Erlbaum agonistes

Janice Erlbaum, author of the smashing memoir Girlbomb, posts a wonderfully honest entry about the highs and lows of writing -- the fear, self-loathing and active struggle that go into producing good work, in contrast with what being a writer looks like from the outside.

When I see those ads in the NYR or the Atlantic or wherever about MFA programs that promise you bullshit like "life the life of a writer in New York" (that's the ad for the NYU MFA program, if I remember correctly) I have to laugh. Erlbaum really is living the life of a writer in New York.

Disheartening, to open September - November 2004, and read words I could have written yesterday. God, I'm so fucking angry. I wonder if I will ever get past it. I try so hard to be a good person, and I'm just furious all the time. I'm so overwhelmed. Reading myself as I struggled with various projects -- I think I got the first scene done, now all I need is the backstory... -- realizing that none of them bore fruit. Book after book after book, of anger, fury, fruitless writing. Nightmares, complaints, food that takes forever to come. I should stop overscheduling myself, cut down on seeing people, stop saying yes to things I know I don't want to do. Changes I never make.

Yep. And yet -- Garrison Keillor is right to say "quit complaining; writing is no harder than anything else." It's true that people are too melodramatic about the struggle -- for example, the oft-quoted maxim "Writing is easy, you just open a vein and bleed onto the page." That's the kind of thing Keillor means, I think. You can be too romantic about both the difficulty and the rewards.

You know what the real reward is? It's not the fun of doing a reading and having people applaud, though that's great; it's not the ego-boosting Lunch With Your Editor, something that happens maybe once every five years (that's what people probably are thinking when they see "live the life of a writer" -- yeah baby, lunch on the editor!). It's that glorious feeling of having worked all day, through struggling with characters and pacing and dialogue, and you keep at it, and finally you reach a state of grace and finish a story in a burst of energy and inspiration. And then you go outside and look at the sky and feel as if you've just had the best sex ever. That's why we do it.

writers, Janice Erlbaum, struggle