Thursday, November 06, 2003 it's true
I hate to say it, because I'm really down with what I think NaNoWriMo is all about, and I don't want to be the nippy little weasel nipping and weaseling away at the already weak and corroded infrastructure of the self-esteem of sensitive writers everywhere, but Jesus, a quick scan of the message boards reveals something I've suspected for years: Any old son of a bitch can write a book.
One of my college jobs was carting semi-famous writers back and forth between my remote country college and BWI airport, or in some cases, the Amtrak station in Wilmington, Delaware. Because of particularly juicy and detailed bequest of a certain "writer of light fiction", the school had a fairly large budget for luring quite a lot of biggish names in literary fiction and poetry. I don't know why I was allowed to transport them, but my friend Leah and I were called on to do this fairly often.
Even when they got to the school at the hands of other amateur chauffeurs, the visiting writers were much more accessible than they would have been at a larger, more important school, and it was usually pretty easy to get a feel for their personalities.
Not all of them were ideal party guests. Some of them, including some pretty big names, were jerks. There they would sit, in the passenger side of the school Buick, silent and brooding, grunting rudely in response to even the most sparkling of conversational gambits.
Others talked too much, about nothing much. One poet they brought in greeted a class (which was supposed to have read and digested his slim volume of poetry) by saying "So, first let's go around the room, and each say which three of my poems you liked best."
I know I've blogged about this before, because the visiting writers are the closest I've gotten to any sort of starfucking, and that makes me feel important, but I think it's a lesson that any struggling writer must realize. There are absolutely no criteria that one must meet to write a book, except for this: you have to sit down and write it. Publishing, I'm sure is another matter, but I'm not even in a position to worry about that yet.
Right now, it's nice to know that I'm just as mediocre as I need to be, and so is just about everybody else.
My play novel is up to about 9,000 words. My real novel is still terrible.
posted by Frenzy Lohan | 11/06/2003 11:04:00 PM
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