Tag Archives: literature

Support for Victims of Writers

Being a friend or relative of a writer is exceedingly difficult. Because we writers are shameless users of people, we view your lives through the narrow slits of our ambition. Not only is all you do and all you are fodder for our wicked profession, but all you don’t do and all you aren’t and never will be is equally at risk for exposure. We writers make things up and we make things believable, a particularly nasty combination for the innocent by-standers in our lives. Driven by larger than life egos, we believe that what we think, and what we imagine we might think, and what we think we might imagine all belongs on the printed page. Yes we put ourselves in your shoes daily, but only so that we might exploit you as material. We struggle mightily to put aside our quivering qualms about using you because we are chasing the high that comes like a shot of pure heroin when a reviewer calls us “fearless”, “honest”, “insightful”.

So what can a person do to shield themselves from the carnivorous pennings of a writer who lives close at hand? I’ve given some thought to this and would like to make several suggestions.

The best and most effective response might be to become a writer yourself. Wreak revenge in the very same way your writer has injured you, through the printed word. Be better, sharper, snappier than your writer. Become the competition.

Not up for the printed page? Gossip can be a powerful tool. Get on the telephone and talk about your writer to all their friends and relatives. Spread half truths about things they’ve written that you haven’t actually read but that you have on good authority from someone else is about you or someone you love.

Remind your writer that you are vigilantly fact checking everything they write. This is an especially pernicious weapon if your writer writes fiction. Saying things like “I didn’t actually say that,” drives fiction writers crazy.

Take offense on behalf of someone who doesn’t bother to take offense for themselves. This strategy works well if your writer has actually named someone, because they will have had to have gotten permission from that person. Be all about protecting that person from your writer. Find other people who will be outraged on behalf of your duped friend. Taking up this kind of cause makes people feel good about themselves, gives them a reason to get together and work up a righteous anger.

Help other people to recognize how your writer has alluded to them personally. Say things like, “How are you holding up after reading that short story?” Or, “You must be a saint to be able to smile after that last column.” Of course, if someone comes up to you and says this, you must smile and say “Oh I’d be silly to take any of that personally.”

If all else fails, and the writer in your life continues to pillage your life in order to attain fame and profit, you must simply stop living it. Do nothing. I mean this in the most literal terms. Be the most uninteresting, unengaged, lump of a person you can be. Granted it will be a sacrifice, but persevere long enough and your writer will either stop using you or stop being read. That’ll really show us.

A Day in the Life of an Award Winning Novelist

You used to be an unvalidated nobody, struggling to string some sentences together that someone, somewhere, might want to read. But no longer, because you have written a novel and your novel has won an award, or maybe even multiple awards. This is what you have worked for, what you have dreamed of since you were a child. It’s time to sit back and enjoy the fruits of your long, hard labor.

In the mornings, you wake to the smell of fresh brewed coffee and the rhythmic hiss of waves crashing onto shore. That’s because the cat knocked over your husband’s half filled cup where he left it on the dresser and the 6:15 light rail train that runs through your backyard is right on time. On your way to the kitchen, you notice the help has not yet gotten to vacuuming the dead leaves in the hallway from when the dogs dragged half the outdoors into the house. Hmm. You read the notes left for you by your family- reminders, pleas, a couple of outright and heavily underlined demands. You forgot what they haven’t- you are the help.

Exchanging dirty dishes for clean ones in the dishwasher, charging your dead cell phone so you can retrieve your messages, pulling on that blessedly stretched out pair of skinny jeans one more day before you wash them and they don’t fit anymore, you begin to wonder where your laptop is. Back in the day, when you wrote your award winning novel, your laptop served virtually one purpose- to advance your career. It sat obediently on your desk, where you would go each day to write, to do research, to complete administrative tasks like communicating with the publishing world. Now your laptop, a newer model than the productive one, calls to you throughout the day and night like a siren song with its array of capabilities, winks at you when you think about writing, and travels all over the place as you interface with the world in its many fascinating forms. You finally find it under a sofa pillow in the living room where you spent last night catching up on episodes of Modern Family. It is dead as a doorknob (yes you, the award winning author, still speak to yourself in clichéd idioms, saving your original word choices for the printed page).

Looking for the charger reminds you of all the ways your life has changed since your novel was published and won its award. Your desk is no longer visible. You can’t remember the last time you sat there. Is there even a place to sit still? You look under where your chair used to be. Oh there’s your favorite book signing pen, over by the stack of your novels that were misprinted and that you’re supposed to be using as giveaways but that you really use for kindling. No charger. But you do find the to-do list you made for last Valentine’s Day.

Your social life has taken a turn since you’ve become an award winning novelist. If people you’ve known casually all your life know you’ve written a book, they suddenly find you remarkable. Conversations with these people become almost impossible when you realize they are holding their breath lest they miss any of the dazzling words that tumble from your lips. Dazzling words have never tumbled from your lips- that’s why you write. At social gatherings most of the people you meet have never heard of you or your book, but there are usually a couple of people who are dying to talk to you. Mostly they want to know three things: if Oprah has read your book, if you’ve signed a deal for the movie rights, and whether your agent could take a look at something they’ve been working on. Sometimes they want to know if you’ve met and could introduce them to the “Fifty Shades of Grey” lady. You don’t even know where to begin with these questions.

You did have a brief sense that life had changed when the local librarians knew you by name, but then you found out it was because you have broken all previous records for overdue fines.

Now that you are an award winning novelist, you are actually earning money from what you love to do. If you were to check on your book sales, which you have firmly disciplined yourself not to do, you would find that even while you were sleeping, somewhere in the world people were buying your book. Two people to be exact. Cha-ching! Three bucks goes into the kitty. How on earth did you sleep soundly at night before becoming an award winning author?

But enough with basking in the dewy glow. Even you, an award winning author, must work and since your laptop is dead and you can’t find the charger, why not tackle the accumulated mess in your office? Well, there are a thousand reasons why not. Somewhere in the sloping hill of paper that is cascading from your desk is a partial draft of your next book. Your award winning novel was once just such an unsightly abomination to you, a heaving, shifting wedge of ruined characters and flailing plot twists. And now it sits on your bookshelf, a shining beacon to your hard work. Actually, fifty of them sit on your bookshelf because you are supposed to be at a book fair tomorrow where you will sit and smile and say, “Yes, this is my novel. It won an award this past spring. Would you like me to sign it?” Over and over and over again. And you will remind yourself that this is what you dreamed of, and worked for.

So you, the award winning author, will let this thought carry you along through your day, a day that will be a little like yesterday and a little like tomorrow and not so very different from the days you had two years ago before you were an award winning novelist. You won’t be jetting to Chicago to lunch with Oprah, and you will not face the temptation of running off with the leading man from the movie made of your book. Your daughter will still drop your grandson off for babysitting three afternoons a week, and your husband will still swat you on the bottom and say “Now that’s what I’m talking about!” when he crosses the room. There will still be people out there writing the next versions of “Fifty Shades of Grey”, and you will never be one of them. It turns out, for you, the award winning novelist, the fruits of your labor is the labor itself. And that, my friend, is a pretty good gig if you can get it.

What happened between me and Anne

This is not a paid advertisement, although it might as well be.

I had coffee in D.C. with a friend and afterwards he bought me a book by one of his favored authors, Anne Lamott. The book, called “Some Assembly Required,” is her journal of the first year of her grandson’s life. I’m reading it, savoring it, laughing out loud at it, and am now a fan of all things Anne Lamott. I fully intend to read everything she’s ever written, and will write in the future. I am now money in her back pocket.

I do this with writers, fall in love, gobble up their every word, pine for their next book. I am very faithful. Michael Chabon, Ian McEwan, Barbara Kingsolver, Jonathan Franzen, you will have me forever. But I feel a kinship with Anne Lamott. She is a writer. I am a writer. She is a messed up person of faith. I am a messed up person of faith. She is a grandmother. I am a grandmother. She is an anxious worrier with friends who impart great wisdom to her which she mostly ignores. I am not an anxious worrier, but my husband is, which is why I am determined to find ways to read parts of her books to him. He needs her. He needs the kind of friends she has. He has me, but he doesn’t appreciate me. Anne doesn’t always appreciate her friends either. Her die hard, last resort friend whom she only turns to when she is on the verge of spinning off into outerspace from anxiety, she calls Horrible Bonnie. Horrible, because Bonnie never worries.

I never worry either. I am very, very laid back. I am sure that my husband sometimes thinks of me as Horrible Lara. Worriers like to be validated in their worrying. Worriers worry about people who don’t worry. We make them crazy. We are icing on the cake of worries. They have to wring their hands doubletime to make up for all the ways in which we are failing to hold the universe together. But anyway, back to Anne Lamott.

I am sure that if I were to meet Anne, we would soon be best friends. How could she not feel the same way about me as I now feel about her? There is only one thing about Anne that bothers me. She has a more highly evolved work ethic than I do. She must have, because she is about my same age, but she has written over a dozen books and I have written just one. My one is a very good book, but still… Maybe Anne has written so many more books than I have because she is such a worrier and she worries that if she doesn’t write lots of books, people won’t want to be her friend. But I want to be her friend in spite of the fact that she’s written lots of books! So once she and I are friends, she can slow way down with all that book a year business. That can’t be good for her health.

The thing about Anne is, she writes not only novels, but also books about her life. Maybe I should be writing books about my life too. How hard can that be? You live a certain amount of time, then you write about it. It’s probably much easier than making up a bunch of people and then having to figure out what they’ve done with their lives before you can even write the book. Maybe, once Anne and I are friends, and seeing as how she already has so many books about her, she will want to write a book about me. I’m not that fascinating, but neither is she and she’s managed to write lots of funny books about herself. Anne would be able to spice me right up.

Anne lives in San Francisco and I live in Baltimore so that will make being best friends challenging, but it will be fun to fly back and forth to see each other. Being friends with Anne may actually improve my productivity as a writer. Although it’s hard to imagine how Anne even has time to live her life with all the writing she does. Anne is so prolific that it’s kind of annoying. I enjoy reading Anne’s books and they make me want to write more, and better, but Anne herself makes me feel kind of lazy. And who wants a friend who makes you feel like an underachiever? Anne’s problem is she just keeps on writing, even when the rest of us are stuck. Anne could make being stuck as a writer into a book.

Which is too bad, because I really think we could have been friends.