I Wanna Be Bob Dylan...

I wanna be Bob Dylan - “Mr. Jones”

No, no you don’t.  Not really.

Writers are born, not made.  I don’t mean to say that a writer is not a slave to their craft, they are.  What I am saying is that no one would ever choose to be a slave to this craft if they weren’t born to do so.  See, when people say things to a musician or writer or whomever, “well you have a God-given talent”, it really is a “God-given ability and a God-given desire to work”.

Because there are no short cuts.  There are no American Idols.  There are no mythical Schwab’s Drug Stores.  Songwriters sometimes say the songs are already there, they’re just lucky enough to grab them.  Or, they’re gifts, or maybe that they’re just conduits of something spiritual. 

I call bullshit.

That’s not to say that sometimes things don’t come completely formed, but those things are lucky breaks that are the result of tens of thousands of hours of work.

To paraphrase Nick Cave, the process of writing is painful and excruciating.  As an example, just last night, I spent over an hour listening to the same sixteen bar loop of music trying to write two lines.  The first line came to me relatively easy; about twenty minutes.  The second line took about an hour and, to be honest, I’m still not satisfied with it.  Maybe it’d be easier if I had a bigger ego and I actually believed the lies I try to tell myself to keep pushing through, but then, the art would suffer, and I can’t have that.

See, writers, no matter what they might tell you, or the famous ones tell the media, are insecure by nature.  Nothing is ever as good as it could be.  You have to learn to live with the imperfection.  You have to learn to accept that the very thing that you care about more than anything else on this earth, is the thing you fail at the most.  As soon as you start resting on your laurels you start writing things like “Having a Wonderful Christmas Time”.  If I was Paul McCartney, that would keep me up at night.  Forget the fact he wrote “Yesterday”, “Hey Jude”, “Blackbird” and any number of other songs, I bet you all he thinks about in his quiet moments is that somehow that piece of shit slipped through his otherwise pretty decent filter.

But, I digress.

To paraphrase another writer, David Joy, most people want to see the world in black and white, but the writer can only live in a world of shades of gray.  It’s being able to withstand the darkness in order to appreciate the light that much more.  It’s seeing that light in places that others only see darkness, or seeing the darkness underneath where others only see light.  Every moment and object you interact with is a complex and complicated encounter with life that you’re trying to either make sense of, or to use as a foundation to color or make sense of something else.  You’re looking for connectedness where things look separate.  You’re looking for breaks in the chains of things held together.

All of this makes the writer a difficult person to be with or be around.  It’s hard not to be self-absorbed and depressed.  And any time you do feel normal, you question everything and you start to miss the turmoil because it’s what feeds you.  The immature writer will create conflict or turmoil, the mature writer knows you don’t have to do that because it already exists everywhere and in everything if you know where to look.  I no longer feel the need to create emotional messes or ignore the perils to others in my doing so, but I admit, I most definitely still am not an easy person to be around a lot of the time.  Being present is hard, it’s something I work at because I love my family and friends, but I admit I fail them far too often.

If you still want to be a writer at this point, then welcome to the club.  Misery loves company.

I’m being half-sarcastic there, I’m not miserable by any means, but it is fair to say I’m often tormented by my need to work.  But, I thank God every day for it.