A Writer's Lament

by Steve Lazarowitz

There is nothing noble about being a writer. Nothing at all. Like drinking or gambling, writing is a disease.

I spend too much time behind the keyboard. I get my hopes up every time I place a manuscript into an envelope and send it off. The payoff is never quite what I expect or need it to be. I have a better chance winning lotto than selling a fantasy story to one of the few big print publications left. And like any gambler, I continue to hope, no matter how far I fall or how heavily the odds are stacked against me.

So I sit here, sipping a glass of Bailey's Irish Creme, contemplating authorial suicide. All I need do is stop here and walk away. Make this sentence the last of this month's column. All I need do is go inside and flip on the Yankee game.

I'm still here. I can not stop writing any more than I can stop breathing. I can not stop thinking of plots any more than I can stop eating. There's something compelling about the art, that does not let me turn from it. I would imagine, it is much the way a gambler feels caught in trap of his need to beat the system.

I have been writing all my life, but seriously writing for about four years. For the last year of that four, I've been writing on and off. I write something, I go through a dry spell. I feel like a moth, pulled to the flame of a candle. I am inexorably drawn to the written word.

I am in a dry spell now. I can write when I sit here, but I can't bring myself to sit here. I allow myself to get distracted all too often. I find excuses to put off writing yet another article. There are people who call it burnout. It is closer to brain death.

So, why not write about how hard it is for me to write this piece? Why not make it the topic of an entire column? The problem is, as soon as I had the topic, the words started to flow and so now, it is not as hard as I'd originally thought it would be.

Thus, my initial concept of what I am trying to accomplish must morph. I must follow this new thread. Milk it for all it is worth.

From whence do these ideas come? They flow so quickly, it is almost as if I had always known them, yet I do not remember, until they emerge unbidden from my mind. Is there a place within me, in which is stored everything I will ever write? Is it all done already, waiting only for me to transcribe it? Am I the author of my work, or just a medium? If the latter, who deserves the credit?

I once wrote a poem called The Battle. Truly one of my best, this work appeared under a somewhat bizarre set of circumstances that I seldom share, for fear that men in white coats will come and lock me up.

However now, I am forced to reveal the story, as my mind is not my own. It belongs to that other entity, the author within.

I was either fifteen or sixteen, home from school for some reason. I was lying in the tub, soaking. I fell asleep. I woke suddenly, the poem, all three pages of it, burning in my mind, completely written.

I rose quickly, stepped from the tub, still dripping. Fortunately I was alone in the house. Stark naked, I sat at the dining room table and wrote the entire thing down, before I forgot it. Then I grabbed a towel, dried off, cleaned the water from the floor and returned to the scene of the crime.

I looked at the pages, but didn't pick them up. I closed my eyes and tried to remember what I had written. I couldn't. Not a word of it. When I finally gave in and looked, it was as if I were reading it for the first time. It was as if someone else had written the poem, using me as an instrument. It bears my name, but I did not write it.

Oh what I would give for that now. Just a few months off, where I did not have to come up with yet another new topic for an article. Just a few weeks, where I didn't have to consider the plot of some story.

Some people look at the writer's life and romanticize about it, but the simple truth is this. There is nothing romantic about being a writer.

It is more akin to a mystery.

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