Try This On: Phone It In

The Freedom of Not Giving a Shit

A Cautionary Tale:

Around my second year¹ in Tom Spanbauer’s workshop, a new student joined and brought in a scene from a book she’d begun to write. In truth, the scene rocked. Funny as hell it was, about a wife walking in as her husband banged another woman. A great launch. When I left Tom’s workshop after five years, she was still bringing in that scene. She’d tweak one or two words, then present the scene again—every week. When Tom shuttered his workshop around 2018? 2019? That writer was still bringing in the scene or others from that still unfinished novel. The workshop dues didn’t phase her, she was loaded. Rich rich. Nor did it occur to her that no one else wanted to see her rework the same territory for three decades.²

Poor Tom. He needed the money, so he suffered through week after week of that same infidelity scene. That writer, rich as she was, drove all the talented writers from Tom’s workshop. Leaving Tom with only problem children, quarreling misfits who’d stick around for decades and never complete anything, yet demand his praise. Hell, they were paying money for Tom’s praise … not to learn.

That’s what happens when a would-be writer starts with his/her Most Cherished Idea. They never finish it. Because they’re so emotionally invested in the original event. Because they know in their hearts that they don’t have another idea. Because they never really want to resolve that wound and risk the rejection of bringing it to the marketplace. What if no one wants to buy/read their account of their deepest trauma??!

When students begin by tackling their own deepest demons, it’s a recipe for suck. Either they’re stuck for years, their writing skills will never catch up to the emotion and identity they’ve invested in that trauma story. Or, worse, they slap a happy recovery transformation on the end. This faux-recovery story fools no one. It always lands like comedy when a writer with limited skills tackles a horror story, then wrestles it to a false cheery finish. I can’t count the number of professional writers I know who’ve written about finding the perfect husband, then come home from a book tour to find said husband banging another man.³ Or who write about conquering their drug habit only to embark on a new, worse drug addiction a year after first publication.⁴

In 1989, when I started to write, my biggest issues revolved around housing. No one I knew could afford to buy into the housing market; a few friends suggested we pool our money and buy a derelict candy factory and subdivide it into lofts, a dream that never happened. But I cut my teeth by writing an 1100-page novel about wage slaves trying to find stable housing. In Tom’s workshop I cut this to eight hundred pages, but it was still shit. Of that novel, all that survives is the blow-up doll scene later used in Snuff and the speech Marla gives in Fight Club about the condom being the glass slipper of her generation.

One time I asked Tom to read that manuscript and he said he would … for two thousand dollars in cash. The nerve of him! I felt so wounded, this was my heart. My heart!! All my emotions were invested so deeply in this manuscript; to me, this was something above money … it was my, my soul, I tell you! But I paid the two grand, and Tom gave me pages of notes. I made all the revisions, and the book was still crap.

It wasn’t until I was just screwing around at the laundromat—City Laundry⁵—that I tried to write a story in the voice of Vogue magazines—the laundromat was cluttered with dog-eared Vogue magazines—and I actually had fun writing. What’s more, that throw-away afternoon’s experiment expanded to become Invisible Monsters. At City Laundry, video monitors hung from the ceiling showing MTV videos. Trashed glossy magazines lay everywhere. It was fun. No one was there to write The Great American Novel.⁶

Now Watch This Video

This video, here.

Now Read This Excerpt

From Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories:

She (Sally Bowles) sang badly, without any expression, her hands hanging down at her sides—yet her performance was, in its own way, effective because of her startling appearance and her air of not caring a curse what people thought of her. Her arms hanging carelessly limp, and a take-it-or-leave-it grin on her face …

“But What About My Deep Personal Trauma That I Suffered and That Was Traumatic and … Well, Me!” said the suffering writer.

My long-time editor, Gerry, told stories about regional writers conventions. The organizers will ship in editors, agents, and movie producers. These connected folks get wined and dined and all-’round feted. In exchange they sit and listen to pitches from would-be writers who’ll pay a hundred dollars-plus for six minutes of the editor/agent/producer’s time.

Gerry said it was the equivalent of being a paid priest hearing Confessions. Seven minutes, all day, in a curtained-off space, carved out of a hotel ballroom. Almost every writer who entered brought a memoir and a big smile and worked themselves into an outburst of tears within the first few minutes. Here was their One Big Story, and it was to be Their Ticket to Everything. Unless they could sell it to huge public acclaim, what was the point of all their suffering?

It costs a fortune to launch a new name. Correction: It used to cost a fortune, to get the new author into stores and onto reviewers’ radar and onto newspaper Book pages and television arts shows. Now it costs roughly a million times that. All the Book pages are gone, and YouTube has made everyone a reviewer, so no one rules the roost and can direct traffic like in the past. That said, publishers don’t want a one-shot author. They never have. Publishers and readers want someone who can deliver a long-ish series of books. Harper Lee was the exception.

An Aside

In 2019 I was in Los Angeles driving down Melrose with a movie producer. I told him that among writers and publishers, these one-off trauma stories were known as “The-Sun-Is-Shining,-The Birds-Are-Singing,-My-Father’s-On-Top-Of-Me-Again stories.”

The producer laughed so hard he began to cry and had to pull over onto a side street.

BUT WHAT ABOUT MY PAIN!?!?

Yes, childhood trauma is traumatic. But it’s maybe not the first thing to write about. Maybe caring less—at the beginning—is a better ploy.⁷ And I say “ploy” because you’re writing to fool someone. First you, you’re writing in order to fool yourself into going somewhere you’d never willingly go, much less lead a tour of strangers to.

As Henry James put it, “A writer sells for six dollars, to strangers, the secrets he would not tell his closest friend.”

So, if a writer is openly, eagerly telling you “secrets,” it’s bullshit. Professional gut spillering. Second, you’re writing ultimately to fool the reader into going to some uncomfortable place. You’re seducing yourself, first. Your reader, second. Otherwise, you’re not going anywhere very special, are you?

If I didn’t want more and more (and more) from myself and books, I’d still be reading Encyclopedia Brown and Ellery Queen.

Note The Contrast

Note the contrast between the lead singer of The Flying Lizards and the weeping writers who sit with Gerry for their expensive seven minutes of Confession.

The latter—what’s the phrase?—stinks of hunger. The former is daring us, challenging us to listen. Like Sally Bowles, The Flying Lizards have created a style based on a seeming lack of attachment. While we might sympathize with the needy writer, we won’t respect him. So why not skip the needy, navel-gazing first novel, and just skip to writing the fun idea you’re not chained wrist-and-ankle to?

BUT, CHUCK, I HAVE EMOTIONAL WOUNDS I NEED TO LICK AND YOU ALWAYS CITE TOM’S “DANGEROUS WRITING” AS A VEHICLE FOR HEALING SOME SECRET ISSUE!!

Right, and if you don’t tackle the issue head-on, you’re not you anymore? Are you?

Secret? You’re still you, you’re still writing about your deep shit even when you think you’re writing a frothy featherweight idea. Case in point: In 1995, at work, I dreamed up seven rules just for shits and giggles. I only wanted some rules to experiment with, how rules might be used to help transition between ideas in a short story. Three decades later, that silly experiment has become ingrained in millions of minds. That throw-away afternoon led to a breakthrough between my father and I, and it resolved the age-old housing problems in my life. All of that, unintended. I wasn’t trying to “fix” anything. Just to have a good time.

So now what?

Consider that breakthrough ideas occur when you’re just at play. Even if you don’t get a novel out of your screw-around time, you’re likely to get a device—a chorus, a clever mis-phrasing, something—out of your play time.

BUT WHAT ABOUT MY PAIN?

Ask yourself: Do you really want to resolve that trauma and bring it to the judging eyes of so many strangers? Beginning with agents and editors?

Wouldn’t it be safer and more effective to start off in the direction of something that looks, well, sexy? Something that starts out fun. And to trust that—like everything else in life—it will turn to darkness and shit. You’re you, you can wreck anything. You’re a human joy-destroyer. As am I. Consider that caring deeply won’t make one lick of difference.

So why not begin by phoning it in?

1. I started among Tom’s first crop of students in 1990.

2. It’s funny that, how often Rich and Selfish go hand-in-hand.

3. You know who I mean here. No need for me to climb out on a long, legal branch and risk a defamation suit.

4. This situation is perennial. Track down most writers with a successful recovery memoir, and you’ll find they’ve scaled up to a worse addiction.

5. I wrote City Laundry into Fight Club and my friend, the owner, Gretchen, threatened to sue me. She was furious that Marla Singer was depicted stealing blue jeans from that business. This past autumn when CBS was looking to tape interview segments with me, the network contacted the downtown Los Angeles laundromatte where the movie had been shot. In order to film a segment there, the place wanted six thousand dollars. We shot at the Los Angeles movie palace instead.

6. Gretchen would tell me stories about a rich, West Hills couple who’d drop off their soiled S & M gear for her to clean and fold. They’d give detailed instructions about folding the soiled diapers and hoods, and Gretchen knew they were getting their jollies by displaying their “secret” lives. What mattered is they paid, a lot.

7. Imagine if Spielberg had started with Fabelmans instead of Jaws.