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  • On Writing & Resistance & The Miami Sound Machine
  • Elissa Schappell (bio)

I think it is marvelous when writers say, “I have no trouble writing! I never struggle!” “How wonderful!” I say. “Let me take your picture so I can display it all around the world in bookstores and libraries and bus shelters. Here is the one writer who does not struggle!”

Understand, if you are one of these writers, that some people will throw rotting fruit and vegetables at you, other people will pray to you as a God, and some—I am among them—will smile and nod politely knowing that what you are doing, my happy hobbyist, isn’t really writing, it is typing.

Thomas Mann put it best when he said, “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”

Writing is difficult, and it should be difficult, because anything in this life that is really worth doing is going to be difficult. And if you are really pushing yourself—if you are exploring those dark places where your most potent material lives—you should be a little scared.

The question is, how to get past that fear? How do we out-fox the forces of resistance?

I expect that a room of full of writers can understand how it is that I never wrote a story that bore any resemblance at all to my real life until I was in my twenties. Why in the world would anyone care about the life I’d lived? I’d never gone to war, shot a bear, or worked as a secret agent. It was hard for me—an upper-middle class white girl growing up in the suburbs—to take my life and my material seriously when the culture at large, for the most part, didn’t. [End Page 472]

I don’t expect you to understand how I could not have finished writing all the stories in my first book until it was already in the catalogue. What can I say, I struggle.

The fact is, it’s not that hard to write about stuff you don’t feel attached to. As in any kind of relationship, the stakes are very low when you are not invested on an emotional level. There is safety in that, of course. The chances of you getting hurt are a lot less. After all, you can say, this work doesn’t really represent who I am. Trust me, when I really care about a subject, I write like an angel.

If you are cool with that, that’s great, but it’s not for me. As a reader I want to feel that the writer has some skin in the game. I have no interest in writing that doesn’t bear the mark of the writer’s bloody finger-prints. The writer’s blood, no one else’s. I want to feel that the writer has given up something of themselves. If they haven’t, why should I waste my time? Let alone my hard-earned cash.

Here is the good news about being a writer: No matter whether you’re using pen or pencil or the computer, scratching in the sand with a stick, or, like Robert Frost, writing on the bottom of your shoe on a train, you are not writing in cement. What you write is not going to be engraved on your tombstone or tattooed on your body unless you want it to be.

The good news is that, unlike working at Sea World, where every hour on the hour, in front of hundreds of people, you’d have to stand on the back of a killer whale while it jumps through hoops of fire, no one is watching you write.

The good news is when things go wrong, you won’t drown, or lose your bathing suit top, or set your hair on fire. No one is going to clap when it goes well (writing is a lonely business), but no one is going to boo when it goes poorly. Except for you. You are relentless. You will heckle and you will boo because that is what you do.

And...

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