WRITING ROOM: FROM FAMILY ROOM TO SICK ROOM AND BACK

A writing room is any room where writing is done. It’s a bedroom, a classroom, or living room.

It could be a bar or coffee house; a bus or train.

Some writing rooms belong to writers who need ‘consistency of place’ to be productive.

How can you be sure your writing room is right for you? One word:

Ghosts.

That’s right, ghosts. What better describes the work of writers long dead when it feels like they’re talking to you in real time.

Kurt Vonnegut did that for me when he was alive. Since he’s been gone I’ve bought his books as presents for my kids. They don’t write-write like their old man, but they do listen, and Kurt’s a talker.

One of his books features a society where soldiers get an antennae installed in their brain that rattles a marching rhythm of “Rent-a-tent-tent.”

One of the troopers goes about their business, eventually finding a letter about another soldier, a good man, an honorable man. It’s a letter the soldier wrote to himself to remind him of his better self.

If that doesn’t speak to you, maybe you don’t have a better self.

Or maybe you’re a Vonnegut fan. Have you read is take on doing things you’re good at, and winning?

Here it is. He somehow learned that doing things because they are interesting is reason enough to do them. Agree?

In another book he described a couple, an elderly couple connected by their heart strings, who did everything together. Everything. No spoilers.

As half of a long-term marriage myself, I can relate, but reading it the first time as a teenager was also relatable. That’s what good writers do, they relate. But how?

William Shakespeare and James Joyce wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. ‘To be or not to be?’ asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favorite sentence in his short story ‘Eveline’ is just this one: ‘She was tired.’ At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do.

Writing Room Ghosts

When my kids were small they used to hang around me all the time when their mom was out of the house. Go figure.

They were the best company I’ve ever had. Agreeable, lovable, and they liked each other.

I was just another piece of furniture in the room, and since it was my writing room, we worked and played together. Any parent who disagrees is a rotten parent with devil-spawn.

They eventually found others to spend time with, but I carry them with me always.

After we combined households with my mother in law, with father in law in assisted living, the new house had a writing room. It wasn’t listed as such, but I could see it from the start. I moved right in.

Then my father in law became deathly ill, and after checking his condition with medical professionals, I moved him home for his final days.

The plan was for a short stay, so I moved out of my room and he moved in. As a result of my heroic caregiving efforts, he lived five more years.

One morning I walked in to a quiet room, very quiet, deathly still. His was an anticipated death with the funeral home on standby. I called them, they said call the police. So I did, which turned a sad morning into a homicide investigation where I was the prime suspect. For about ten minutes.

The lady at the funeral home mistakenly advised me to call the police. When the boss found out, he called the police, who then called the men and women at the scene.

It was one of those “So sorry for the misunderstanding” moments, and they all left with their suspicions.

The room eventually recovered, so did I, but I’ve never spent so much time in the same room someone died in. If I have, I don’t know the history like I do this room.

A Room With A View

Kurt Vonnegut famously said that he smoked as much as he did because he wanted to die and was too afraid to shoot himself.

Makes sense to me, but I don’t see anything supporting death by tobacco as a desirable way out.

My room seemed ready to admit another ghost after I got a cancer diagnosis that sounded like imminent death. Should I take up smoking? Buy a gun and get ‘r done? To that I said, “Fuck to the No.”

And recovered nicely, thank you very much. It doesn’t always work out that way, which you’ve probably heard.

As a result, I knocked out a memoir, bought three rounds of professional editing, and since then I’ve worked on the first page.

Why the first page? If the first page is bad, there is no second page for the reader who figures every page after is equally bad.

A recent post addressed the first page business by breaking down J.D. Salinger’s first page in The Catcher In The Rye.

That post didn’t find a viral audience, hundreds of comments, and a book contract because of my amazing ‘writing voice.’

I am a little disappointed because I like goofy old shits who do amazing things. Salinger and Vonnegut qualify for that description, but there’s more.

While I contemplated my impending doom by keeping calm and carrying on, I wrote it out. Will it find the same audience as my first page Salinger post?

Old Kurt Gives Comfort And Sympathy:

In case you missed the other link:

“When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of ‘getting to know you’ questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.

“And he went wow. That’s amazing! And I said, ‘Oh no, but I’m not any good at any of them.’

“And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: ‘I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.’

“And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could ‘win’ at them.”