read everyday

I have never emotionally imploded but I imagine it's much like a Californication episode or one of those coming of age novels where the depressed protagonist loves that girl but that girl doesn't love him so he like is all sad about unrequited love so he gets really down and does something stupid like take a lot of pills and try to ride his bike 4 and then through a series of unlikely events he meets this manic pixie dream girl let's call her Sam and she is like all kinds of adorkable and she has them anime eyes and she has this friend Garry that is a little bit Autistic and he thinks the whole world is actually just a run-on story on a collision course with a period and if they don't act exactly like the teenager writing style trope they will all die and the protagonist is taught how to live and falls in love and they.

"One last question," I begged. "To what do you attribute your incredible productivity?" Isaac Asimov replied with but a single word: "Escape." And then he appended a famous statement by the similarly prolific French writer Jean Paul Sartre: "Hell is other people."

There's more to life than happiness. The words of an unhappy man committed to his unhappiness.

At home, I removed my shoes, peel off my socks, and climb into bed, moving right to the middle, where I sleep best. I take my weighted eye beanbag and lay it over my eyes. It smells of green tea and vanilla and is as relaxing as the package promised. I run my hands over the seersucker coverlet. I'm just a person suspended in a series of rented rooms, in a city barely seven miles by seven miles. Far from the place I was born. Far from my father's plans for me. I'm a temporary person. But, of course, so was he.

We're sitting on the couch in the window, and I gesture to the warm and sunny side walk. Beautiful couples pass by on their golden errands - buying peaches, buying panettone - hands held, arms swinging in metronomic synch, as if keeping time to some unheard music. the revolution of the heavenly spheres. "Mechanical optimism."

The ride home seems colder, shorter, grimmer. On Valencia Street, I look out the window at the hipsters on their fixed-speed bikes. The tight clothes, the tiny hats - their major struggle as a generation seems to be reducing drag. As if success in life requires being ever ready to slip through a narrow opening.

frnd1: what were her strong points? drbas: ???? frnd1: strong points = good qualities drbas: she's beautiful, spirited woman of great class frnd1: did you admire her or love her? drbas: i have the highest admiration for those work with the poor frnd1: did she need you? drbas: who? frnd1: your wife drbas: she needs me to pick up the drying cleaning by 5 pm.

He was disoriented, of course, but the truth holds. He's not self-sufficient; he's just alone. This revelation shouldn't matter so much, shouldn't shift my life one way or the other, but it's been working on me in some subterranean manner. I seem to have been relying on Fred's example. My father, not otherwise much of an intellectual, had a favorite quote from Pascal: the sole cause of Man's unhappiness is his inability to sit quietly in his room. I had thought of Fred as someone who sat quietly in his room.

There are people who can do amazing things. But I never take it personally. Any more than I would take it personally if Christina Stead could do things that I can’t imagine doing, as she does, or Philip Roth, as he does. The generational thing just doesn’t really come into it. That sounds like a real wussy answer, but writing is a private discipline, in a field of companions. You’re not fighting the other writers—that Mailer boxing stuff seems silly to me. It’s more like golf. You’re not playing against the other people on the course. You’re playing against yourself. The question is, What’s in you that you can free up? How to say everything you know? Then there’s nothing to envy. The reason Tiger Woods has that eerie calm, the reason he drives everyone insane, is his implacable sense that his game has nothing to do with the others on the course. The others all talk about what Tiger is up to. Tiger only says, I had a pretty good day, I did what I wanted to do. Or, I could have a better day tomorrow. He never misunderstands. The game is against yourself. That same thousand-yard Tiger Woods stare is what makes someone like Murakami or Roth or DeLillo or Thomas Berger so eerie and inspiring. They’ve grasped that there’s nothing to one side of you. Just you and the course. From that perspective, the fact of others carrying on the struggle beside you is no more threatening than the fact that libraries are full of great books. It makes the context for what you do. You’d never want to be the only writer, would you? How meaningless. Writers lose their temper sometimes and express a self-destructive wish in the form of a pronouncement that the novel is dead, that it’s a terrible time for fiction, etcetera. In fact there are thrilling novelists everywhere. It’s an amazing time.

I’d begun a first novel, and I told myself I was dropping out to write it. The school cost a then astronomical fourteen thousand dollars a year. I only wanted to work in bookstores and write fiction. I explained it to myself very logically at the time—I liked hanging out with my new friends and I hated going to class. Since I was paying to go to class, I dropped out. I was one of those creepy dropouts who moves into his girlfriend’s dorm room. She stole meals from the dining hall in a Tupperware container hidden in a hollowed-out textbook, and I sat in her room and wrote an unpublishably bad first novel.

Things to worry about: Worry about courage Worry about Cleanliness Worry about efficiency Worry about horsemanship Worry about… Things not to worry about: Don’t worry about popular opinion Don’t worry about dolls Don’t worry about the past Don’t worry about the future Don’t worry about growing up Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you Don’t worry about triumph Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault Don’t worry about mosquitoes Don’t worry about flies Don’t worry about insects in general Don’t worry about parents Don’t worry about boys Don’t worry about disappointments Don’t worry about pleasures Don’t worry about satisfactions Things to think about: What am I really aiming at? How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to: (a) Scholarship (b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them? (c) Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I neglecting it?

INTERVIEWER Does that mean that writing is a kind of addiction? KING I think it is. For me, even when the writing is not going well, if I don’t do it, the fact that I’m not doing it nags at me. Writing is a wonderful thing to be able to do. When it goes well, it’s fantastic, and when it doesn’t go so well, it’s only OK, but it’s still a great way to pass the time. And you have all these novels to show for it.

Scribner asked me if I had a short story they could publish online. But their focus was never, in fact, the Internet. They were thinking more about these 
little gadgets that let you read a book in your hand, where you push a button to turn the page. I never liked the idea and most people don’t. They want to have pages. We’re like people who bought cars in the 1910s, and they would break down by the side of the road and people would yell, Get a horse! Now people yell, Get a book! It’s the same deal. But all the excitement over online publication was interesting to me because people who had never talked to me before—business guys, suits—suddenly took notice. What are you doing? Can you do it all yourself? Are you going to be able to change publishing? It was always the bucks that were driving the interest. It was never about the stories.

Like a lot of young writers, when I started out, I had a dim conception of my material. I wrote about people and places that were vastly separated from those I knew. Then, too, if I tried to write about my own self, the results were far from illuminating, for the simple reason that I didn’t understand myself too well. As soon as I began writing The Virgin Suicides, however, I suddenly realized that I knew a lot, not about my own psychological dimensions so much but about the town where I grew up. I knew everything about the people who lived on our old street. I remembered their oddities and family histories, the rumors and gossip, and I remembered the weather, the local legends, the racial tensions, the flora and fauna. I stopped being embarrassed about being from a suburb in the Midwest. I treated it like my own Yoknapatawpha County and, for the first time, produced something that interested adult readers.

I get that a lot. People know me. I feel like I should know them. I feel guilty that I don’t. Like I should. I feel superficial. I feel like I am a fraud. How can I not know so many people who seem to know me? Is it possible to go through life this way? Apparently, it is. I don’t know myself, I don’t know my friends, I don’t know the people who populate my life. I can’t be the only one. That gives me some comfort. That’s what I tell myself. I’m a product of the world. A by-product. I didn’t ask for this. This thinning out of existence. This hollowing out. My interactions with people are the bare minimum. I don’t feel anything. Ever. Hardly ever. Once in a long while. And even then, it’s random.

Is that what writing is? A collaboration between selves across the multiverse? I’ve written stories that had to be wrung out, drop by drop, in the arid environment of the desert of your imagination. You’ve written other stories that came in a rush, your forehead clammy, feverish, trying to just keep up with the words as they were pouring out—but from where? Nowhere you can go back to. Nowhere you understand. Do you think you know how writing works?