One of my dearest friends began her last novel-one that went on to become a prizewinning best-seller-by telling herself that she was going to write a short, bad book. For a long time, she talked about the short, bad book she was writing. And she believed it. It released her from her fear of failure. It's a beautiful strategy. Anyone can write a short, bad book, right?
A while back, I was looking through a file on my computer in which I keep drafts of all my essays and stories and book reviews, and I realized that each one of these dozens of pieces had begun with the same phrase rolling through my head: here goes nothing. It's my version of telling myself that I'm going to write a short, bad book. Here goes nothing. The more we have at stake, the harder it is to make the leap into writing. The more we think about who's going to read it, what they're going to think, how many copies will be printed, whether this magazine or that magazine will accept it for publication, the further away we are from accomplishing anything alive on the page.
My son Jacob is in a rock band. When he starts learning a new song, he likes to spend a lot of time printing out the sheet music, getting it to look just right before he puts it in his binder. Then, he thinks about the YouTube video he wants to make, the record label who will sign them. All this, before he's learned to play the thing. I know this feeling well, this fantasy, these dreams of glory. I smile at them in my son, who, after all, is twelve and doing exactly what twelve-year-olds should be doing: trying on different identities for size. But I try to eliminate them in myself.
Years ago, I received my first big assignment from The New Yorker. On the checklist of dreams I pretended not to have, this was at the top. Now I had the chance. I had a contract for one of those "Personal History" pieces. A deadline. The story, which was an investigation into a family secret-an early, tragic marriage of my late father-was rich and sad and beautiful, and I wanted to do it justice. In the days and weeks after landing the assignment, I sat down each morning to write, and nothing happened. As I sat at my desk on West Ninety-second Street in Manhattan, instead of making the journalistic and imaginative leap into the world of Brooklyn circa 1948, I pictured my story in the pages of The New Yorker. What would it look like in New Yorker font? Would it have an illustration? What would the illustration be? Maybe they'd want an old picture of my dad. I made sure I had several of these around, should the photo department call.
I couldn't write. I grew tense. I was strangled by my own ego, by my petty desire for what I perceived to be the literary brass ring. I was missing the point, of course. The reward is in the doing. Most published writers will tell you that the moment they hold the book, or the prestigious magazine piece, or the good review, or the whatever in their hands-that moment is curiously hollow. It can't live up to the sweat, the solitude, the bloody battle that it represents.
I did eventually tire of my fantasies of being published in The New Yorker, and just got down to work. I set my alarm clock for a predawn hour and stumbled straight from bed to desk in an attempt to short-circuit the cocktail party chatter in my head, which went something like: Oh, did you read…Yes, brilliant…and a National Magazine Award to boot, and started with one word, and then another, then another, until I had a sentence. Here goes nothing. Eventually, I had pages. They were imperfect, maybe even bad, but I had begun. And these years later, when I think of that essay, what I remember most is not the moment I saw my work in New Yorker font, not when I saw the illustration of my father, not the congratulatory phone calls and notes that followed, but that predawn morning in my bedroom, at my desk, the lights of cars below on Broadway, my computer screen glowing in the dark.
