The Day Job: Carpe Penicullus

I experienced a chilling moment while on a flight this year. The attendant said, “If Denver is your final destination, thank you for traveling with us.” She creeped me out. “Final destination,” indeed! Bill Bryson writes in A Short History of Nearly Everything that “Even a long human life adds up to only 650,000 hours.” It’s sobering to picture a countdown clock in heaven ticking off the time I have left before retiring to procrastinator’s paradise, before I check into the pine condo, or before I fill my reservation at Chateau Eternity.

Time’s winged chariot pauses for no one, and for writers whose passion almost always takes multiple hours, days, months, or years for the completion of a single project, the clattering of those distant hooves must sound distinctly loud, if we remember to listen to them.

I tell English students that all literature addresses the basic questions: who are we, where are we going, and how should we behave? It’s a three-variable equation, except the answer to the “Where are we going?” is the same for everyone: the six-foot step, the house whose cornice is “a swelling of ground,” or the auditorium of heroes and legends. None of us gets out of this alive.

Seems a little morbid, doesn’t it? What does it have to do with writing?

It has to do with this story I’ve heard attributed to Stephen King. Evidently he was at a party and a fellow told him, “I always wanted to be a novelist, but in a couple of years I’ll be forty-five, and that just seems too late.”

King said, “You’re going to be forty-five anyway. Why not be a novelist too?”

I had a conversation with Connie Willis a couple of years ago, where she told me she didn’t think she had that many more novels in her. It isn’t that she doesn’t have the ideas for more books, but she doesn’t think she has the time to write them before the energy necessary to do the work overwhelms her capacity. She was born in 1945, after all, and not everyone is capable of Jack Williamson’s seventy-eight years of writing productivity. She said that she probably would gear down to novellas and novelettes, then into short stories, and finally into dribbling out a few haikus at the end.

Here’s why all this thinking about time, deadlines, and mortality seems relevant to me: I can hear the sand funneling away; and this is what I know about writing: you get better at it with time. So, how good can I get before the hourglass is empty? What stories won’t I tell because I wasted so much time in my life?

Have you ever read a book and realized that you have no idea what the last couple of pages said, so you have to go back and reread them? Life strikes me like that sometimes. I can reach the end of the week and have no idea where the days went. What did I do? It’s sort of like exiting an epileptic fugue. Unlike reading a book, though, I can’t go back. There are no do overs, and lost days remain lost.

Thank goodness, it’s never too late to start. Look at writers who have done marvelous work later in life. Frank McCourt published Angela’s Ashes, his first book, when he was sixty-six. Norman Maclean’s first collection, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories wasn’t published until he was in his seventies. So it is possible to delay a writing career and still do well, but we don’t know that we have that luxury. Look at the writers who were cut off (or cut themselves off) too soon: Stephen Crane (29), Emily Bronte (30), John Kennedy Toole (31), Sylvia Plath (30), John Keats (25), Edgar Allan Poe (40), etc.

Life is short. The days rush by. If you really want to write, does it make sense to say, “I’ll get started next year”? or “I have too many responsibilities now. I’ll write when I get past this rough patch”? or, even worse, “What happened to the time?”

When I listen to the excuses folks who claim they want to write make for not writing, I cringe: “The kids take too much of my attention.” “I’m tired in the afternoon.” “I need long, uninterrupted periods to compose.” Can’t they hear the approaching hooves? The lost days aren’t coming back, and although we don’t know when our last day will come, it’s definitely coming. When I consider my reply to those three questions: Who am I? Where am I going? And how should I behave? I answer: Among other things, I’m a writer. I will one day travel to the city of the silent, and when I look back, I don’t want to see that I wasted any of my days.

The poet Tennyson had an aging Ulysses say at the end of the poem by the same name:

“We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

We don’t have to wait until we are old to be “strong in will, to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” We can work with that kind of resolve right now. We can take on the tasks that truly make us happy and make us feel that our days have not been wasted.

If it’s an author you want to be, there’s writing to be done. Seize the pen.