Why?!

And other burning questions about being a Creative

I am approaching my second anniversary on Medium. And for a moment I thought of getting myself a gift to celebrate the occasion — but then I felt that it would be better suited if I just punched myself in the head.

I generally consider that I’m a doer. I get things done — not across every spectrum of life — that would be manic and I would probably need to be sedated. But I get a lot done and as a direct result, feel that I have a good understanding of what it takes to, well — get things done. No matter the subject or activity. And I have proven myself correct in this basic assumption, with one glaring exception. Yeah, you probably knew this one was coming — except for writing.

If I were instead a hot dog vendor and had what was arguably the best hot dogs anywhere, I would still find myself being outsold by the guy down the street, unwrapping frozen wiener rolls and selling them for $1 each.

If I were the baker of the best chocolate chip cookies in LA, (based on some obscure, but fundamentally sound survey) I would be out there on the sidewalk, in my foam rubber chocolate chip cookie suit, trying to outsell the gal down the street, selling prepacked cookies from Safeway.

Yeah, it’s that kind of misery that I am talking about here. The kind that sets a man to drinking or taking recreational drugs — six times a day. The kind that begins to bore great holes into self-confidence and generally wraps itself around the creative parts of a human being, until the lack of blood flow makes the damn thing fall off.

I am stressed about my ability to be a writer. There I’ve said it. I am generally frustrated on a level with other unknown artists, trying to find storage space for their 1217 paintings that remain unsold. And to be totally honest, I find absolutely no fucking solace in the fact that I am not the only one suffering from acceptance fatigue. This being the society’s inclination at large to respond to only so many creative people at one time and as a result, ignore everyone else.

You see if I truly sucked at writing. If I couldn’t find an appropriate verb to save my life. If I couldn’t spell dig or auto without diving into a dictionary or asking Google for help. If the idea of accurately describing a goldfish swimming made me nauseous, then I could understand why people were not flocking to my stall to buy what I’m selling. I can be that humble.

But I’m actually okay as a writer. Perhaps not great. Perhaps not of the caliber that has teachers comparing me to Hemmingway or Fred Stalworth (a guy I knew in Queens that was pretty good), but passable and certainly capable of earning a few bucks at it.

And yet, — there is always an, and yet, lurking somewhere — I continue to struggle to earn a following. I continue to lament the loss of income that keeps running past my door screaming. I keep wondering, at what point do the words finally coalesce into passages that make people take notice and say — ahh!

This is where success bites one in the ass. This is the junction in one’s life where merit and persistence get into a fight and forget all about achieving something good together. This is where I sit on the edge of my bed and sob.

Not for overly long periods of time — that passed long ago. But enough to get the cheeks wet and the heart beating and the old images of standing lonely at the side of the dance floor to surface and wreak havoc all over again.

I thought that the reason I was having such difficulty considering myself a success, was that I hadn’t formally adopted a reason for writing. You know, something altruistic or fundamentally propitiative in some way. Not that groveling before the Writing Gods is essential — but hell, if it works, then why not. I thought this for a while but found that to be a false lead.

I read other writers; those earning in the five, six, and seven figures who spoke of writing as an exercise — like yoga or skateboarding down stairwells in the Chrysler Building. They didn’t get all flowery. They didn’t burst into tears. They just wrote and wrote some more and found an audience and voila — bestseller lists here I come.

So, I began to get the sense, that writing because one wanted to or needed to, was good enough. That entertaining someone — just one reader — like I’m hopefully entertaining one reader right now — might just be reason enough for all the pain and heartache.

Not to mention chiropractic bills for adjusting the lower back, after sitting upwards of 10,000 hours in a chair designed by another creative who had absolutely no fucking sense of what a human body looked like. But I digress.

All of this went into the proverbial creative hopper and spun for days on end — all in an effort to produce a line of reasoning that made sense. That gave me a direction to go in — that wasn’t a dead-end or terminated in the front yard of some serial killer living in the woods. I wanted an answer. I was willing to do all the heavy lifting and suffer up through the levels of competence needed to be a success.

And yet . . . like bailing water through a sieve, I remain constantly knee-deep in uncertainty, while pursuing a craft that honestly, is better equipped and better shod to keep a safe distance ahead of me, no matter how fast I go.

So, best to give up, right? Chuck it in. Fuck it all. Snap the pencils in half. Burn the unused sheaves of paper and take up crocheting car covers for large 1930s sedans. Something to occupy the mind and hands for months on end.

But I can’t. I’m a failure at giving up. I just can’t face the guy in the mirror and say, I just couldn’t do it. He’d beat the crap out of me and then, where would I be?

So, I rant. And rave. And state the obvious, that the world is just fucking unfair. That people who like reading listicles at two in the morning, with a flashlight under their covers — need to learn how to read a damn book and get the information the old fashion way.

That writing can be about education and not just entertainment. It’s possible. Nothing dire will happen if one pursues that course. Nothing will suddenly fall off. That there is room for writers who have lived interesting lives and have something to offer, if one would please, take the time to read them.

I hate comic book movies. Whoa, that came out of nowhere. But I do. I hate them because they cost $325,000,000 to make and suck the air out of the room, the building, and the surrounding environs and prevent 32 other smaller movies from being made by people, whose name is not Stan Lee and who might have something entertaining to offer.

Writers with 175,000 followers put in the work. I don’t think they phoned it in. I assumed they worked hard and earned what they now have. But algorithms can be nasty little creatures. They sniff and search and tend not to think for themselves. They seek out like items and bundle them all together in cute packages, and offer them up over and over again until most readers are absolutely certain that they sought out these babies and are reading them because it’s what they want. I wish that it were.

Sour grapes? Oh, definitely. Big honking bunches of them and I apologize in advance if they stain everywhere and make things unnecessarily sticky. I don’t like being that guy, standing in the corner of the room, sneering and smoking a cigarette.

But sometimes — just every once in a while, what people are whining about — may actually be spot on.