Maxim Monday #5: On Writing the Book You Want to Read...Assuming, of Course...

Glen battles the blather. Then offers some.

I’m going to leave the intro from MM #1 pinned here for new readers. For today’s new post, scroll down below the photo:

By way of user’s guide, I’m reprinting a snippet from a post I put up this past spring about teaching writing:

“All those rules we’ve all read...any maxims we’ve stuck to our workspaces or screened on our mugs or chanted like prayers...they’re exactly as good as the last thing they helped you get done. Many of them are brilliant. A few of them are true. All of them are wrong.”

Which is just to say, take these for what they are: encouragement; company; one long-timer’s half-sketched map to his own Writer Island, where he takes the air and scours the woods and abandoned buildings and works the days away and may or may not discover buried treasure and may or may not recognize it if and when he does. Hope they help you find yours.

(Also just to say that I’ve eaten all the words left in the refrigerator. Delicious, of course, so sweet and so cold. But every time I open that door, there seem to be more in there, so you should go and check…)

Sometimes I’ll be taking on or adding to or denying longstanding writing truisms. Sometimes I’ll be offering my own.

Hope at least a few of these, over the course of the year, inspire or prod or spur or enrage you enough to get you back out there and digging. If you have thoughts, share ‘em!

And if you do find inspiration here, and you want to show support, please invite your friends to stop by. Or click this little purple button, if you’re so inclined. Any financial encouragement is of course also welcome and deeply appreciated…

Maxim Monday #5:

“Write the book you want to read.”

In theory, I love this one.

It’s a better— less cloistered, more aspirational, more practical, less smells-like-teen-journaling— version of “Write for yourself.” It has the clarity of a Commandment— do this thing for love of this thing—and an implied good beyond its value for you alone (i.e., do this enough, and create a wonder that others might want).

It has so many things I love folded into it: books; reading; wants that (probably) won’t destroy us, will in fact keep us curious and searching; writing as the one thing that rules (or just encompasses) them all, and in the darkness binds them.

It sounds intentional, professional, determined, engaged. It fits on a Post-it, feels like a little bell to ring at the beginning of every session. A bell worth ringing, a reminder worth keeping in mind.

If only I believed it were possible.

What I want to read? Erm…when are we talking? And for how long?

Don’t know about your bedside table, but right this second, mine’s got…let’s see: well, there’s a Rex Stout, but there’s always a Rex Stout, unless there’s a Stevenson or a Machen, and usually there’s all three. There’s a Deb Olin Unferth collection, because she’s been breaking my heart by making me laugh lately, and laughing heartbroken, honestly, what higher pleasure is there in art (or living)? There’s mad Julian Cope’s kinetic writing about music I mostly don’t need to hear but get inspired watching him rhapsodize about. And Tayari Jones’s latest, because An American Marriage has been buzzing around in my brain and my days since I read it three years ago, and I can’t wait to see what she does next. There’s the 3rd Fontana Book of Ghost Stories, because it’s a marvelous collection, but also because I’m putting the final touches on the first decent new creepy tale I’ve managed in a few months, and rereading Robert Aickman’s intro to those books feels like flinging the North Star back up there where it belongs so I can stare at it, catch the ghost of its light. There’s the annotated bibliography of American Railroad Fiction. And Michael Weinreb’s Season of Saturdays, possibly the best thing I’ve ever read about college football, and it’s the season, after all, and my son is back home right now, and Saturdays alone are not enough.

That’s just the bedside. You should see the living room.

The point being, I have enough trouble deciding what finished, already-existing thing to pull out of the stack at any given moment, let alone which not-even-thing-yet thing to lure out of my own head and try throwing down on paper. I don’t have one book or kind of book I want to read; I want to read everything good. I want to keep finding new good things.

And there’s another, even more insurmountable barrier to living or creating by this principle, no matter how much I might want to, and it’s this:

I don’t think we have so much control over the stories we get to write. Most of us don’t get to pick our parents, or our heritages, or the nature of our light, or the number and tenor of our days. Or the books we stumble into. Or the ideas that surface— from all or none of the above, from all of it, from a misread word, from a regret, from a terror, from a joy. From the air.

We’re not passive in all of this. Having an idea is not the same thing as acting on one, as honoring the miracle of inspiration by making use of it.

But we’re not in control of what inspires us.

So— with regret, but also with awe, eager anticipation, and a writer’s complicated, essentially half-detached, muted joy— I say, read the book you want to read.

But write the book you have in you.