My Greatest Embarrassment as a Writer
A Confession I've Been Holding Back for Years.
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My Greatest Embarrassment as a Writer
I confess,
for someone who wants to be a writer, I don’t actually like to read a lot.
I know a lot of writers who make posts about how their ideal version of heaven is a library full of books. No people interfering. No appointments on the calendar. Just me and my books.
This is not me.
I sit down with a book, read a few lines, and then I get easily distracted thinking about other things, like where the cats are, what I’m going to have for dinner, how the lettuce in the refrigerator went bad so fast? This happens even with a good book. One with lots of violence and sex, where things start off medias rias, (in the middle of the action). Where the author has a great voice full of purpose and the stakes are high. There just isn’t anything so interesting it can compete with what is going on in my fridge, or my garden, or the giant bundle of nerves that is my body. Especially when it is hot and I am sweating, or it is cold and I am freezing, or it is any random day when the cat re-appers and begins licking my toes.
Maybe it’s because I have undiagnosed ADHD or because I’m a poet…
(maybe I am a poet because I have undiagnosed ADHD) but if I’m trying to focus in on a book where a character is about to kill another character, and he’s there, lifting the gun, ready to unload, and then a bird flies by out the window of the house where I am reading, I will put down the book and stare at the bird instead.
Right now there’s a little gold finch out my window picking at a cone flower and it’s already derailed me from focusing on this essay.
Also, I might invent my own story about tarantulas while I’m zoning out on the beauty of nature. I might pick up a mango and begin to peel it and let all the skins drop to the tile floor until a butterfly is seduced by their sweetness to come over and uncurl its proboscis and start to suck up the nectar. Then I’ll think of the word proboscis, what a fun word! Pro-bos-cis! What would it be like to be a butterfly with a proboscis fluttering around, unrolling my tongue and sucking up nectar and not even able to read any books at all?
All of these things feel so much more alive than whatever might be happening in between the pages of the books. So much more vital and colorful and full of flavor. They engage all five senses instead of just one.
Needless to say, this is part of why I became a poet and not a novelist. It’s because my attention span is short. And it’s because I’m too busy looking closely at butterflies to pay attention to other things like who is murdering whom, or what clothes they are wearing while they do it, or why. I’d much rather just take a basket of plums down to the river and eat them, and feel the cold water on my feet and the hot juice of the fruit burning down my throat as I finish them up, and then write a short little poem before I walk to the market to buy some more.
But I do read anyways, in spite of my easily distracted mind.
If I do like to read it’s because I like stories. And I like people. And I like to talk with people about stories. I may struggle through a book like Madame Bovary, for example, but then I’ll think about it for the rest of my life. It took Gustave Flaubert 12 years to write Madame Bovary because he kept trying to perfect every sentence, and it took me almost 12 months to read it because there was a hummingbird feeder at my house the summer I picked it up. Yet, when I do finish a book, all I want to do is think about it and talk about it with others. If there’s a graduate level course on Bovary in college, I’ll sign up for it. If there’s a movie made about it, I’ll want to read reviews about the adaptation. If someone in a writing workshop writes a poem about Emma Bovary I’ll instantly make friends with them because I know what they’re talking about and recognize them as a kindred spirit.
One of the great embarrassments of my life is how little I actually read.
How little I have in fact read. In addition to my own trouble reading there’s also the overwhelm of selecting a book. How many classics are there that I never made it through? How many new novels have won the Thomas Mann award or Pulitzer? Who is on the New York Times Bestseller list right now? And more importantly, why are all the great pieces of literature so g.d. Long? Hasn’t anyone ever heard that brevity is the soul of wit? And what’s worse is that every year writers keep adding more to the stack, so I feel like I personally will never be able to keep up.
I keep flashing to my death bed and thinking when my time comes, I am going to meet my maker and have to admit that I got a degree in literature, spent my life trying to be a writer, but never finished Moby Dick. I just got to page 100, right before he introduced Ahab, and gave up because I couldn’t make it through one more description of the difference between a beluga and a sperm whale.
How do you decide what to read?
If you want to make me really, thoroughly depressed, send me to a bookstore. I will walk through the shelves like a woman condemned to stand in front of each of her many failures. Other people look at the classics as something they will read in retirement, but I stare at any collection of books and just think about how fleeting life is, and how mortal I am, and how I can never be as prolific a writer as Thomas Wolfe or as good a reader as my mentor Jack Grapes. When I walk through the shelves I can actually feel the books condemning me.
Barry Shwartz talks about this in his TED Talk, the Paradox of Choice. He uses the analysis of going to choose a salad dressing. The number of bottles can paralyze you. No matter what you choose you’ll wonder if the other bottle of dressing was better, and you’ll wind up less happy.
If I did want a book I wouldn’t go to a store to buy it. I’d order it online, so I could get it delivered without the fear of walking past all the other titles pointing out all of my terrible inadequacies and making me wonder if I should read them instead.
But here, with this long stretch of time there’s almost nothing else to do, I feel like now I can tackle some of the great works. For one thing, I had loads of free time, and for another, getting books in Playa del Coco was one of the fun things you could do for absolutely free due to the free book exchanges that popped up in nearly every coffee shop and restaurant in town.
Under these circumstances I have nothing to do BUT read.
It won’t surprise you to learn that in a Spanish speaking country there are not a lot of English language bookstores or libraries. But in Coco there are a lot of English speaking expats and they have created a network of lending libraries out of the various coffee shops where you can get books for free. Patrons of the coffee shop come in to eat, to drink, to make friends, and to browse the shelves. When they’re done with a book, they return it.
The shelves in Coco are smaller. It’s not Barnes and Nobles. There are usually only 3 shelves in any given coffee shop, and that seems manageable.
I’ve been reminded what a magical kind of joy happens when you don’t have access to everything in the world and are forced to make choices based on limited availability. At Java I find books I’d never pick up at a Barnes and Nobles, but here, with limited choices, they seem like good options. And because what else am I doing with my life, I get longer books than I usually challenge myself with. Books I’ve never heard of. Books I’ve heard of but dismissed as simplified, pulp fiction, meant for the masses and not for a high minded literary connoisseur like myself. I’m no longer trying to sort through the great classics or try to define myself by which book out of millions I’ll choose to go home with.
Having fewer choices actually makes me happier.
I’m just picking from what is available. Letting the universe select for me. Then I go home and read and read and read….
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To me, your knowledge of poets and poems is encyclopaedic. I have been a slow reader my whole life. I’ve always been more comfortable writing than reading. I, too, feel that poetry is liberating because I experience the world more in impressions than narratives. I even dream in vibes more than stories. I, too, have ADHD, and some literary shame around how that has affected my processing of everything, from your post above to the classics.
I have feared traditional teaching roles because, while I, intuitively, grasp grammar, I can’t name all parts of speech. Distractions that throw me off course are words I don’t recognize. I run into one and, eventually, realize I’ve been reading the same sentence for an inordinate amount of time, stretching it out like the tired resentment of an unsolved puzzle. (Hey, maybe I’ll use that in a poem!)
I “need to” fill in my Shakespeare gaps, attempt Crime and Punishment again, even get through The Wasteland. 😣
Yeah, I feel you. Oh, and the choices! Too many choices ARE a hindrance to the ADHD brain! Actually, that reminds me of why I enjoy writing in forms; the freedom OF not FROM constraints. Ya got me percolating just by being you! Thank you, my friend. 😊 (Sorry to make you read such a long comment!! 😆)
I can relate. Especially since the stroke. Going back and reading books again for the first time.