BOOKISH: Call It Courage

Writers need courage. But so do nurses, mail carriers, and Save-A-Lot clerks. So maybe this is not such an extreme requirement.

Why do writers need courage? There’s a lot of challenges in writing. Producing a manuscript which you find acceptable is hard enough. Then, the agent has to find you acceptable. Then the publisher. Then the reading public has to accept you.

That’s a lot of acceptance. And writers ask for it every day. They write and rewrite. They query. They submit. They cajole and plead. Getting published begins to look a lot like that Mouse Trap game, a maze of unlikely events. The stop sign hits a shoe which kicks a bucket and the cage comes down on the mouse.

Which is the writer, I suppose.

So we need courage. Courage is found in honesty. Among other places, like in the gym, practicing Taekwondo. This is not a frivolous comparison. Honesty can kick your beehind. And other people’s too, but for the time being let’s stick with yours. And what is honesty for the writer? Honesty means saying you could be bad. This is a huge ask for anyone, but especially writers.

Of course, in sticking to my own principles, I might be guilty of bad reasoning. I decided to run this by Derek, a fellow writer and MFA candidate. He is tall, narrow-chested, and handsome in a blond, angular sort of way. He is not confrontational, and I would treat him gently. He has the look of someone who could be knocked over by a feather.

“Listen, Derek,” I said, catching up with him in the reading room at the Hazelwood Center. “Do you think all these writers are being honest?”

“What?” He stood by a magazine rack, paging through lit journals and chapbooks. Derek deploys the child’s response when surprised. He pretends he didn’t hear. I repeated the question.

“It depends on what you mean by honest,” he said.

“Do these writers think their work is first-rate?”

“Sure. All of them do.” He put back one chapbook and picked up another. “A Mime in the Attic”, or some such title.

“But are they being honest?”

Derek winced at a page, and returned the chapbook. “No.”

“So there is a disconnect.”

“Yes. But otherwise you wouldn’t have all of this.” He waved at the rack.

I didn’t see that as so bad. “How about your MFA class? How can twenty-two students all be good?”

Derek sighed. “I know what you’re getting at, bud. You want to know what I think of my own writing.”

“I didn’t want to get personal.”

“Because you’re a nice guy. But here’s the thing with my stuff. I love writing, but I may never write anything of value. I accept this. That’s honesty. Personally, I don’t know how anyone can be a writer and think they’re great.”

I was very surprised. “Why?”

“Because they might be wrong. I might be wrong. You might be wrong, none of us can know. The poet, Berryman, was asked how a writer knows he’s good. He said a writer can’t know. If you have to know don’t write.”

“Have you told this to your class?”

“Are you kidding?”

“Too afraid?”

“Too polite. Plus, I’d like to graduate.”

A very large, young man with a Johannes Brahms beard and work boots clomped into the reading room. He shouted, or nearly shouted into a cell phone. Something about the Packers-Jets game. Derek cleared his throat. The man kept talking. “Excuse me, friend,” Derek said. “This is a reading room. Could you take that outside?”

The man looked at Derek in pure disbelief. “Who the f— are you?” He puffed his chest and took a step our way.

Derek stood his ground. “Someone who asked you nicely. Take your call outside.”

The man left. He gave us the finger on the way out. Tough guy. “That was brave,” I said.

“Not really.” Derek smiled, and picked up a local lit mag. “Not as brave as looking at a whole night’s work, the best work of your life, and throwing it away in the morning. Now that takes guts.”

Yes it does. And well said, my friend.