ever comes up to me and says,
"How I envy you. How I wish that I could be a writer
too." But I know that so many of you would say that, if only you had
the chance, so I am writing this article to set the record straight once and
for all: you can't be a writer. You can't be a writer because you can't
write. You don't believe me? Well try it:
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You see? Pretty pathetic. Now watch this:
Lucinda's nostrils flared ever so
slightly as Derek handed her an icy glass filled to the brim with vintage
champagne. Small beads of perspiration formed on her tanned forehead,
kind of reflecting the beads of condensation forming on the glass, in a
way. If you see what I mean. So then Derek leans forward
meaningfully and says, even more meaningfully, "I want to run my fingers
through your hair. I long to kiss your luscious lips. I yearn to
embrace your delicate neck. I got a hankering to drop to my knees and rip
open your dress and. . ."
I could go on, but
let's stop there. Now I'm not trying to be arrogant (in fact, I'm
exerting no effort at all) but if I wanted to, in about three or four days of
intense, frenzied, all-consumingly obsessive work I could expand that little
gem of an idea into a 900-page blockbuster epic saga packed with life, love,
romance and power, full of undeniable lust, unimaginable wealth, seismic sex
and Pi to seven thousand decimal places. Hardback sales would top eight
figures. The movie rights alone would put me and all the future
generations of my extended family on Easy Street for good. But hey, I
don't feel like it right now. I got ideas like that to burn. Also,
I'm supposed to be telling you what it takes to be a writer. So here
goes:
First, you have to be born. A
writer, I mean. Even in your earliest childhood you have to be aware of
that uncertain, obscure, indescribable, ineffable, intangible, impalpable,
ungraspable, unknowable nameless something that will enable you later in life
to write a succinct, accurate description of any thing or concept
whatsoever. For instance, sitting here right now, I could give you a
complete summing up of all of human spiritual and philosophical thought for the
last seventeen centuries in just three words. But I won't. For
writing is more than that. Writing is also ideas.
People never send me letters,
but I'm sure they would if it occurred to them, to ask: Where do you get your
ideas? And the answer is: I have no idea. Let me illustrate.
Right now I am sitting here in front of my old, broken-down, beat-up,
dented-in, rusted-out, rotted-through manual typewriter, made in 1897, with the
keys in alphabetical order. The "B" and the "U" only
work in upper case and the comma key doesn't work at all. It weighs 92
pounds, the ribbon is always jammed and it smells like a wet sheepdog, but I
just love it. I wouldn't give it up for any fancy high-tech word
processor in the whole world. Mainly because all I ever do with the old
heap is sit in front of it. For writing, I have a Powerpunch 2000 MegaMag
LXPC-3 with 17,000 gigabytes of RAM and a hard disk that can store two copies
of all the written works published since the Rosetta Stone. I have a
modem that can contact the Space Shuttle and a laser printer that also does my
taxes. The mouse alone costs more than a new Audi.
Now, where was I? Oh yes: to
be a successful writer you need to cultivate the ability to pick a topic and
stick to it. Was that it? No -- I got it now: ideas. Let me
explain the genesis of ideas in such a way that maybe even you will be able to
understand it (don't thank me, this is my profession):
To have an idea you have to know how
to have an idea. And to know how to have an idea you have to have some
idea of how the idea-having mechanism works. Nobody has any idea how this
happens, not even the world's top brain surgeons, so I suggest you just bag it
and forget about ever being able to write your way out of a broken condom.
But hey, you can keep on reading this particular article anyway.
So to continue, to be a good writer
you have to develop an ear for detail, an eye for dialogue, and a very good
memory so you don't get things mixed up. Take me, for instance: I
remember the day I sold my first story. I recall it as if it were
yesterday, even though it happened earlier this month. I was sitting on
the porch of the disused fishmeal plant on the coast of Alaska where I had been
living for nine years in total isolation, with no heat, surviving on leaves,
berries and roadkills, drinking melted snow, sleeping on a pile of rags that I
glued onto my skin in the daytime for clothes and sending out short stories at
the rate of about one every three hours. All of them came back with
rejection notices, until one day when I was sitting on the porch, like I said
earlier, I think, and up to the house came a man from the sheriff's office with
an eviction notice, followed by two men from the telephone and power companies
to cut off my phone and electricity, a team from the water company to shut off
the water and the gas, and a small army of finance company representatives with
orders to repossess my car, my television, VCR, stereo, bicycle, rowing
machine, all my furniture, my glasses, the dog and the toilet, when just then
the mailman came up and handed me a letter.
I was so used to receiving big brown
packages containing my returned manuscripts, I was shocked when he reached in
his bag and pulled out a slim envelope addressed to me. Imagine my
surprise when I opened that letter and read that the state welfare agency was
cutting off my benefits and sending someone out to take my children and give
them to wolves so they could be raised in a more salubrious environment.
Now that I think about it, I remember that I actually sold my first story a
little while later, to a cropdusters' inflight magazine, and even then it only
paid $15, so I lost all my stuff anyway.
But that's the life of a
writer. As you've no doubt guessed, a successful writer leads a life that
is remarkably different from yours. You probably get up in the morning
and go to work, come home at night and go to sleep, you poor scum. Well,
it's not that kind of humdrum daily routine for us professional writers, I can
tell you. I, like so many innately creative people, prefer to work at
night, so I tend to stay up later and later, go to bed later and later, and get
up later and later. And that means that the next day I stay up even
later, and then go to bed later, get up later, and so on. You follow
me? I could go over that part again if you want. So anyway, I
started staying up later and later until I was staying up all night. Then
I started staying up all night and part of the morning. Then I was staying
up all night and most of the morning, then all night and most of the day.
In fact, these days I stay up so late that I don't even go to bed until about
10:00 pm the next day. Then I sleep until 6:00 am and get up and work
during the day, only for me it's the previous night.
But that's just one of the many
things that makes life so very, very different for the writer. Another
thing is that, now that my name is a household word, I get a constant stream of
invitations to a never-ending round of receptions, parties and dinners.
Naturally, I am disdainful of any such tiresome, superficial social functions,
and I never ever accept these invitations because I know that a person of my
stature would be certain to have a simply dreadful time. Why, just two
days ago I was at a cocktail party for the second anniversary of the opening of
a local all-weather radio station, when a woman came up to me and said,
"I'm so glad you could come. Let me take your coat." Can
you believe it? No fatuous questions about my work. No confusing me
with some other famous (but, let's face it, lesser) author. No
self-effacing but downright cretinous admission that she always wanted to be a
writer too. Probably what she wanted to say was, "I love your
books. I've read all of them three times. In hardback. You're
the greatest voice of your generation. Possibly of the century.
What the hell, the millennium. Oh, and I always wanted to be writer too,
but of course I can't."
Well, in reply, I said -- I mean I
would have said if she had in fact said what she didn't in fact say, but would
have if she had in fact said it -- "Allow me, dear woman, to quote the
famous literary critic and Shakespeare scholar Oliver Wendell Holmes, who once
said: 'Tough bounce, bubeleh -- where's the booze?'"
©2000 by David Jaggard. All rights reserved worldwide.