Suggested Reading: It's Short

Lots of pictures, too

I’m not saying you should get socked in the head, but…

Not to beat a dead horse, but this fascinates me. On the Joe Rogan Experience, I talked about how I wrote nothing but crap until a group of kids jumped me and beat my head in. After that my storytelling improved radically. After that, my best work had more in common with song lyrics than with prose fiction. My writing became more intuitive.

Rogan responded with anecdotes about how Roseanne Barr had been hit by a car at age sixteen and her personality had changed so much—from quiet kid to loud comic—that she’d been placed in a mental hospital. Sam Kinison had also been hit by a car, and Rogan seemed to credit that event for Kinison’s talent or access to talent or whatever you want to call it. I responded with the anecdote about how Eadweard Muybridge had been a failed-at-everything nobody until a stagecoach accident seemed to turn him into a genius at photography. For more examples:

This guy dove into a shallow pool and busted his head.

This dude was struck by lightning.

This one fell.

This guy was smashed by a camera boom.

This guy got smacked by a baseball on the left side of his head.¹

All along, there’s been this guy, who went from rocking a sweet mullet and ripped triceps, to being a successful artist—after he’d been beat on.

For more on the subject, here’s the wiki page on him.

Better yet, he’s got a Tedx Talk, here, in which he talks about how his sense of reality changed from a “smooth” flow of movement to a “choppy” series of still images. This is uncannily how Muybridge’s perception changed, allowing him to pioneer motion pictures. All of this resonates with how Amy Hempel’s “list” stories impressed me, how she simply lists details and allows them to accumulate in the reader’s mind. In stories such as The Harvest and In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried she doesn’t try to create a continuous flow of moment-to-moment time. Her stories, like most of mine, are more like the frames of a film that flash by to create the illusion of motion.

In her own break-out story—The Harvest—she recounts being in a motorcycle accident that put her in the hospital for months. I’ve emailed her to ask if she thinks there’s any correlation between her writing talent and the traffic accident.

Could it be? Are we acquired savants?

Postscript: Amy just wrote me back. Yes, she was driving in San Francisco when a bus failed to yield the right-of-way and crashed into her. The impact struck her driver-side door, hitting her on the left. She was hospitalized and lost memory for days.

She was nineteen at the time. About the aftermath of the event, Amy shares this:

Since that first accident, the bus crashing into my left side (it also broke all the ribs on that side of me and caused a back injury I still feel) I've thought associatively, not beginning-middle-end, even when telling a friend something that happened.

1. When attacked, I was beaten on the left side of my head. During the Catholic ritual of Confirmation the bishop struck me on the left side of the head. In Fight Club—which I wrote in one sitting, from an idea that just “struck” me—one character smacks another on the side of the head. In 2014 my car was totaled by a tractor-trailer that had lost control on a steep downhill incline… and smashed into me on the left side. All a coincidence I’m sure.

But, really, you should’ve seen the solid crap I was writing up until that attack. I couldn’t turn my head or chew food for weeks afterward, but then: I want you to hit me as hard as you can.