Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

Gunning the Writers

“Bunyan spent a year in prison, Coleridge was a drug addict, Poe was an alcoholic, Marlowe was killed by a man he was trying to stab, Pope took a large sum of money to keep a woman's name out of a vicious satire and then wrote it so that she could be recognized anyway, Chatterton killed himself, Somerset Maugham was so unhappy in his final thirty years that he longed for death... do you still want to be a writer?”
Bennett Cerf, the co-founder of Random House, said.

Omigod! Now I know why I’ll never make it. I am on the happier side of the world.

Why do writers get into so much trouble? I am going to try to come up with possible explanations, as far out as they may sound due to my usual far-out reasoning.

Some writers do not write as much as the writing art requires. Writing is akin to exercising. If we stop doing it, the energy dips, muscles atrophy, and mind grows cobwebs. We turn into couch potatoes and lazy slobs, and this makes us depressed because we've gotten lazy and we feel useless. This feeling encourages us to do things that are out-of-character and socially unacceptable.
Remedy: Have a day job in which you feel useful.

Writers, good ones, are perfectionists. They are terrified when they run out of gas. They think that their ambivalence and lack of ideas show and that they have become pathetic writers. So they act out of desperation or from the subconscious belief, which says: If I’m going down, I’ll take a few others with me.
Wretched isn’t it? And soooo sick!
Remedy: Have a day job in which you feel useful.

That quote could be null and Bennett Cerf could have belonged to a cult that worships cynicism. But then, I’ll come up with anything to free writers from the claws of degenerate, self-indulgent publishers.
Remedy for me: Stop reading publisher quotes or blogs or anything they say.
Remedy for Bennett Cerf: Rest in peace!

What is so difficult in writing is that we only have our brain to work with. Although the brain seems like a fantastic organ, it is an inferior one. Superior to other organs in a human body, maybe, but still it is inferior because it is mortal. If it was that superior, we all would live forever. And I think writers discover this fact before other humans, and this drives them to being the writerly losers Bennett Cerf has talked about.
Remedy: Discover a better instrument than your brain? Nope, that won't work either. We already have computers and robots.

Coming back to me, well, I have a life philosophy that says, do not fight a useless fight. That is why, even though I write (granted, not as good as those authors Bennett Cerf cited), I am on the optimistic side.

And oooops! I just looked over this entry to discover my use of the bullets. Recently, I have been thinking in bullets. My NLs have tons of bullets in them.
Bullets, guns, crime?
Does that mean I am joining the crowd?

Heck, no. Not in my wildest dreams…