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by Richard Lederer
(Richard Lederer will be the Lone Star Chapter's guest speaker in May. Online reservations may be made starting Mar. 15, but no one will be admitted for the program only -- it's a dinner and program event -- Editor)
Ernest Hemingway's first rule for writers was to apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. But not all authors are able to survive with such a simple approach.
For stimulation, Honor de Balzac drank at least 50 cups of coffee a day, and died of caffeine poisoning. The German poet Schiller started each of his writing sessions by opening the drawer of his desk and breathing in the fumes of the rotten apples he had stashed there. Victor Hugo went to perhaps the most extreme lengths to ensure his daily output of verbiage. He gave all his clothes to his servant with orders that they be returned only after he had finished his day's work.
Compared to such strategies, my daily writing regimen is drearily normal. Perhaps that's because I'm a nonfictionalist -- a hunter-gatherer of language who records the sounds that escape from the holes in people's faces, leak from their pens, and luminesce up on their computer screens. I don't drink coffee. Rotten fruit doesn't inspire (literally "breathe into") me. My lifelong, heels-over-head love affair with language is my natural caffeine and fructose.
To be a writer, one must behave as writers behave. They write. And write. And write. The difference between a writer and a wannabe is that a writer is someone who can't not write, while a wannabe says, "One of these days when . . ., then I'll . . . ." Unable not to write, I write every day that I'm home.
A grocer doesn't wait to be inspired to go to the store or a banker to go to the bank. I can't afford the luxury of waiting to be inspired before I go to work. Writing is my job, and it happens to be a job that almost nobody gives up on purpose. I love my job as a writer, so I write. Every day that I can.
Long ago, I discovered that I would never become the great American novelist. I stink at cobbling dialogue, episode, and setting. A writer has to find out which kind of writer he or she is, and I somehow got born an English teacher with an ability to communicate ideas about language and literature. Early on, I also discovered that I am more lark than owl -- more a morning person than a night person -- and certainly not a bat, one who writes through the night. I am usually up around 7:30 a.m. and banging away at the keyboard within an hour.
I write very little on paper, almost everything on my computer. My work possesses an informational density, and the computer allows me to enter all manner of matter onto the hard drive and accumulate that density. Theodore Sturgeon once wrote, "Nine-tenths of everything is crap." The computer allows me to dump crap into the hard drive without the sense of permanence that handwriting or type on paper used to signify to me. I'm visual, and shape my sentences and paragraphs most dexterously on a screen. The computer has not only trebled my output. It has made me a more joyful, liberated and better writer.
Genetic and environmental roulette have allowed me to be able to work in a silent or a noisy environment. I'm a speaker as well as a writer, so phone calls and faxes and e-messages chirp and hum and buzz in my writing room, and I often have to answer them during those precious morning hours. That's all right with me. Fictionalists live with their characters, who get skittish and may flee a noisy room. As I write my essays, my readers are my covivants, and they will usually stay through outerworldly intrusions.
Besides, the business of the writing business gives me the privilege of being a writer. In fact, I consider the writing only about a half of my job. Writers don't make a living writing books. They make a living selling books. After all, I do have to support my writing habit.
When you are heels over head in love with what you do, you never work a day. That's me – butt over tea kettle in love with being a writer -- a job that nobody who works it would give up on purpose. Imagine: a job that nobody wants to leave.