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Writers Anonymous
By
Dustin Wells
Are You A Compulsive Writer?
1. Did you ever borrow to finance your writing?
2. Did you ever lose time from work or school due to writing?
3. Have you ever written to escape worry or trouble?
4. Did writing cause you to have difficulty sleeping?
5. Do arguments, disappointments or frustrations create an urge to write?
6. Did you ever have an urge to celebrate with a few hours of writing?
7. Has writing ever made your home life unhappy?
8. Have you ever felt remorse after writing. (e.g. I can’t believe I wasted a year writing that book.)
9. Have you ever considered committing an illegal act to finance your writing?
10. Have you ever considered suicide as a result of writing?
Writers Anonymous
Everybody starts similarly. It’s even encouraged. You write a poem about horses. Your teachers praise you. They may even give you an award. In sixth grade, you decide to become a writer. Everyone tells you this is a bad idea. But writing makes you feel like God’s megaphone.
In high school, you write more poems. It’s like flying. It’s a rocket to the moon. Oh, those early poems. That person will be sorry they ever dumped you! And that political poem. The way you told everyone war is bad --that’s brilliant. That poem about how we consume too much resources will surely change the world. Or that one about why you shouldn’t be mean to the fat kid. Obviously, no one has ever been lonely like you. Your path is set. You have been chosen.
Against everyone’s advice, you major in English. You acknowledge that you’ll be poor, but you don’t believe it. You decide to be poor like Hemingway who lived in Paris with two apartments, one just for writing.
Stories seem to be the way to go. That’s what the big time folks do. Book of short stories. Then the advance. Then the novel that’s praised but sells poorly. Then the sophomoric slump of a book. Then the doorstop masterpiece. Then you buy an estate.
But you can’t seem to write a short story. It doesn’t matter. You’ll study. That’s what college is for anyway. For the time being, you’ll dress like a writer. Scarf. Tweed and wool. The classics under your arm. You start smoking.
In an upper level English course, you study sonnets. Over Thanksgiving break you write two. Your family doesn’t know there’s a genius among them. You don’t even show them your work. They wouldn’t understand the complexities anyway. You hide away and tinker with the rhyme scheme of the tenth line for hours. You show up late for dinner.
Then lightening strikes. Your first real story. What a great theme. Your seventh grade teacher becomes the worst monster in literature. Oh how she humiliated you. But you have your revenge on the page.
Then comes publication in the college’s literary magazine. Two sonnets and a story. You are so versatile. It’s better than you’ve ever felt. There are only five hundred copies. You think how valuable they’ll be once you’re famous.
Everything is happening as planned. Of course, you’re poor. It doesn’t feel too bad. The college cafeteria has good food, but you decide to eat in a grimy diner like Kerouac. You decide to eat in a bistro because it’s so Parisian. You are poor, but with taste. You drink strong coffee and eat croissants.
The college lit mag only comes out once a year, and you’re jonesing for a publication, so you write for the campus newspaper. It’s thrilling. You are obviously more gonzo than Hunter. You buy yellow sunglasses. But, on newspaper day, why aren’t students grabbing the papers out of the box? Why aren’t they carrying you on their shoulders? You are the spokesperson of their generation.
You didn’t want to take a Creative Writing course. They’re for amateurs. Then you acquiesce in your junior year because you’re lonely. The other students say your writing is brilliant. They want you to read their work outside of class, but you decline. There is only so much time. You read only the greats. You discover Bukowski and start drinking beer. For some reason, you carry a harmonica.
You don’t apply to the summer writing program at Oxford, because you are the radical, the rebel, the one sent to shake shit up. So you stay at home and begin your novel. You got no material, so you write about Dad. Everything not concerned with writing is a hassle. You are moody and irritable. You have a change in personal grooming habits.
After college, you sneer at a “career.” You snarl at law school. You take a room that looks like a writer would live in it. Someday there will be a plaque there. You finish the Dad novel and send the first chapters to three-hundred agents. Initially, the rejection slips feel good, because you know they’ll be kicking themselves. After the fiftieth one, the form letter rejections don’t feel so good. It doesn’t matter. You’ll write another novel. Then both books will get published.
Your next book is about your sex life. The controversy will blow the roof off the bestseller list. You mail the first chapter to three-hundred agents. Nobody wants it.
You spend extravagantly on a new laptop, because you feel if you could just write in the backyard or in a cafe, words would magically fall into place. The cat jumps up and knocks over your coffee onto the keyboard and ruins it.
You get a job where you can write on company computers while you’re supposed to be working. You abuse the privilege and neglect your job to stare at the hundredth draft of a troublesome chapter. You get fired.
You decide to break into publishing by writing stories. You mail one to the New Yorker. Everyday you check the mail. You write another story to kill time. The New Yorker never responds. You mail stories to the Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Zoetrope. Surely McSweeney’s will take one. But they don’t.
You decided to break into publishing by writing a thriller. Save the literary stuff for later. The secret files fall into your main character’s lap. There’s driving and running and everything. It’s all very exciting. You cleverly sneak in some literary stuff. You mail the first chapter to the thriller agents. A guy in Manhattan wants to read it. You mail off the manuscript. Two months pass, so you call him. He hasn’t read it. Six months pass, and you call him, and he passes on it. It doesn’t matter. The way you came so close feels good. Someone in Manhattan read your book. He almost liked it.
You take temp jobs so you have time to write. You take temp jobs, you tell yourself, just for the material.
You lie to your friends, family, and strangers and say you have a book or a story or a play coming out. You avoid everyone, because someone will ask you about the book, story, or play.
You run out of material, so you decide to move to a literary city. There are many options. New Orleans: Capote, Faulkner. San Francisco: the whole beat thing. New York: of course. Or you go all ex-pat: Hemmingway, Henry Miller. Or you go south to channel Marquez and Cortazar.
You’re not writing in the city, because you’re drinking too much. You’re gathering material, you tell yourself. Somebody reads your unpublished work and falls in love with you. They propose an idea: they’ll support you until you make it big. Surely it’ll only be a few months, if you apply yourself.
You can’t write where you are. Too many friends. Too much drinking. You and your benefactor move somewhere isolated. You write in the spare bedroom while your benefactor works. You’re serious now. You write about your libertine days in the big city. Before the first draft is finished, you mail the first ten pages to three-hundred agents. An agent in New York likes it! You rush to finish the manuscript and then mail it off. You take a shit job, because you feel guilty for not working. After six months, the agent contacts you. The agent likes it, but not enough to represent it.
You lack motivation when it comes to non-writing activities. Your benefactor plans a vacation you have no desire to go on. On the vacation, you have anxiety and involuntary typing movements of the fingers. You chip away at a notebook with a pen to relieve the writing withdrawal.
Frustrated, you begin a horror novel to break into publishing. A serial killer tortures a character much like your benefactor in the book. No agent wants to see it.
You want to honor your benefactor for sticking by you, so you propose. You get married. You fight on the honeymoon because you packed a rough draft and a laptop.
You decide to write a gritty crime novel like James Ellroy. After it’s written, you decide to go back and put the subjects back into all the sentences. You contact some hack of an agent in Dallas. He represents shitty crime writers, but somehow gets their books published. After a form rejection slip, you call him and demand he reads your book. He does. He rejects it.
You’re dejected, but you can’t stop. Writing is your only purpose now. It defines you. It’s your core, because you have no other skills. You use writing to escape feelings of helplessness. Your writing exonerates you somehow. Its confession takes the place of religion. It’s better than justice, because you can turn back time and set the record straight. “This is the one,” becomes your phrase with each new project. “I wrote a good chapter today,” you say to your spouse when you were really at the movies all day.
You can’t believe the shit that’s being published. It’s shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. You hate published writers.
You take a full-time job at which you steal an excessive amount of writing paraphernalia, such as paper, paperclips, manila envelopes, pens, and lots of pens.
You write before or after work. Your job makes you feel stupid, but when you’re writing you feel brilliant. You snap at your co-workers if you didn’t fit in your early morning writing. You can’t enjoy your days off, because you never believe you’re writing enough. You have difficultly paying attention when you’re not writing. Your work performance slips.
You find it easier to engage in fictional relationships than real ones. You skip vacations to edit that final draft of a novel. You skip Christmas with your family to labor away on a new book. You come to view fictional characters as more real than friends and family.
On your birthday, you splurge at the bookstore and buy How-To-Get-Published books.
You follow the advice and join a writing group. You can’t believe what losers they are.
You develop a sudden need to upgrade your computer. You purchase expensive writing-aid software. Creating your characters is boring and it doesn’t help your writing in the least.
You pay to go to a Writers Conference where writers you never heard of tell you that you’re a good writer. They suggest you go to grad school. You enroll in an MFA program where writers you never heard of tell you that you’re a good writer. You’re not concerned about the student loans, because you’re going to get your big break. Good first novels are going for six figures. You sign out some more money. You write more and more. The good feeling you once got from writing a page, now takes a whole chapter or a whole story to produce the same effect.
Someone in your class thinks you’re brilliant so you fuck them. Another person in your class thinks you’re brilliant so you fuck them too. Your spouse leaves you.
Your story in the college lit mag is brilliant. There’s only five hundred copies. You think how valuable they’ll be once you’re famous.
None of the contacts you made at school wants to publish your MA novel. None of the contacts you made at school wants to publish your MFA collection of stories. Your professors won’t introduce you to their agents.
After graduation, you take a job as the college janitor. One of your classmates becomes a stripper and calls herself a “performance artist.” Another works for literary agents in New York and begs you for money to pay her rent in exchange for getting your book read; you send the money and your book; you never hear from her again. The rest of your classmates wish they never wrote a single word.
You decide to become a junkie to kill the pain. Very Jim Carroll. Very Burroughs. You’re a shitty junkie, because you’re already addicted to writing. You work shit jobs to buy time to write. You work shit jobs because it’s all you’re qualified to do. You work shit jobs because the student loan payments are more than you’ve ever imagined.
Jonesing for another publication, you mail the same story to fifty obscure literary websites run by people like you. One site wants your story. You wait for someone to offer to buy the movie rights. Then you wait for an email from anyone who read your story. Neither happens.
Paranoia sets in. You think books and movies got to your idea just a few months before you did. You become enraged when people you know get published. You experience harsh blaming. If you’re male, you lament how publishing favors female writers. (And vice versa.) You feel the publishing industry doesn’t want whatever racial identity you are.
The college hires you to workshop incoming MFA students. Their work sucks so bad you can’t believe it. You realize, you’ve been taken.
You wish you had gone to law school. Your student loan payments bleed your paychecks dry. You can’t believe how old you look. You can’t believe how unhealthy you are. You keep writing. Writing still makes you feel good. You pile up rough drafts until your apartment looks like a shut-in who collects newspapers lives there. You try to kick, but it’s too late. You’ve bottomed out. You’ve OD’ed.
What To Do?
Stop the literary brainwashing! Learn about Writing Intervention. Writing Addiction takes over lives and endangers people’s health, safety, and happiness. The longer literary denial goes on, the longer it will take for an addict to change his or her behavior. If you suspect someone is writing, tell the person that literary aspirations can damage his or her health and future. Explain that you want to protect him or her from the dangers of writing just as you would any other threat. Call Writers Anonymous today.
Testimonials
“I’ve got my son back through Write-anon!”
“I came to WA a broken mess of a human being . . . Today I have no words to really explain the difference in my life . . . I am successful and happy. I have a future.”
“I have more stability now than I ever dreamed possible.”
“After a short time in Writers Anonymous, my wife regained her health and became herself again.”
“I wish I had heard about Writers Anonymous before I blew $41,000 on an MFA.”
Copyright © 2006 Dustin Wells
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