I watched a YouTube video with Lee Child, author of the Jack Reacher series, titled How to Write Strikingly Well — Lee Child. I’ve never read a Jack Reacher book, and I don’t particularly want to write something like a Jack Reacher book, but I think it’s good to get different perspectives on the thing you want to do from people who’ve done it. I’m no big Stephen King fan, and On Writing is still one of the best books ever written about writing. Same idea.
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In this video, Lee Child gives what I consider one of the worst pieces of writing advice that you can give someone who wants to do it. I won’t fully put it on his feet because it seems to be accepted conventional wisdom, but it’s a conventional wisdom I reject.
The advice goes something like, “live first, write later.” The idea is that you can’t write something good while you’re young because you don’t have enough experience to write about said experience. (Things like a big, strong Army man travelling from town to town and beating people up.)
I get what he’s going for, but it’s just survivor bias. He wrote his first book in his 40s and found success, so he could only have done it when he was in his 40s. He had to have another job that whole time. I should relate to that and agree with it as I will also be a first-timer in my 40s, but I just think it sucks.
In what other artform would you tell someone this? There would be maybe five good albums in the world if you told musicians to do this. Every film would be The Big Chill.
A better piece of advice might be to use a pen name. Or to start with YA. Maybe a pulpy romance, the kind with Fabio on the cover. Or a simple action premise, like a guy who is really tough who beats up bad guys. Because the best piece of writing advice, and really the only piece of writing advice ever needed, is to write. All the time. Every day. When you finish one thing, you start another and do it over and over. James Joyce, or whoever you want to prop up as the proof that living first and writing later is the way go, wasn’t good because they were older. They were good because they did it, over and over.
What the advice ends up reading like is not “live first, write later”, but “work first, write later”. It’s the idea that art is something that you earn your way into. Child worked for most of his adult life (in another creative industry), so he’s allowed to do it now that he’s paid his dues. You can do this thing, but first you must kneel at the almighty throne of capital.
There is also the other elephant in the room with this advice: what makes anyone think they will live that long? With the world on the brink of global thermonuclear war, the necessity of mass distributing your little story to the world falls several million steps behind finding clean drinking water and paying your landlord.
I have no other way to put it except to say that this advice is boomer shit. Their only view of the world is that you need to work, and they need to do whatever the hell they want because they’re entitled to it. It’s the idea that you need to earn every scrap they give you. A selfish generation that passed their selfish traits down until they became the accepted norm. They believe you need to earn everything, that you have to wait, and that the world has to be this way. We just fell for it.
Well, fuck that. Write your shitty story. Make your stupid song. Post your cringe post. I’ve had a pretty good and fun life, but I’ve wasted so much of it kneeling to their framing. I wasn’t ready! I don’t actually deserve this! Nobody wants to hear my story!
Falling for it has left me an old man filled with regret, but I’m not dead yet.
These thoughts have been banging around my head since I read Tilt by Emma Pattee. In the book, a pregnant former playwright has to travel across Portland after an earthquake. The earthquake details are fantastic, but what has stuck with me is the way Annie’s story is just dripping with regret over her failed creative endeavors when there is just nothing to be done about it when the bills are due.
It rings throughout the story, but this passage sums it up well.
“We were in a play together.” We pass a building with an entire wall gone, collapsed into a pile of bricks. And out front, three picnic tables stand untouched—the absurdity.
“Actors, huh?”
“Sort of. We were. Well, he still is, or is trying to be. And I wrote the play.”
“You wrote the play?”
“Yeah, but I don’t do that anymore.”
“How come?”
I sigh. “It’s a long story,” I say.
“What’s the short version?”
The short version. The short version is that nobody told us (us being me and your father and everyone who grew up watching Britney Spears and LeBron James explode from nothingness into white-hot stars) that it is worse to try and fail than to not try at all. Because when you don’t try, you can always imagine the life you could have lived. From the safety of your cubicle or your car window or your business-trip hotel room, you can imagine the life you’d be living if you’d just gone all in on your thing. The applause! The pride! The meaning! How your parents will suddenly respect you. You don’t imagine all the rejections, all the mornings spent alone staring at a computer screen, all the times your card gets declined at the grocery store. And now here we are, thirtysomethings. Mary-Kate and Ashley had a baby. It scares me to look at them.
“Health insurance,” I say.
This was a book I enjoyed very much, but I did not enjoy reading it because the author kept punching me in the face like this. If that’s what it takes to get these dumb boomer thoughts out of my brain, so be it. Punch away.
I think the conventional advice to end this one would be to say something like “it’s not too late,” but it is almost too late. You know? The doomsday clock is ticking. Let’s get to work.
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