Past Present Future: What It Means to Be a Writer Today, Part 3

Past Present Future


In our last installment we left two beginning writers, one 23, the other 45, at the outer edge of a deep dark wood. We spent a lot of time explaining how the old literary ladders had been busted, that the good ol’ days of big advances and multiple markets for short stories, all were gone. We left them asking the question, “Where do I go from here?”

And like cowards, we ran away. More than a week they’ve been standing there! They’re cold, they’re hungry, they smoked their last butts on the second day.

Now we’re going to do something worse. Instead of bringing them a hot cup of soup and a cold beverage, we’re going to yell at them: “Are you crazy? The world is in turmoil, the economy is in the tank, and you want to be what?”

But guess what? They look right through us. Like we don’t exist. Like we’re the ghosts in the Underworld in Dante’s Inferno. What’s up with that?

What’s up is the best reason to be happy about the future of writing, reading, and even our precious literary standards. Because the ones who are just starting out on the path treat us like ghosts and walk right through us, and on into the future.

Why is that such a good thing? Let’s start with our 23-year-old. First, young beginning writers can be so annoying, no question. They just blithely start writing, without asking the permission of older writers. Don’t they know that’s not how it’s done?

Of course they don’t, and that’s the beauty of being a beginner. It just kinda sucks for the rest of us, who’ve put in our 10,000 hours that Malcolm Gladwell talks about in Outliers, only we put in those 10K, like, 100K hours ago. So we’re due, and we’re sore because here comes yet another tyro who’s just had her hippocampus light up like a mouse brain in a lab test over a short story she’s written. Written without our permission!

And that’s the beauty, I repeat. Let us learn from the young. We should all be beginners. Don’t feel you have to wait 10,000 hours because some woolly headed New Yorker writer said so. Don’t you know he’s saying that to weed out the field of woolly headed rivals?

Just sit down at the table in the laundromat and knock out a dozen poems, like “The Flowers of Evil,” or a book of short stories, including “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Type Typee at age 25, emo Omoo and White Jacket before you’ve even learned proper grammar, and let the critics sniff.

As for the 45-year-old, well, she should really know better. That’s why the rest of us find older beginning writers to be even more irritating. The young, they’re young. The older writers, really, with all the mileage on their souls . . . (How are you going to take a decent plunging neckline author photo?) And yet here they come, looking like Joan of Arc right after she got conked on the head while stirring the cook-pot and had a vision of herself leading France to freedom. They throw aside good jobs, fat pensions, sensible shoes and instead of watching “Mad Men” and “Hawaii 5-0″ and “Dancing with the Stars” while folding socks, they start writing. They write Almayer’s Folly, and Jim, and The Secret Sharer, and Nostromo. They write Stones for Ibarra and Don Quixote. They write The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man.

And they totally ignore the OMG expressions of the youngsters in skinny jeans and high-top tennis shoes who own writing the way strollers own the sidewalks of Brooklyn.

That’s why we should all be older beginning writers, too. Because they’re saying the future belongs to them, hipster beards or not. But also because they’re saying that we who are old like them, but who put in our 100K hours, we should stop carping. Either get aboard or step aside, because this train’s got to run today.

And now, back to you, No. 23 and No. 45 at the edge of the deep dark wood. Did that answer your question? Are you ready to take the next step, and the next, and the one after that?

But they’re gone.

We’ll catch up to them next week. Or not.