Chasing Rainbows

I attended writing workshop I hadn’t been to in awhile a few years back now, and the nice but slightly awkward person there, uh, one of them, mentioned that she’d heard I’d fallen off the horse. This was news to me. My publications had slackened while I worked on longer stuff, and I guess the consensus of the workshop was I was out of juice.

I hate to think many were happy about this, thinking that a not young writer had gone into retirement and maybe some new blood could use his vacated publication slots.

I shouldn’t care. I’m trying not to care about such things.

John Cheever wrote in a letter that pursuing a career in order to find a group of successful colleagues to be friends with is madness. The cart before the horse. It may happen. It may not. If that’s your focus… maybe get the hell out of the arts and go into marketing. You know, like Willy Loman.

When you drift away from writing, or writing in a certain genre, those working in that genre drift away too. It isn’t a conscious decision. But writing is hard and you simply have no room in your life, often, for anyone or anything that makes that effort even a tiny bit harder. Your slacking off can feel infectious to others.

So, keep your non-writing friends. You may need them desperately from time to time. For years at a time.

Older writers say this infuriating thing to younger writers, that if you don’t have to write, do something else. Instead of reassuring you about a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, you’re told you should enjoy chasing rainbows.

Because that may well be all that you are doing.

So. Now I smugly assert, at age 58, that I find myself writing, thinking about the WIP, piling up words. Trying to force myself to hit a word count, a set number per day, in the hope of Making A Living writing has receded. The one person I know who went on to that has the willpower of olympic athlete.

And I have come to grips with the fact that I am not one of those. Almost.

But as I process the passing of my parents and our lives together, their lives as I have uncover them in letters and photos and fragments of memory, I find myself lighting out over that inner landscape again.

I’m lighter there. Younger. The light is different. The world is newer and the work beckons and it is never good enough, and I’ve grown to accept that, too. Almost. The work embarrasses me, even the stuff that gets published, or maybe especially that work. We reveal ourselves in our work and if we are decent human beings feel both pride and shame in this.

The sky is full of brooding clouds that will one day merge into darkness, the darkness into which we all disappear. But for now there is light, and color, and power, and Story. A few good writer friends and generous (and award-winning!) editors that give a Flying Fuck. They should be enough.

And the work.

And the shimmering heat mirage of success. I mean the big-time, always somewhere up ahead, never getting any closer. Mocking you and reassuring you. Reminding you that you better enjoy the ride.

It’s the one thing you are guaranteed to get.