A Writer’s Prayer: The Hell of It

One writes because one is a writer. It is not something one can simply change about oneself, which is the terrible hell of it all.

You can never stop being a writer, even if you fail at it, even if you never succeed, even if you never sell a manuscript or get published or get read by anyone, anyone at all. Never mind the thought of attaining the rarified status of the all-time greats, like those Serious Southern Writers or the masters of pulp or the troubled artists who are always exorcising their demons. You’re simply a writer… because you have to write, because you’ve always written.

You wrote your first story when you were young enough that you cannot quite place the year, which is saying something because your steel-trap mind can normally recall, with striking specificity, any one of a slew of sepia-stained memories. These memories are sometimes grainy. Sometimes faded. But they are usually legible. And yet, your very first story must have been written early enough that you can’t quite excavate it from the darkness. You can, however, remember the first “masterpiece.” It came about when you were eight and you penned a yarn about a murderess who was jealous of her husband’s lover. It really was a masterpiece in its own way – you thought of it as literature, literature of the highest form, forgetting whatever it was that brainless vulgarian teacher said. It was parlor room stuff, yes, and a little derivative, but it was clever and portended toward deconstructive and sometimes subversive, even if, in the third grade, you didn’t quite know what these things meant; nevertheless, all things being equal, you were more than a little proud of it and more than a little sure it would have made Agatha Christie proud, too. But then, when you gave the goddamn thing to your friend’s mother to type it up on her fancy new word-processing contraption, she cut the ending because she couldn’t read your chicken-scratch. This was the first, but not the last, miserable and wretched time that an editor let you down, which is what editors always do. An editor will break your heart quicker than a fickle woman, and in much less forgivable ways.  

Life moved on from this heartbreak, but the writing never waned. Sports were played and girls pursued, both earnestly if not also poorly. And the writing was an outlet for these things – the sports and the girls and the grades. It was an outlet for other things, too. So, you kept at it, not even realizing that you were doing it, because why would you?  Writing was what you did. It was as elemental as breathing. As implicit as hooking a seven iron. As second nature as a second nature. Then, later, somewhere along the way, you realized that writing for a living was what you wanted to do. To really do. Forever. A writer was what you must be. What you had to be. There was no other first, best destiny.

But one needs something to write about if they are to have that title. Puzo once said something about how he couldn’t wait, as a young man, to have a terribly tragic romance so he could one day write like Hemingway. You’ve always understood this sentiment innately. You even wanted the same thing. So, you grew up; and you lived; you lived hard. Very hard. Only, sometimes you didn’t. Usually, you didn’t. Often you tried. But no matter what else was going on, or what else wasn’t, you were always studying. And observing. And keeping notes. Because you couldn’t help it. Because everything is copy. Because everything is inspiration. And because everyone is a character. And because life is a story.

But then came time, like a miserable thief. That’s what Peter Lorre called it: a thief. Another fellow said that time was something else: luck. Maybe both are right. Time… it just bit you one day, and ripped and tore and wouldn’t let go, like a goddamn big fish driving up at you from the murky waters, heretofore unseen and unfelt. It ate you alive. Swallowed you whole…

You suddenly begin to hear that big grandfather clock up in the sky ticking away – tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick… You suddenly hear it everywhere you go, like Captain Hook.

This ticking drives you mad, constantly. It is the sound of fear – real, palpable fear. For, it’s not dying or death or even the thought of failure that scares you most. It’s the thought of time running out. Bear Bryant once said that he never lost a game; it was only that the clock just sometimes ran out before he could get more points over on his side of the scoreboard. Well, time is running out for you, too. Fast. Faster. Faster by the second. In fact, in a way, time has already run out, for you and for everyone else, but in a good way, in a way that you take for granted as you wrestle with your demons. This, after all, is the point of Jesus Christ’s great, messianic moment. When he died for the world’s sins, he granted you, like the rest of his followers, eternal salvation, defeating, in the process, time; defeating oblivion; defeating death. This is a thought which should be, but is not, reassuring. You are, in fact, wrought with guilt over this salvation because you aren’t in much of a hurry to meet the Lord, not until you make those red-inked edits; not until you finish that last paragraph; not until you rewrite that last chapter and finish that essay and storyboard that novella and proofread that other long-lost manuscript, the one in that wasteland of wastelands: your bottom desk drawer. You must finish these projects. You must finish them before the clock expires. You must beat time because your words must live. They must breathe. Because they will die if you don’t get them on paper. They’ll die with you. And you’ll die with them. That’s what people don’t understand. These words, they are inside you and you have to get them out. You have to. They gnaw at you and poison you as they wither away inside you, taking your voice with them, the voice God gave you, the voice God gave you to share, which in the end may not be unique enough to matter. Or maybe you simply weren’t damn good enough. But it’s all violence if you can’t get them on paper. Terrible, earthquaking violence.

Either way, there simply is not enough time to work it all out. The hours seem more and more truncated. Life continues to take its toll. And the obligations of the everyday beget more obligations, which beget more obligations, which beget more obligations still, until eventually there really is no more time left to use the time you have.

But you still must write. No matter what. Even if you pack it all in and burn every word and courageously look at the sullen face in the mirror and come to grips with the many failures that stare back at you, angrily. Even in such an instance… even then you will write. You will write for penance. You will write to get out all the pain and the sorrow. You will write. You will write down your prayer to God the Father, Creator of Heaven and Earth, asking to be forgiven for your sullenness and your anger and the self-doubt. You will write this prayer down because the written word is more powerful to you than the spoken… because it is more. You will write it down so your wife may understand you. And your kids. One day, your grandkids. You write it down because you hate yourself too much not to. You will write to Holy Mary, Mother of God, so that she will pray for you, now and in the hour of your death, which is soon and sooner, as long as those words remain inside you.

You will write because you are a writer, for good or bad. For better or worse. In sickness and in death. You will write because you don’t know what else to do.

And that is the hell of it.