Freakout!

For the past month or so I haven't yet freaked out about the whole process. Now I find myself freaking out. This is the largest body of work I've done so far where I've not received some sort of feedback. I think much of it is bad. I'm .45% done. The school year is frighteningly close. I guess there's nothing I can do but suck it up and continue writing.

John Gardner's "On Becoming a Novelist" is a bit scary. I found the first half to be concrete and helpful in terms of describing the writer's aptitudes. As soon as I got to the section on finances I started to grow nervous. Writers are poor, I know. The chances of success are slim, I know. I've been poor and hardworking since I arrived in New York. I'm taking out loans and counting pennies and splurging for me means buying a $4 falafel sandwich rather than cooking at home. Authority figures like police officers and landlords scare me, not because I'm doing anything illegal (per se), but because they have the power to take my money from me. So if nothing else I've got the starving artist lifestyle downpat. If I had read this book before now I wouldn't have changed anything about my current course. But for some reason it's unnerving to hear a professional writer talk about the relentless process. Living the life with eyes set forward is actually somewhat easy. A simple lifestyle with simple needs is easier and fun when you surround yourself with people of similar orientations. I have a clear focus and I live with people who have the same goals. So to be honest I'm not sure why hearing it from the horse's mouth sent me into a sort of panic this afternoon. Maybe it's just nerves over the impending school year, and maybe after I meet my quota tonight I'll settle down.

Blogging before writing acts as a sort of centering act for me, so I realize this post is more immediately about me than writing. But it is a fact that writing is demanding not just in its intellectual ground but what type of lifestyle it necessitates.

Gardner also has some entertaining passages on the personality traits of the writer. I'll transcribe one here for you:

"Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller's is partly natural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, most of which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity or incivility: wit (a tendency to make irreverent connections); obstinacy and a tendency toward churlishness (a refusal to believe what all sensible people know is true); childishness (an apparent lack of mental focus and serious life purpose, a fondness for daydreaming and telling pointless lies, a lack of proper respect, mischievousness, an unseemly propensity for crying over nothing); a marked tendency toward oral or anal fixation or both (the oral manifested by excessive eating, drinking, smoking, and chattering; the anal by nervous cleanliness and neatness coupled with a weird fascination with dirty jokes); remarkable powers of eidetic recall, or visual memory (a usual feature of early adolescence and mental retardation); a strange admixture of shameless playfulness and embarrassing earnestness, the latter often heightened by irrationally intense for feelings for or against religion; patience like a cat's; a criminal streak of cunning; psychological instability; recklessness, impulsiveness, and improvidence; and finally, an inexplicable and incurable addiction to stories, written or oral, bad or good."

-John Gardner, "On Becoming a Novelist," W.W. Norton & Company, 1983, pg. 34.