WRITING LIFE LOOKS FOR SMOKING WRITERS

Do people in the writing life smoke to show they’d rather die than change bad habits?

Or maybe they secretly want to lose a few pounds, although Joan Didion may disagree.

The writing life? Please. I hear that and think of droopy people sitting around typewriters with a pipe or cigarette stuck in their face.

“Look at the stinky writer in his black tie and short sleeve shirt. Is that a writer or an IBM man?”

Whose Writing Life Looks Droopy?

Smoke like William Faulkner and you might end with the longest sentence you’ve ever seen.

It’s a reading workout.

Light a stick up yourself and read other long sentences for practice before starting the writing life.

Who’s Got A Match?

Mark Twain’s got a match.

“Pretty soon I wanted to smoke, and asked the widow to let me. But she wouldn’t. She said it was a mean practice and wasn’t clean, and I must try to not do it any more. That is just the way with some people. They get down on a thing when they don’t know nothing about it. Here she was a-bothering about Moses, which was no kin to her, and no use to anybody, being gone, you see, yet finding a power of fault with me for doing a thing that had some good in it. And she took snuff, too; of course that was all right, because she done it herself.”

He’s got a take on the Bible, authority, and freedom. No wonder his books were banned.

Kurt Vonnegut Smoked To Die

Does anyone look like they enjoy smoking more than this guy?

He loved it so much, he complained about the results he expected.

“Here’s the news: I am going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, manufacturers of Pall Mall cigarettes, for a billion bucks! Starting when I was only twelve years old, I have never chain-smoked anything but unfiltered Pall Malls. And for many years now, right on the package, Brown & Williamson have promised to kill me. But I am eighty-two. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.”

Seventy years of smoking, decades of suicidal thoughts, and literary production. He said he smoked to kill himself because other methods frightened him.

And he’d been in frightening places.

Grandpa Loved John Steinbeck

Grandpa was born in a box car, Grapes Of Wrath ends with a lactating woman nursing a starving man in a barn.

No wonder Grandpa was a fan. He knew the Steinbeck people; he was one.

If you’re in trouble, or hurt or need – go to the poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help – the only ones.

Steinbeck would have loved Grandpa. He and Grandma learned to help others in a way that made them modern pioneers.

Camus Knew How To Take A Good Drag

He didn’t let tuberculosis hold him back.

Get scared. It will do you good. Smoke a bit, stare blankly at some ceilings, beat your head against some walls, refuse to see some people, paint and write. Get scared some more. Allow your little mind to do nothing but function. Stay inside, go out – I don’t care what you’ll do; but stay scared as hell. You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.

George Orwell Knows Smoking

How much was too much?

Camus was not George Orwell’s twin who, separated at birth, was raised in French Algeria. Orwell was taller and wore tweed. The rumor is, however, understandable. Both men smoked relentlessly, both men were tubercular, both men died too young and both men acted on their political convictions: Orwell during the Spanish Civil War, Camus during World War II.

Joan Didion’s Guiding Cigarette Light

Can you feel the gaze? Is it asking, “What do you think you’re doing?”

Because of her belief that it is the media that tells us how to live, Joan Didion has become an observer of journalists themselves. She believes that the difference between the process of fiction and nonfiction is the element of discovery that takes place in nonfiction. This happens not during the writing, but during the research.

For those who live a writing life, this rings true. It rings real loud.

I wrote a script, a romance/comedy, a RomCom. Except it wasn’t romantic, or funny. I’d found things during research.

In a notorious essay published in 1980 called “Joan Didion: Only Disconnect”, Barbara Grizzuti Harrison called Didion a “neurasthenic Cher” whose style was “a bag of tricks” and whose “subject is always herself.

Elusive Writing Life

“Do you write?”

That’s the question, not, “What do you write?”

You’ve shared a story, told a joke, taken a road trip? Sometimes writers take all three and put them together.

The accusation that a writer makes everything about themselves is usually leveled by a non-writer, or a jealous person, or a poor reader.

The best advice I’ve heard is, “Be yourself, everyone else is taken.”

Write that down, brudda.