I stand on the rain-slick precipice of darkness, knowing I should be writing my first book, knowing it deep within the meaty core of my yearning heart like a… like a, ummm…
A thingy.
“Jesus Badger-Copulating Christ, this yogurt is disgusting.” I exclaimed. “It tastes exactly like sour cream.”
“IS IT sour cream?” My wife ventured, apparently not putting it past me that I might accidentally consume a small container of sour cream in lieu of yogurt.
(Alright, so it happened once. Ages ago. But it wasn’t yogurt that I thought was sour cream, it was whipped horseradish-cream for putting on prime rib that I thought was regular sweet whipped cream. I proceeded to make the most awful ambrosia salad ever.)
“No, it clearly says yogurt on it. It’s authentic nonfat organic greek yogurt, vanilla flavored. And it tastes like authentic nonfat organic greek s**t, s**t flavored. I mean it, it tastes and has the exact texture of sour cream. There’s nothing about this that reminds me of yogurt, except that it’s clearly labeled yogurt.”
“Well throw it out then,” she said helpfully, a suggestion at which I balked and then scoffed.
Throwing out perfectly edible food is, to me, unthinkable. Surely she jests. Why, yogurt that tastes like sour cream can just be put back into the refrigerator and used on a baked potato someday soon. I’ll just think of the raspberries I’ve added to it as a bit of exotic flare.
These are the types things that interrupt my productive writing time, and yet I allow them to happen. I allow my valuable work time to be consumed by small-talk or daily tasks or other people’s excellent blogs. It’s always been difficult for me to start anything because I’m afraid that I’m beginning it wrong. Crippling self-doubt, etc.
Perhaps my most favorite writers out there are people who I can’t actually imagine writing, at least, not in any real sense. Did Ernest Hemingway have a special boxing glove that could grip a pen so he could write between rounds? Does Anthony Bourdain write while hunched over in a meat locker, pounding away at a typewriter while downing booze and smoking a cigarette that’s subtly flavoring tomorrow’s filet mignons? Did Edna St. Vincent Millay compose poetry in her head while it lay upon the breasts of her lover? Yes, I imagine.
But Chris Hoke? Well, he writes at night while he sits in a lovely little cottage, experiencing slight ankle pain he acquired when getting out of the shower the wrong way that morning, pausing every once in a while to go to the fridge and see if anything has materialized out of thin air since he’s been there last, some 10 minutes ago. He wonders if the bottled water sitting on his desk from 3 days ago is too old to finish off (does water go bad?), and wastes time being pithy on the A.V. Club comment boards. He admires other blogs, social networks, thinks about his personal character arc, and screws around a bit on his bass guitar until his wife, currently trying to sleep, tells him to knock it the hell off.
The answer to my own un-asked question: It must be that there is no wrong way to begin, except perhaps to never begin. For even if the end product is the most horrible thing ever created, there is still hope. It can always be rewritten, polished, backspaced out of existence, hacked up, re-rewritten, and, if that fails to produce something decent, it can be finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters, then begun entirely anew.
And, besides, nothing I write can ever possibly be as bad as that yogurt tasted.
