A Series of Open Doors

March 26th, 2010Blog0 comments

I’ve noticed lately that when I tell people that my job is “to restore a sense of childlike wonder to peoples’ lives”, they take me seriously and don’t seem to understand that this is a joke that I stole from Fake Steve Jobs. I also sometimes say that in order to write I need to be in a “Zen-like state” in a perfect 72 degree, low-decibel environment. Again, people think I am being serious when I say this. Like writing is some kind of weird magic done by fragile weirdoes.

Here’s the straight dope, my friends: It is magic. We take nothing and create something from thin air. That’s fucking magic. But strangely and ironically, it’s also a job. And like any job, it requires discipline, work ethic, deadlines, and all sorts of other un-magical, everyday things. The temptation to look at ffffound and The Awesomer is often mighty strong.

Yeah. So writing is this strange, improbable coin: On one side you have raw emotion, conflict, and the sometimes rational and sometimes irrational forces of creativity. On the other side you have the lonely act of sitting by yourself in a chair and punching out pages — you have structure and the dissemination of work, all of which seem antithetical to the pure creative process. It’s the weirdest thing in the world.

But I think that’s what makes it a very special job. Because when I get bummed by the work, or I get stuck, or I’m thinking too much about the business aspects surrounding it, I start thinking about the new stuff I’ve got that’s brewing in my head. The new stories. Every new project or new story idea that appears in my mind is like an open door I can jump through… To escape.

Well, maybe “escape” isn’t such a great term for this — more like, “move forward into”.

Every time I start a new piece of work it’s like I’m a recently arrived immigrant in a strange new world. I don’t know the people, I don’t know the language, I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I’m feeling great because I know that I will eventually make this world my own. I will eventually know everyone that I meet here, right down to their nitty-gritty core. I will become fluent in their language, and I will work out the destinies of everyone involved.

Last night at a birthday party I was talking to a friend about how I don’t really second-guess myself as I write. In fact, I don’t even think about it — whether something is going to turn out good or bad. This is because I know that if something doesn’t work, I can fix it. And if things do work, I can make them work better. So it really doesn’t matter either way.

So yeah — that’s one of the things I love about this job: That no matter what, there’s always a new way forward. No matter how crumby things might look, or how stuck we might get in the present tense, there will always be another open doorway up ahead.

Also, as writers, we are fragile weirdoes. But I think everyone is a fragile weirdo at their core, so that’s OK.