The Person Who Infuriated Me the Most this Week Was…Me
A brief rant at myself
As the time for my weekly rant approached, I scanned the headlines to see which world event had set me off the most. Putin’s ongoing madness in Ukraine? I’ve written about that multiple times already. The dumpster fire that is the U.S. political/economic/social situation? That has become like screaming at the rain; it doesn’t change anything and the rain doesn’t care.
Then, in a rare moment of lucidity, it struck me that what has pissed me off most this week is me, specifically the me that is, allegedly, a novelist.
Like many of the writers here, I originally saw Medium as a place to get more exposure for my fiction; it’s a crowded field out there, and the more exposure the better. Sure, I enjoy writing about movies, politics, books, and Springsteen (have you noticed I like writing about Springsteen?), but if you look back at my earliest stuff here, there’s more fiction than anything else.
A couple of months in, that started to change. I got into a groove writing non-fiction and, unconsciously or not, pushed the short stories and the novels to the back burner. The Springsteen pieces were getting somewhere around 5,000 times the number of views as the fiction, so I stuck with what was getting eyeballs, telling myself that it would draw people to the fiction. This was, of course, like thinking that selling someone a good steak would lead them to having me paint their house; they are two vastly different things, and one simply does not lead to the other.
Ultimately, none of this was the point anyway; the point is that I have used writing the nonfiction as an excuse to not work on the novels, as if a novelist needs another excuse to not be working on a novel. And “blaming” the articles I write here for taking time away from writing fiction is a huge cop-out; Hemingway worked as a journalist for the Toronto Star, with daily deadlines I don’t have, and still managed to produce a little thing called The Sun Also Rises. Except for the white beard and a fondness for whiskey I am no Hemingway, but if he had used my excuses he wouldn’t have been either.
Here’s how ludicrous my novel-avoidance has become. I have always written best in the mornings. Because my muse hates me, most of my ideas for nonfiction also come in the morning, so that is when I’ve been writing the articles. This led me to the brilliant idea of writing the fiction in the evenings instead, and while it’s out of my comfort zone I figured that if I watched fewer Netflix documentaries it would be a snap.
A few nights ago I sat down to try this new idea out, and thirty minutes in what I had was an article on becoming a nighttime novelist. That’s not as bad as page after page of the line “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” but it’s close. At least Jack Torrance was certifiably insane.
I realize that this is looking a lot more like a whining lament than a rant, but I’m not done. In the spirit of the venom I have spewed at book-burners and Texas politicians, here are some choice words for myself:
Stop bitching that no one reads fiction on Medium. It has been true throughout our history and remains true today that only about 20% of the population reads fiction, and the majority of those only read novels in book form. The days of F. Scott Fitzgerald making more from his short stories in The Saturday Evening Post are gone, and they’re not coming back. It’s 2022, not 1922; deal with it.
Stop telling yourself you make more from the nonfiction articles than you’ll ever make from novels. It’s not only untrue, it’s not an either/or proposition; it’s both/and. You have ample time in any given day to do both if you’ll stop acting like writing a review of Born in the U.S.A. drained you so much creatively that you need a four-hour nap afterward.
Unless you honestly believe you can become the next Joan Didion, James Baldwin, or David Foster Wallace (and if you do, you need counseling) stop dreaming of being the next great essayist and turn that real-life shit into fiction. Proud as you may be of this recent piece in Age of Empathy, a few years ago you would have fictionalized the hell out of that thing and put it in a novel. It would have been both funnier and more true as fiction.
Stop thinking you’re 20 years old with all the time in the world ahead of you. Morbid as it may sound, the clock is ticking; hell, it’s a miracle you made it this far. The novels you write from this point on may only live on in a box in your kids’ attics or some thrift store shelf, but they’ll live a lot longer there than anything on a website will. People who say the internet is forever never wrote for Associated Content, Helium.com, or Yahoo Voices.
Buckle down and finish something. Bouncing from Bruce to Valley Girl to Beto O’Rourke like a cocker spaniel on crystal meth is fine for nonfiction pieces, but not novels. Finding a Charles Dickens or Virginia Woolf unfinished manuscript is noteworthy; your five unfinished novels just prove that you’re lazy. It’s the literary equivalent of the guy with five junk cars on blocks in his front yard, none of which have been repaired enough to even run.
Finally, stop ranting and go finish chapter four. It’s 7:00 a.m. (though it feels like 6:00…stupid time change), the time you should be writing fiction. Don’t change what’s always worked because you’re lazy or scared or supposedly “blocked.” Trust me, you can write that review of Darkness on the Edge of Town just as easily at 9:00 p.m. as now.
As with all my rants, I hope that there’s something valuable for everyone who reads them. In this one case, though, if I only get through to the knucklehead writing it I’ll be satisfied. Have a great Sunday.
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