Apply ass to chair

Inspiration comes during composition and not before.

A creative writing professor at UMKC gave this maxim to us as young and dreamy students. It would be many years before I absorbed this information or really knew what the hell my teacher was talking about.

The prof was a known entity in American letters. He’d penned essays and short stories for Esquire, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper’s, and other luminous publications. He’d published in the top-tier journals and he’d written books. He wasn’t really that great of a teacher. Many is the day that I would show up for class only to have his assistant or secretary from the English department appear in front of the class to say he wasn’t coming. He muffed around the room, bored with us undergrads. He always exuded the feeling he wanted to be someplace else.

What I remember of the class, which is little but a series of observations or truisms, is that we had to write several short stories for the grade. I’d always wanted to be a writer. Since I was a kid,I’d scribbled in numerous notebooks. Writing and illustrating stories at home and at school filled my grade school years. In high school, I’d pretend to take note in class, when I was writing stories. I kept my head down and dutifully wrote, looking up from time to time so the teacher would not discover my deception.

I think there was only one time I got caught. I was in Sister Colleen’s class. She stood about 6’ 2” and had glasses thick as Coke bottle bottoms. She was skinny and had a horsey face out of which her giant teeth stuck as if she had spent her youth constantly sucking on Tootsie Roll pops. I was deeply infatuated with her and was horrified when she took my notebook, held it up before the class, and said, “This is what Patrick does in my English class.” Then, she made me read. I don’t remember what the story was about, only that I was the butt of jokes about being what Sister Colleen said was a “dreamy boy destined to failure.”

When college came, I was fired up to show my professors the level of my expertise. I was finally in my own territory. But other things, notably women and drink, took my attentions. In my writing classes, I pulled together stories the night before they were due. I waited for inspiration to write, which hardly ever came. My performance was mediocre, at best. I wasn’t ready for the rigors of writing. I never sponged up the lessons of writing being a lonely business for which the writer seldom gets attention or remuneration.

I worked at the college newspaper. It was more of a social event for me than a serious writing lesson. Now, there were people who took their labors seriously, learning the intricacies of the trade and understanding what it took to become good journalists. But I never really saw it like that. College was someplace I was supposed to be. It was a great breakout socially and morally from the tight confines of my Catholic-school upbringing. There was comradery, new friends, and lots to drink. I didn’t learn the things I was supposed to learn. I didn’t excel at anything but managing a 3.0 GPA and a stable of drinking buddies.

So, I didn’t fail my classes, but I failed at understanding what people were trying to teach me. The lackluster nature of my creative writing professor didn’t help but, in fact, harmed my capture of the challenges of the writer.

It wasn’t until many years later that I understood what I was supposed to be doing as a writer. The truth of the statement, “A writer writes,” didn’t take hold until after I sobered up and determined to make something of my life. As an emotional adolescent, I stumbled. I didn’t really know what I was doing and had no idea how to start.

But I had my notebooks, and I kept journals on and off for years. I didn’t really write any stories, though I penned many really horrible poems. Looking back on that time now, I feel a twinge of nostalgia for the innocence and open-eyed wonder with which I perceived my new world. I was adamant I would make something of myself. I was dead set on becoming legitimate.

And, after my head settled down the shine of new sobriety began to wear off, I did start to write stories. I took my lessons from the great travel memoirists, whose books I devoured. It was that genre, I thought, that I needed most of all. I emulated the English greats at first—Bruce Chatwin, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Rebecca West, Robert Byron, Eric Newbie. I moved on to Paul Theroux and Bill Bryson, and then to a raft of lesser known authors.

I read book after book, discovering what was good and what I didn’t like or what was bad. I came to love the meditative and contemplative consideration of place and eschewed the high-energy, adrenaline-driven, over-the-top tales of extreme exploits. I was not interested in how fast a person could drive a car from Barrow to Tierra del Fuego. I wanted to know about Barrow and Tierra del Fuego. What were their histories? Who lived there? Why do they still live there?

Slowly, I began to remember the maxims my college writing teacher, who, by the way, told me I’d never be a writer and that I should study something that would get me a job. I can see it from his perspective now. Had I continued to treat writing like a hobby, I never would have made it. But surveying his list of dos and don’ts I realize that somewhere around the summer of 1993, I began to act like a writer, which is about as important as writing itself. These were the commands and observations my college writing teacher:

1. The only things worth writing seriously about are, in some form, love and death.
2. To write well you must feel your subject truly, and never flinch. Honesty is all.
3. Writing is rewriting. 
4. How to be a writer: Apply ass to chair, remain stoic, and fill the page from top to bottom.
5. Nobody ever went broke listening to a sensitive, honest editor.
6. Competition is good for writers. Envy is self-destructive. 
7. Writers write. Regularity in writing is more important than regularity in anything, including digestion.
8. Good writing in any medium is interesting. As Henry James said, you must allow a writer his or her subject. After that, the only valid tests are whether it is interesting and how well it is done.
9. Good writing is good writing, period. The sex, age, color, nationality or personality of the writer is irrelevant.
10. Don’t write for fun. It’s the hardest, least remunerative work in the world for most writers—and the most rewarding.
11. There is no penalty for stealing, as long as you turn what you steal into your particular expression.
12. Be hard on yourself when you can stand it. When you can’t, tell yourself the world is wrong.

It would be another few years of extraordinarily heartbreaking rejection and false starts before I accepted that none of this would be easy, that I faced a lifetime of hard work, that I would, as in #4 above, have to sit still, contemplate, and punch keys for no other reason than to put words together in a sequence someone might read someday, or not.

I became so determined that I went out to find something to write about. I walked to Helena, Montana, and canoed home on the Missouri River, writing a column every other week for a newspaper. Then, I came home and began to freelance stories for that paper. The dream of my lifetime came true when I was asked to join the paper’s staff. Now, not only was I writing and getting better at it all the time, I was making a living at it.

I no longer make a living as a writer. But I am a writer. I’ve published books. I’ve had stories published in magazines. I’m still waiting to get struck by writer’s lightning but I no longer wait to be inspired. I apply ass to chair, remain stoic, and fill the screen from top to bottom. If something comes of that, good for me. If not, there’s always tonight or tomorrow. I just have to muster the discipline to put in the time and do the work.