"Non-fiction?" he says.
He squeezes his eyes together and shakes his head slowly. He is my friend the serious writer. His MFA and the five-hundred words a day, every day, make his claim to the title "writer" a thousand times more credible than mine. I am a writer who never writes.
He continues to shake his head while he thinks of a response, because my non-fiction has just been published nationally and his fiction has not. Still, he's trying to be kind to me. I took a writing class from him once - how we met - and there is still a bit of that mentor relationship.
"It's just," he says, "the craft is not the same," which is a kind way of saying that whoring out your life experiences is not craft. He's right about that. I function more on inspiration and lucky word choice than any process of craft, which requires dedication and thought and a level of seriousness that I avoid - mainly out of fear of failure.
If I invest too much, I will lose. I have lost before and I am still gun-shy. The problem with having called yourself a writer thoughout most of your twenties is that when you reach thirty and your book has not been published, and your friends have stopped asking you about it, and you want to but can't seem to write anything else, and the woman it was dedicated to is no longer the woman you are supposed to love - it becomes hard to keep calling yourself a writer.
(I know it's called self-defeat. I've been to the meetings you recommended. I heard the stories and recognized the traits. It doesn't mean it gets easier.)
There are new books. There are new stories. But the only thing that seems to come is the non-fiction, the plain dictation of a life that doesn't make sense very often. Craft is the application of sense to the experience, to create a statement. I can't make sense of anything yet.
I quickly make up a story about the novel I'm working on. I have honestly completed about 3000 words on the plot idea, and that was a year ago. Now I can't even find the text files, and every time I sit down to recreate them, I get distracted. The story hangs in the back space of my brain. I keep trying to come up with shortcuts to getting it down: voice recorders and new notebooks, different pens. I get distracted. I fill my life with activities to make it seems like I'm accomplishing things when what I want to start and finish, I can't.
We are very drunk while talking about this. We are at a party full of artists, musicians, promoters. There is probably no better place to be in this city right now. I admire his dedication and that he is living the life I once desired: the young university professor, writing, drinking, playing pool in the local bars, writing letters to the editor of the city paper. Honing his sense of self and his work by defining it daily for his students.
I am a writer who never writes. I'm trying to change it. I'm trying to change a lot of things, to take stock of what I even have to write about. I think that process has to start with the non-fiction. If I can't honestly and clearly record what is important in my life, how will I ever be able to tell a story?
+++
Every time I think I've reached a place where I can process the recent past, I realize it still hurts enough to stop me completely, even though I can't feel it anymore, I can't recall those details, those things that used to be so important. It is more an overall sensation of failure that I can't shake.
+++
So I should call my friend. It's been a long time since we had the conversation about writing. There was more: about musicians and New York and the city we live in, about women. My face was numb during most of it. I don't know if there will ever be anything more.
I don't know many writers, really. I mean truly know them as friends. However, of those I know, it seems they are all more dedicated than I am.
