For as long as I’ve been published I’ve tried to hide something. My neck. I have a long neck. That’s why the turtlenecks and stand-up collars. I gave up. I wondered why an author photo couldn’t be ugly. Search the web, and the best prison mug shots are a combination of menacing, tragic, and clownish.
I covered half my neck, my face, and my shaved head with fake tattoos. Adam Levey put on Tom Waits and turned it up, loud. Edna O’Brien, I am not.
Go figure, but the publisher loved it. A week later they didn’t like it. They say it might even hurt sales. We are currently in negotiations over a new-new jacket photo sans prison tats.
So Why Bother?
Tom would tell you that if you’re writing “in order to” achieve anything else, then you should not be writing. So if you’re writing in order to buy that big house, or win your father’s respect, or convince Zelda Sayre to marry you, forget it. There are easier, faster ways to achieve your real goal. But if you want to write because you love to read and write, consider the following payoffs. Why: Therapy
Tom called his approach Dangerous Writing. His idea, as I understood it, was to use writing as a way to explore some unresolved, threatening aspect of your life. Everything you write is a sort of diary. No matter how it appears to diverge from your life, you’ve still chosen the topic and characters for a reason. In some masked way, whatever you write is still you expressing an aspect of yourself. You’re trapped.
You don’t have to start with your worst secret. Just something you’re helpless to resolve. Case in point, I once had a neighbor. Chances are we’ve all had this neighbor. Day after day her music would blast; needless to say it was not Bauhaus or something decent, but it was loud. On the one sunny afternoon I chose to mow my lawn—with an electric lawn mower, please note—she would call the city and summon me to a city-mandated neighbor mediation session about the noise I’d made. Other neighbors warned me, she was a little troubled. A couple of times I’d stepped out of the shower to find her face framed in my bathroom window. She’d say hello as I reached for a towel. Spooky.
She loved her house. It was a wonderful house in a great location, and she often told people she’d die there. I couldn’t afford to move. So I wrote Lullaby, a book about someone dominated by overwhelming memes and unwelcome music. The plot centered on a poem that killed people when read aloud. The problems I couldn’t resolve, I exaggerated. Spinning them out to the wildest possible scenario and ultimately resolving them, on paper at least. The process distracted me from the music next door. In fact, I fed off the annoyance. The irritation I felt, I used to fuel the book.
Behavioral psychologists use a technique called “flooding.” Also called “prolonged exposure therapy.” If you’re terrified of spiders, for example, they might put you in a room filled with spiders. You panic at first, but the longer you remain there the less reactive you become. You acclimatize. Your emotions exhaust themselves. And writing Lullaby was my way to subject myself to flooding. By the time I submitted the book to my publisher the noise and music were still there, but I hardly noticed them anymore.
The miracle occurred during my book tour. When I got home, the house next door was vacant. Neighbors reported that a moving van had arrived, and the music lover who’d planned to live there until death had moved.
It’s spooky, but it works. Once you use a story or novel to explore and exaggerate and exhaust a personal issue, the issue itself seems to vanish. Magic it’s not. I’m not promising miracles. But your personal attachment to the topic or situation will keep you engaged and writing despite the lack of another reward, be it money or recognition. That’s my interpretation of Tom’s philosophy. Call it catharsis or not, use the writing as a tool to mentally resolve what you can’t resolve physically. Take your payday up front. Why: Harness Your Monkey Mind
Do you remember a particular episode of the original Star Trek television series? It involved a robot picked up by the crew of the USS Enterprise. As a robot it looked more or less like a floating silver box with antennae, and its purpose was to identify flawed forms of life in the universe and to destroy them. In accord with its prime directive the robot was always chasing after crewmembers it deemed imperfect and vaporizing them with a laser, all the while repeating, “Sterilize! Must sterilize!”
To remedy the crisis Captain Kirk asked the robot to compute pi down to its final digit. The task required the robot’s full faculties, thus distracting it. Scotty or whoever used the transporter to beam the preoccupied robot outside the ship’s hull, and they destroyed it with a photon torpedo. Massacre averted.
We all have that annoying robot in our heads. Buddhists call it “the monkey mind” and it never rests. The monkey mind is always fretting and chattering, distracting us and driving us nuts. It can’t be silenced, so why not do what Captain Kirk did?
Give the monkey mind a big arbitrary task that will keep it busy. By inventing a fictional crisis, you’re asking the robot to compute pi to the last digit. And not only does the monkey mind have to resolve the problem, it’s also required to create and develop the problem. When you harness that chattering, problem-solving little voice in your head, a strange sense of peace takes over your life.
If you’re a worrier, writing can make your nervous anxiety into an asset. Why: The Little-Big Stuff
The Pacific Northwest of the United States is lousy with beavers. Beavers denuding watersheds. Beavers gnawing down newly planted saplings. This is a century after trappers had
