SAN ANTONIO – This week I began painting glass jugs instead of writing. Reading, socializing, Twitter, documentaries, laundry – all of these, it turned out, were not effectively enough keeping me from writing, despite many years of service in the enterprise. A vigorous new distraction came to the fore. The perfect week for it, too; a 2,000-word cover feature due in a few days, novel 8 stalled at 92,000 words, and this column needing to be written, read, colored, shortened, lengthened, and read thrice more.
A local supermarket put its organic apple juice in exquisite glass bottles some months back, bottles so lovely I could not bring myself to refuse them, and so they accumulated on the counter till a visiting friend told me about a YouTube video of a bachelorette party – there’s your muse! – that had colorful acrylics poured and baked in mason jars. Now a lengthy process is hatched, a tidy sum is sunken, and bottles five and six sit drying as these words happen.
“If anything can stop you from writing, let it.” That is about the best advice I’ve yet come across concerning this craft. I read it somewhere and don’t recall who said it, so I’ll put it in quotes and attribute it away from myself. Then I’ll google it and find it was in a book that attributed the quote to “an editor named John Dodds.” It’s advice I occasionally impart and more often credit myself with imparting to younger writers.
It speaks to the compulsion required to do this thing, it speaks to the lack of affirmation, it speaks to how disproportionately longer it takes to write something than it does to read it, and quite often in an inverse sort of proportion to that disproportion; the worst writing, what often takes the longest to endure reading, gets written fastest, which is not nearly tragic, from a writer’s perspective, as that proportion’s inverse and what it says to writers who whale away at their prose, flensing it till nary a transition remains from one idea to the next, then go back over it thrice more, under the auspices of once more, before reading it aloud, sighing, shrugging and filing it – triumph free.
That is not the worst of it usually. The next morning is the worst of it, when the writer first sees his inadequate effort through the eyes of a reader and panics at how terrible it is. A few hours pass, an email or two comes in, if he’s lucky, and he’s able to decide it’s not quite awful as imagined. By midweek, in fact, he’s often forgiven himself, which is good because the idea for next week’s piece is already overdue and the next deadline is bearing down, as it will do. A few weeks later, or anyway at year’s end, the writer returns to that inadequate effort of his, and if he truly worked at it when he wrote it, he is surprised how good it was. That leads inevitably and instantly to a brand new horror: What happened to me? why can’t I write that well anymore? will I ever recover that guy’s vocabulary or insights?
It’s good a time as any to write this column because it’s the time of year members of the Boxing Writers Association of America try to determine what pieces of theirs to submit for the BWAA’s writing contest, and putting aside the legitimacy of any contest that judges art, those writers who do the craft right, those writers admired by their peers, should have to struggle with this choice because they wrote hard as they could every time and didn’t write a few pieces much better than others to target hypothetical judges for contest time.
The other night, haunted by calls I’d not made for that long feature and questions I’d procrastinated preparing for interviews because prepared questions were my trigger for making the calls whose making I dreaded – which, as an aside, is an amateurish mistake, and an idiocy, and thrice the idiocy from any writer who has commented often enough to remember: “I’m always glad I’ve made the call by the time I hang-up” – I closed the dark screen of my laptop, set it on the sofa and found “Deceptive Practice,” a documentary about prestidigitator Ricky Jay, and marveled at his ability and willingness to spend 14 daily hours shuffling a deck of cards. No sooner, though, does a craftsman marvel at another’s compulsion than he begins a spiral of self-loathing at his own comparative half-assery.
A month ago, during fightweek for Maidana-Broner, I had the pleasure of walking home from the Friday weighin with my favorite Monday columnist, and when conversation turned to the nature of column writing, somewhere right about Houston Street & Soledad, we began interrupting one another and completing the other guy’s sentences about the tariff a column like this exacts from its writer. The collapsed marketplace for good writing – how much did you pay to read this? – takes each day more of what remains of the dilettantes, leaving mostly the quixotic and compelled.
This craft is not about having “something to say”; that’s a cliché and simplification made by people who couldn’t do what we do. It’s about other, better things that include this: Euphoria at a process that places a certain chunk of one’s identity in a hermetically sealed compartment that, for its seeker, can be durable a refuge as exists. So let’s end here: I first came across the word “prestidigitator” while reading Henry Miller in 2000, and you’re damn right it felt good finally to use the word in print, and correctly, nearly 14 years later, up in graf 7.
Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com
