I was 42, and ready to give up writing.
No, scratch that.
I was 42, and had already given up writing. It had been years since I wrote anything of note, years since I’d stared at the sky trying to come up with better words for what I was trying to say.
What I was ready to give up was the idea of writing. I was ready to give up the idea that I was a writer, or a vision of the future in which I wrote things down for other people to read.
If that sounds like a hard realization, it wasn’t. As I described in my last post, I had given the writing life a good shot, had some success even, but the path was petering out. My childhood dream of putting a book on the shelf felt more and more far-fetched. I had written four books, and gotten four books worth of rejections. As I like to tell my kids, I may be dumb but I’m not stupid. It was time to pack it in.
Again, this wasn’t a hard choice. (You know what is hard? Writing. It’s not as hard as actual work, mind you, but it does take a steady supply of time, diligence, and belief in oneself. At various times, I ran short on all three.) Sure, I was giving up a childhood dream, but I wasn’t a child anymore. I was forty-two, and old enough to know better. Most of my adult life has been a battle between ambition and indolence, and it felt like high time to declare indolence the winner and let it take a nice victory lap. I had already picked out a nice hammock and was ready to leave the writing to others. The world would not notice the difference.
My nineteen-year-old self might have found this retreat an unpardonable compromise, but my forty-two-year-old self saw it as a reasonable accommodation to reality. It’s a compromise most folks make sooner or later, at least when it comes to their art. Some are tired of the obscurity, some are tired of the poverty, and some are just tired of the work.
What’s more, I had changed. My values had changed. My goals had changed. My definition of success had changed. Things that were once important were not so important anymore. My fire had dimmed a bit. It still glowed warm, but not as bright.
Again, this was not a dramatic switch. I have always had a lazy side. I am fond of naps. And beers. Sometimes beers, then naps. And of laying on my back in a patch of grass, and gazing at the sky. A fine life, with much to recommend it, but it doesn’t always get you to the top of the heap.
In eleventh grade, my world history teacher told me she expected the best from me, but she rarely got it. I suspect she is not the last to feel that way.
I get my work done, well enough, and walk away. That’s my default setting anyway.
The amibitious side of me sees this lazy streak and can’t help but wince.
The lazy side never had much use for the ambitious side anyway.
In my early forties, I decided the lazy side had won.
I don’t guess it spoils the ending to say that I spoke too soon. This website, this blog, this book is proof enough of that.
At 42, I was ready to pack it in.
At 44, I started my next book.
What can I say? I found myself with a good idea, some time to think, and enough left in the tank to give it one more go. Most likely, I was signing up for four more years of anonymous toil, followed by another batch of rejection letters, followed by the realization that I should have listened to my lazy side the first time. Still, I plunged in.
It started with one line, the line that would become the first line in Just Maria:
My friend Sam—he’s blind, like me—says that to tell his dirty undies from his clean, he has to sniff ‘em.
After that, I was all in, back in the saddle and writing more days than not. It was fun, exhilarating even, but I swore to myself: this will be the last one.
Next post: How I Write