Do you know what it is to yearn?
Have you ever yearned, I mean really yearned?
Yearned for something you wanted so badly it scared you?
I write, not so much for a living but as a vocation, or devotion. Maybe even a covenant. I can't get away from it, it nags and drags at me, it will have me no matter what. Writers often have dry periods or times when they wonder if they will write again. And I've had them.
I've also had times when the desert suddenly flooded, the cracked earth dissolved into fertile soil and life sprang up, seemingly in seconds: abundant life, green, floral, almost prehistoric in its lushness.
And oh how hard it is.
Just put out an ebook, everyone tells me. I could maybe figure out how to do it (did someone say prehistoric?), but how many readers would I have? The market is flooded with ebooks right now. There is no quality control that I know of: anything can be slapped up there, like a Facebook post. And that scares me. Might I get 200 readers? 300? . . . 20?
Would I be eligible (because hope springs eternal!) for the Giller, the Governor-General, the B. C. Writer's awards, and even the Booker? No, because it's a bloody ebook and, in spite of what everyone keeps telling me, not considered the equal of a paper book.
I've had paper books out twice, and though it didn't quite match up to my extravagant dreams of publishing, I felt proud of them and still do. You can't delete them, though you may have to go to the library to actually find one.
When I wrote about Harold Lloyd, I committed the unpardonable sin of falling in love with my subject. This is a bad thing to do. Maybe it makes people uncomfortable, I don't know. But I have that awful feeling right now of one of those drill-bits slowly penetrating my chest. A yearning, the way you'd yearn for someone who is dead, or a lover who has spurned you and moved on.
Summer is so beautiful right now, it took until mid-August to get here, and it will slip away in a couple more weeks. Meantime I can't forget about this. I want it so badly. And everyone, but everyone is trying to talk me out of my feelings. I guess you don't get to feel this way: or does it just make people uncomfortable?
When I fell into this novel, I was transported, and could not wait to get to the computer each day to see what would happen next. It was the most magical writing experience I have ever had. Now comes a kind of hangover. I feel cursed, sometimes, as if the thing I want most will always be just brushing my fingertips, like a balloon that bounces up and out of reach.
I've been told: if I don't care about it, then maybe it will happen. If I don't think about it, then maybe it will happen. This is magic penny thinking, also designed to make me stop doing this, stop stop stop. I am not much good at indifference, in spite of the fact that it accurately describes the atmosphere in which I grew up.
"But writing should be its own reward! Can't you just enjoy the process?" What if someone had told that to Dickens, to Tolstoy, to Hemingway, to. . . all right, my work bears about as much resemblance to theirs as a lion to a mouse. But you get my drift. Don't you? Don't you?
Marketing, Margaret. I'm convinced. It all comes down to getting someone to take that second look and go hmmmmmmm...why not? A marriage of Barnum and Byron. Art and artifice. Mad Men and Margaret. Hook and heart, huckster and hymn, philistine and Phaedra...oops. That was sneaky. So solly.
ReplyDeleteI still think scandal would lift this off the ground. Threat of lawsuit, enraged custodians of the estate (unless they get on board). Something in the plot that someone with a raucous voice would find OUTRAAAAAGEOUS!!!! Movie potential here?
Marketing. Marketing. Marketing.
I did send an email to Suzanne Lloyd (I've had detailed contact info for her for months now - also tried to get to her through Facebook and was ignored) and I got some sort of assistant who was delighted I was such a loyal fan, then told me they don't look at "unsolicited manuscripts". I even repeated the process a few months later and the same thing happened, almost word-for-word. I can't get to her because she is probably deluged with manuscripts for novels about Harold Lloyd. Probably one of these days, one of them will sell and be made into a movie with Jake Gyllenhaal. It's frustrating to have all these marvelous contacts which conventional wisdom says should easily get you in the door. This is why writers go crazy. Jeffrey Vance (his main biographer, with Suzanne Lloyd) already read it and loved it, but ignored my request for, at least, ideas as to how to approach a publisher. The phone went dead, as it did with Keven Brownlow and several other "really good contacts". THIS is why writers commit suicide. Really, it does no good at all to have "inside" contacts because they will just treat you like a pest and even a stalker and just try to scrape you off like crap on their shoe. You have to have some sort of out-and-out magic, probably black, preferably a powerful hex or reverse-hex so if they DON'T help me, all their toes will drop off.
ReplyDeleteWe're going to curl their toes and their nose hairs. Here's how: The world is ready for another grande literary hoax. Nothing small potatoes like James Frey pretending he'd been a drug addict, but like Clifford Irving, whose hoax was so grande he spent a little time in prison for it. His books now sell like Green Bay Packers tickets. You can handle a little time breaking rocks, can't you? Hell, wink at the judge and he'll give you a community service sentence. Here's what we do:
ReplyDeleteBartleby Scriveners Assoc., the upstart literary conglomerate that produced a stunningly insignificant political satire and is about to release a pandering potboiler aimed at the heart of the Gun Nut Nation, announces the discovery of a nonfiction kiss-and-tell memoir by a mysterious woman from Harold Lloyd's past who is channeling her story thru noted author Margaret Gunning. "I wrote this thing in three weeks, nonstop 24/7. It was as if my fingers were taking orders from beyond the pale, so to speak. When the book was finally finished, my computer gasped and died in a cloud of electric smoke, and I slept for one week straight without so much as getting up to pee."
Bartelby Scriveners, of course, knows nuttink about these circumstances, but has the highest regard for Ms. Gunning's previous work, which is in a writing style that in NO way resembles that of the apparent mechanical writing of The Glass Character, directed, as she herself has said on several occasions, "from beyond the pale."
Your witness.
It! Could! Work! (as Gene Wilder said in Young Frankenstein). There was a very smutty book that came out a few decades ago called The Private Life of Humphrey Bogart, which was nothing but a "fuck book", just smut and practically nothing else. It even had Harold Lloyd in it. I remember that part! Bebe Daniels recalled that he was "proficient" and "good at" the sex act and "would not get off her until he had given her at least two orgasms". All a bunch of salacious junk, but it's still an underground classic.
ReplyDeleteWell??????????????????????????
ReplyDeleteYou could go to Breadloaf or some similar writers retreat where there are literary minded witnesses. Act in a way that would prompt fellow writers to testify afterward, "She seemed possessed from the moment she arrived. Seemed in a daze, spoke only in a monotone, did not participate in any of the workshops or group readings or even the meals. Just stayed in her room. Sent out for food occasionally. When the program director sent someone to make sure she wasn't ill, she was found at her laptop, typing furiously, a thousand and ten cigarette butts in the fireproof wastebasket, steaming electric coffee maker and a case of Folger's Choice...typing typing typing, mumbling as if talking to herself but not acknowledging my presence, just typing typing typing. Near the end of the three weeks she entered the dining room, looking frightfully exhausted and frazzled and shouted, 'My god, I've just transcribed an entire book that was dictated to me by a dead woman!!' whereupon she collapsed on the floor and began thrashing, kicking her feet and muttering incoherently. She was still muttering when they loaded her into the ambulance. They brought her back after a couple of days and she seemed normal if slightly embarrassed. Then she printed out this remarkable manuscript, the one she'd been typing typing typing, and well, you read the story in The Wall Street Journal, it was The Glass Character, the one the Cohen Brothers just bought for two million. I mean, all this time, just typing typing typing, and I was there in another cabin when history was being made. I'd like a glass of water now, please...oh, I feel faint."
And then she died.
ReplyDeleteWith a smile on her face.
ReplyDeleteSometimes I think my whole life is just a last-ditch attempt to be famous.
ReplyDelete