Why We Write: An Interview with Christopher Higgs
Mulholland Drive, Universal Pictures, 2001
by Katharine Coldiron
The interview below was conducted in December of 2017. Six months earlier, I had finished an MA in creative writing from California State University, Northridge, where Christopher Higgs is a professor. I saw Higgs at an English department event before I had a class with him, and I thought he looked like a homeless hipster. His hair stood on end, he wore khaki pants rolled up to show his mismatched socks, and he had the bearing of a man comfortable in his body but uncomfortable among people.
Before long, Higgs became a mentor to me, and then, a friend. He encouraged me to disagree with him, as long as I could back up my opinions. I found that we disagreed on many things, but we were always able to do so with mutual delight in our creative differences. Part of the reason I did this interview was to draw out those differences, particularly related to why we each write.
Katharine Coldiron
So, why do you write?
Christopher Higgs
I thought we had to talk about why we started. I think why I started is different than why I do now.
Coldiron
Well, answer both. Why’d you start?
Higgs
I started because I had a teacher who encouraged me to. That’s really it. When I was about to drop out of high school—I was a complete fuckup, a drug addict, alcoholic, I was just bad—I had this one teacher who stepped in and encouraged me to write as a form of finding some kind of center for myself, because I was just…
Coldiron
All over the place.
Higgs
Yeah. So she encouraged me to do it and that’s why I did it. I never intended to be a writer, I intended to be a filmmaker. In the beginning that was why I wrote. Later on, when I went down the road of creative writing, I think it was because I needed to do something that would keep me from coming back to Los Angeles doing film.
What about you? Why did you start?
Coldiron
I don’t remember. I wrote my first “novel” when I was seven. I don’t remember my childhood very well, but I remember the houses that I lived in, and I know what years we lived where. We were living in the Norfolk house when I wrote that, so I had to be seven or eight. Why I started again in my 20s is also, in fact, a mystery.
I graduated from college, and my plan was to get an office job I didn’t care about and live a life outside of the office job. I learned later that wouldn’t work for me, but at the time it seemed like a good idea. Why I was writing stories then, when I, too, wanted to be a filmmaker, is totally beyond me. So I know why I do it now, but I don’t know why I started.
Higgs
Was there a turning point? You know now why you do it—was there something that happened that made you decide?
Coldiron
Yeah. I stopped listening to the parental voice in my head that said “You can’t be a writer.” That was in my late twenties. I just started doing it, and thinking I can do this.
Higgs
When you say parental voice, do you mean explicitly your parents said you couldn’t write, or you just felt or sensed that?
Coldiron
Throughout my young life, the implication was that artists don’t make any money, so you can’t be an artist. Which is a sensible thing to teach your kids, but also really wrong.
Higgs
My parents didn’t encourage me either. To this day my parents don’t read any of my stuff. I don’t tell them about it. It’s related to—why you write also asks what you write against. Why else do you write? William Gass died recently so there were all these memorials, and someone had quoted an interview with him where he’d said, “I write because I hate.”
Coldiron
[laughs] That’s a terrible reason!
Higgs
No, it’s a wonderful reason! That hate fuelled him, and I love that. Whatever fuels you fuels you, and if it requires hatred, if you write because you have to write against, in the spirit of “I’m gonna prove you wrong, I’m gonna show you…” A certain percentage of what I do now is just to say “fuck you” to all the people in my life who told me either I couldn’t or I shouldn’t, editors who said no—writing against, not for.
Coldiron
I had a conversation exactly about this some years ago when I was at Esalen. I asked my friend if she thought it was okay to write for that reason, to “show ‘em all.” This older lady who was sitting with me and my friend said, “That will leave you empty.”
Higgs
I’m already empty. And I’m going to be empty for the rest of my life. What do I care about that?
Coldiron
This is going in such a nihilistic direction. I thought that was an interesting insight. You’re right that there’s a lot of stuff I’ve written that has been like “You say that I can’t, so I will.” But most of the stuff that I do is because I love it, instead of because I hate.
Higgs
I guess. You mean you love the act of writing, or you love having something published, you love someone reading you…what is it you love?
Coldiron
I love the act of writing and I love people reading what I write.
Higgs
So you want to hear back from people. How do you know people have read your stuff?
Coldiron
I’m a little obsessive about statistics on the internet, seeing how many people read my blog posts and how many people are clapping for my Medium stories. I know on the inside that that stuff is actually meaningless for the art, but that doesn’t mean I’m not petty and human.
Higgs
Sure. Of course. I remember in the HTMLGIANT days I was the same way. I would post something, and then I would just refresh, refresh, refresh, and I would wait and wait and wait for the comments and the likes and all that stuff. It would drive me insane that no one was commenting. But then people would start commenting, and it would be awful. The comments section was notorious. Everyone knew it was a cesspool. It was one of the reasons why we later had to shut down. It was anarchy. So it was this negative cycle—I wanted people to comment so bad, but then as soon as they commented I’d get so depressed that people had commented.
Coldiron
It sounds like you don’t believe that any publicity is good publicity, any attention is good attention.
Higgs
I do in the sense that what seems to matter in the publishing world is notoriety, and the intensity of discussion, and wanting to be the thing that’s talked about. But I’ve learned over the years that even if you’re the thing that’s talked about, it’ll only be for today or tomorrow or a week. The news cycle is so quick to flip that you will only get a very brief moment. If you say to yourself, “I’m empty inside, and writing for other people fills me up,” the sad thing is, it will only fill you up for a moment, and then you will be empty again. So if your default is empty/bad, filled/good, then you’re constantly chasing. It’s like being a drug addict. So I don’t chase. I just sit with being empty.
Coldiron
I comprehend that. And if I did writing sheerly for the attention, I’d be in the wrong field. I should probably be a reality star. But doesn’t it gratify you when people engage with your work?
Higgs
No. There are multiple reasons why. One is that I’m not doing what I do for anybody else that’s alive right now. I’m not trying to—we haven’t yet got to why we do it now, but why I do it now has nothing to do with other people. It doesn’t matter to me one bit if somebody reads what I write or doesn’t. It used to matter a lot to me. Now I don’t care. The only reason I would care now is if it impacted further publication opportunities. It would be a very pragmatic reason. But I’m not interested. I don’t care what other people think. I have a very small group of people in the world that I’m concerned with, and outside that very small group, I couldn’t care less.
There’s no gratification by stranger or even acquaintance. I mean, there are moments, for instance, when a friend, or a friend’s wife, or a friend’s husband, or a friend’s child—there hasn’t been a child yet but I’m sure there will be at some point—says, “I read your book [As I Stand Living], and I feel like I know you better.” And I think, well, interesting, intellectually, but emotionally it doesn’t do anything for me. And I would be just as happy to have never heard it.
Coldiron
Don’t the intellectual and the emotional overlap at all? I ask that because I don’t think we’d have had all the conversations we’ve had if you didn’t enjoy intellectual conversation.
Higgs
Yeah, absolutely.
Coldiron
What I enjoy about people interacting with my work is that conversation. Being able to talk to people about what I’m thinking and why I did it.
Higgs
But see I chose to talk with you. I chose you out of other—there were other options. I chose you to talk to. Do you see what I mean? I don’t choose readers. And so I don’t care about them. Why do I care that some rando thinks one thing or another about my writing? I don’t know them. I don’t have respect for them. If some rando goes “Higgs doesn’t know what he’s doing,” the first thing I want to say to them is “I want to see a list of all the books you’ve read.”
“I want to see a list of all the movies you’ve seen. I don’t know you. I don’t know what your intellectual quotient is. I don’t know if you’re capable of commenting on my work. If you haven’t read these 20 books, you don’t get to talk about my work.” I’m very discerning. Did I ever tell you the story about the review in the American Book Review?
Coldiron
No.
Higgs
I had come to find out a critic I really admired was going to write a review of the book I did with Blake Butler and Vanessa Place [One]. I was very excited about it coming out, and when it came out, it was devastating to me, because he ripped the book apart. He implied that it was yet another example of why conceptual writing is not worth a hill of beans, and of how conceptual writing is masturbatory, and blah blah blah. Because it was a critic I really admired and a publication I knew all my peers would read, and because that was special to me, it hurt me. I drank a half a bottle of whiskey and listened to Taylor Swift’s Red over and over and cried myself to sleep.
That one time I cared. And I can tell you about that because it was one time. Almost no other times have I cared. If you wanted to talk to me about what you thought worked or didn’t work about something of mine, I would probably care. But not just some random person. And not a critic I don’t respect. I’ve had people write stuff about me and I’m like, well, that’s fine, I don’t think you’re particularly fascinating either.
But you do care.
Coldiron
Oh, yeah. A lot. I think I approach people with more generosity than you do. I go into it assuming that you have read a bunch of books and seen a bunch of movies.
Higgs
You’re so kind. Too kind.
Coldiron
I never know who in the audience is going to be me. The person who looks like she’s 25 and looks like she doesn’t know a goddamn thing, but in fact has a PhD and has seen every Tarkovsky movie and knows plenty. That’s why I care. But I also care because of people who might find a gateway in what I’ve written to it all. I mean, I wouldn’t know about conceptual writing at all if I hadn’t met you.
Higgs
But where does it happen? Does it happen that you care about these things, think about these things, in the process of writing? Or is it after the fact, in positioning the piece in the world? Or is it both?
Coldiron
It’s both. But it’s a balance that took me a really long time to get right. Readers used to tag me for including pop culture references that they didn’t know. At first I thought that was something I had to fix, and then I realized if they hadn’t seen The Iron Giant, that was their problem. Finding the way to refer to something without making people feel left out is something I had to refine.
Higgs
Are you familiar with the debate between Franzen and Ben Marcus? It’s that idea of the contract with the reader that I absolutely abhor. I spent all of my graduate years fighting against that. Almost everybody at Ohio, everybody at Florida, everybody at Nebraska, they all more or less subscribed to the idea that you have a contract with the reader. That you have to care about them. What you just said—I guess I’ve never understood why, in the process of making art, you would care about someone other than yourself. Which makes me super selfish, I’m sure. I’m in art, I’m not in politics. I don’t need to care what other people think. I don’t affect change in the same way.
Coldiron
Oh my. I think art is a much more effective tool of change.
Higgs
Nahhhhhh.
Coldiron
I think politics goes in circles and art goes forward.
Higgs
But art doesn’t have a militia behind it that can put you in jail.
Coldiron
That’s true. Not yet.
Higgs
Not yet! That’d be a great revolution.
Coldiron
That’s why I said I think it’s a balance. The essay I wrote about The Sound of Music, you can’t make sense of that essay if you haven’t seen the movie. But I picked that movie because almost everybody has seen it. I’m working on an essay like that about Cemetery of Splendour, but I’m expecting that essay to have a very small audience. Whereas the Sound of Music essay, more people can read it, more people can have their minds opened.
Higgs
Yeah, but—let’s push on that for a minute. I think that while yes, more people might be able to access the Sound of Music one, from my perspective, the quality of audience you’ll have for the Cemetery of Splendour essay—the audience would be cinephiles. What you would be doing by writing that essay is narrowing down the field of potential audience to a more aware, engaged group.
Coldiron
I see exactly what you mean, and you’re right —but I also think, all the time, about Shakespeare. He wrote the “upper level,” the sonnets and politics, for the people in the top part of the audience, and the bawdy humor for the people who were throwing oranges. That’s a critical move if you—well, if you want your work to be read, which I respect may not be your aim—but also if you want it to last. I will be so gratified if cinephiles are interested in what I have to say about Cemetery of Splendour. But if someone who has never read a lyric essay before but loves The Sound of Music reads that essay, then they might read Maggie Nelson next.
Higgs
Hm. It’s unfair to compare anyone to Shakespeare, if only because it’s been a long time. My go-to example against that would be, of course, my beloved Gertrude Stein. She’s only been around a hundred years. But we’re still talking about Gertrude Stein, we’re still teaching her. She’s still selling books. And she sure as hell wouldn’t write for anybody in the same way that Shakespeare was. She wasn’t writing for anybody throwing an orange. So there’s a way that a text can persevere despite its popularity.
One way of thinking about what Shakespeare was doing is that he was writing for his present moment, whereas Gertrude Stein was not. And this is what I always say: I’m not writing for you all. I’m writing for 100 years from now. My audience hasn’t been born yet. I say that all the time. I’m not really concerned with making anybody happy now, because I’m worried about 100, 200 years from now.
That’s the other reason why I wouldn’t be interested in what anybody currently has to say, unless they’re a time-traveler. And if they were a time-traveler, then I’d be very curious what they have to say. But if they’re not, they’re just people who happen to be alive right now.
Coldiron
I respect that position. But I would advance to you the idea that there’s a difference between feeling validated by the opinions of others and being interested in engaging the opinions of others. I have both, okay, I admit that the Pushcart Prize nomination was validation, yes. Hell yes. But the conversations I’ve had with people were way better.
Higgs
What is it about the conversations that appeal to you?
Coldiron
I think it’s because I created something that people are talking to me about in a way that I didn’t intend. Five years ago, what I had to say about my work was so much more interesting than what anyone else could possibly have to say about it. Which is pure ego. But now, what other people say about my work interests me so much more. They’re taking something out of it that I didn’t put into it, or that I didn’t intentionally put into it. I find that fascinating. I made it, but I didn’t think of it.
That reminds me of all of our brains, and all of our different circumstances and upbringings and how broad the world really is—that’s how something I made can cause people to think of something I didn’t think of.
Higgs
You didn’t say this, but it sounds like, in a way, readers are helping you see you better, or see you differently. Give you more dimensions.
Coldiron
Honestly, it’s less about seeing me than it is about the conversation I’m trying to start. I had to boil it down once, why I write, to a paragraph. The answer for me is communication. That I write to communicate. If I can’t communicate and be heard and be spoken back to, then there’s no conversation. Otherwise, I’m just having a conversation with myself, and I listen to myself all the time.
Higgs
[laughs] I’m curious what value communication offers you. I’m wondering. Maybe it’s just that I’m not a good human.
Coldiron
No, I don’t think that at all. I think you get different things out of writing and reading than I do. That’s something that’s occupied me a lot, thinking about your upbringing and mine and how I read books from the time I was three and you didn’t until you were 15, and how that makes our reading practices different. We’re both voracious readers, but it’s from different places. That’s curious to me.
But about value: Someone famous said that writing is an attempt to record the ineffable. I think that’s true if you’re writing New Yorker stories, but there’s something deeper going on in hybrid and experimental work, and I think what it is is the recordation of thought. Patterns of thought and what it means to think in the world. If, by writing, communicating, conversation, I can know what happens in someone else’s brain?
Higgs
Is it like an anthropological thing? Like you’re curious about another animal’s insides?
Coldiron
Yeah, I think so. I don’t really know how to explain why my brain makes these weird leaps from thing to thing to thing, and I’m curious if there’s a way—not neurobiologically, but through art—to explain.
Higgs
That’s another thing we have in contrast with each other. Because I’m completely uninterested in explaining any of that. You seem to have a desire for answers. And I’m allergic to them.
Coldiron
That’s a hard accusation for me, because I was a philosophy major. The key for philosophy is questions, not answers. Science is answers, philosophy’s questions. I thought I was much more interested in questions and what they do to us than a definite, determined…The paradox that drives my writing is that there’s no way to get to the truth. That truth is not a thing you can get to. And so I’ve kind of given up on that answer, but continuing to try to answer it is what I’m doing.
Higgs
Wow. Okay. So let’s move into why we write now. I do it now for very pragmatic reasons. All I can think about today is the Kobe retirement. Because it’s really important to me. I watched almost every single game that Kobe Bryant played for 20 years. He and I are the same age. We graduated high school the same. He started in the NBA the year I started in film school. Each year there’s 82 games. I’ve watched 82 games of Kobe Bryant for 20 years. There’s a link.
Coldiron
It’s morbid, but that’s how I feel about Columbine. That happened the year I was a senior in high school, and so were they. I think about them not getting to do things I’m doing now.
Higgs
Exactly. It’s like—he worked so hard to accomplish certain things. I’ve worked so hard to accomplish this one thing. Once I’ve accomplished that, if we had this conversation, it would be a completely different conversation. Because I don’t yet know who that Higgs is. I don’t know what tenured Chris Higgs is going to be like. I don’t know if I’m just going to start wearing flip-flops and tank tops and writing YA books. Who knows? I don’t know who I’m going to be.
So I write for tenure and because it’s habit. I’m an addict, and addicts are habitual, and I’m habituated. I’ve been doing this for so long. If you take seriously that the first book I wrote was when I was 16, 17, well, that was 23 years ago. That’s a long time to be doing one thing. So it’s just habit.
Coldiron
My main question is why you bother to do it well.
Higgs
I don’t think that I bother to do it well, I just do it well. It’s the Malcolm Gladwell thing. I’ve written so much that I can’t not. I’ve logged 30,000 hours. But thank you for saying well.
The writing is two things. It’s thinking on paper, that’s William Zinsser, and then the second part is the shaping. I never have pleasure writing, because I’m not the one doing it. This is why I’m not trying to communicate. We’d have to get into a whole philosophical argument about who I am and what I am.
The way that I write is I get quiet and open all the rooms in my head and let all the voices come out. All the voices come out and they spew shit on the page. The time when me, who I think of as me, comes into the picture is only through shaping, only through editing. I don’t write anything. I basically just arrange shit. I often don’t think of myself as a writer, I think of myself as an arranger. I get pleasure out of shaping sentences. I get pleasure out of omitting “to be” verbs. I get pleasure out of seeing how I can take a sentence and wrench it toward some other rhythmic or tonal variation—that’s where pleasure is. I’m very much a technician at the sentence level.
I’m not thinking about telling you a story. When I’m telling my son a story, that’s engaging a completely different hemisphere of my brain than when I sit down to be a creative writer. Maybe shaping is where the good rather than bad writing comes in. Maybe it’s the part that gives me pleasure that makes it good. I don’t believe in good or bad writing, but cared-for, shaped, manicured writing is what I would consider “good” writing. “Bad” writing to me, of my own, is when I let the voices do the thing and I don’t have anything to do with it. I’ve published things that I don’t feel like I even wrote. Just voices came to me and I published it without shaping it. That shaping is the practice, that’s craft.
So anybody can write. That’s why I don’t believe in writer’s block. I presume your brain is always functioning, so if you just put your fingers on a keyboard and allow whatever you’re thinking to come out, there’s no such thing as writer’s block. You could have shaper’s block. You could have assembler’s block. But then there’s also the part of me that’s playing show and tell.
Coldiron
Is there ego?
Higgs
Oh, it’s absolutely ego. It’s pure ego. I’m radically egocentric. Radically. I’m megalomaniacal. I think I’m the greatest writer that has ever lived, and no one’s going to convince me otherwise. It’s not that I think it, it’s that I know it to be true.
Coldiron
The contradiction that I could not have put together before this conversation is how you can think that and not be interested in an audience.
Higgs
Because I don’t need them to tell me that. I already know it. If an editor refuses something of mine, I’m embarrassed for them. I pity them. When I get a rejection, I get sad for them. I don’t get sad for me. I know my shit’s gonna get published. I’m sad for them, like, you had the chance to publish me. And you missed out on it. I feel bad for you.
Coldiron
There are rejections I feel that way about. But mostly, I wouldn’t be any good if I had that feeling. I don’t get pleasure out of editing. I get pleasure out of writing. For me, it’s the opposite process. Instead of opening up everything, I synthesize everything to one voice that’s purely me.
Higgs
Oh, you’re doing some kind of intellectual labor at the moment of putting it on the page. Ohhhh.
Coldiron
So when I have to revise it, it’s heartbreaking. Because it’s like, “no, I wrote this.” like, “I wrote this.”
Higgs
In a sense it sounds like you’ve already done the editing.
Coldiron
Well, yes. Telling people that makes you sound crazy and like a bad writer. But yes. I work in long cycles of thinking and then short cycles of writing, and I’ve honed my actual on-the-page process to where when I have a first draft it’s actually a third draft. Because of all that, I don’t edit much. But people who get pleasure out of editing are always better writers than people who get pleasure out of writing.
Higgs
That’s interesting. I never thought of that.
Coldiron
Oh, no, I’m sure of it. From what I have learned and read about people’s processes, oh, yeah. Revising is where it’s at. My process is that I think for about nine months and then I write. I hate that that’s the cycle, because I’m not planning on having children, and so the fact that it’s nine months is like, goddammit, can’t it be seven? Then I write for three weeks straight, all day, every day. I draft by hand, and then as I’m drafting, make notations, and as I’m typing, make more revisions, so then once it’s in the computer, it’s like, third draft.
Higgs
I used to do that too. Mine was different than yours because I liked that process of editing. I liked shaping as it went along. But now I’ve gotten so lazy, I hardly handwrite anything.
Coldiron
The important stuff I will write by hand. If I don’t, then it’s hurried, and I haven’t really thought about every word. If I have to handwrite it, then I really do think about every word. But I hate revising. I’ve designed my whole writing process so I don’t have to revise.
Higgs
Why is that?
Coldiron
There’s anxiety that I’m actually fucking it up instead of making it better. There’s anxiety that I’m making it better but not better enough. There’s a point where I’m so tired of my own words—but at the same time I’m so in love with my own words, and I’m in love with them enough that I don’t want to change them, but I don’t know how other people are going to receive them—it’s just, I hate it. I hate it.
Higgs
It’s hard to hear about. It’s almost masochistic-sounding. You could so simply eliminate anxiety and all of that worry by not caring. It’s because you care that you’re hurting yourself.
Similarly, I could’ve tried harder to write more commercially viable books, which would’ve been more difficult. Honestly, I’ve taken the easy route, in the sense that I do what I do the way that I do it and I don’t force myself to try and do it otherly. In that sense, I sort of took a shortcut. I chose not to do anything else because I didn’t want to add stress to my life. And it sounds like you’re choosing to add stress to your life.
Coldiron
I don’t think it’s a choice. I think it’s more…what I’m made of. It’s the same way that as soon as I started reading metafictional stuff—I can’t write anymore without bringing in the fact that I’m writing. It’s not a choice to do that. Reading to me is so insane that I cannot keep from shoving it in people’s faces how crazy it is that reading exists. “Do you know what this is? This is nuts, this process!”
But I don’t think that a lot of writers of your ilk would say that it’s the easy way out to write experimental and conceptual stuff. I think it’s partly because you’re so brilliant and your ideas are so good— [Higgs demurs] —no, it’s true. And if ideas are where you are instead of stories, then I guess it is easy.
Higgs
It is all completely contextual. Everybody has something that they excel at. You only find out what it is through practice, and trying out different things. That’s what I’m saying about the stuff that I’m doing. I feel it’s very easy.
Coldiron
But the world pushes back on what you find easy. Early on in the writing, I wanted to be a film critic. But breaking into it is goddamn impossible. Which is, to me, the same thing as the fact that you consider experimental writing the easy way, because it’s like, where are you going to find a publisher? How are you going to make any money?
Higgs
But that comes down to community. The small press world is all about community, it’s all about who you know, and it’s all about networking, saying the right things, doing the right things, and now it’s about liking and retweeting the right things. It’s all strategy. I could walk you through the majority of my publications and talk about how strategically one thing led to another. I think very few things that I’ve published were just chance, or on a whim.
Coldiron
How long do you think it takes to become a writer?
Higgs
What do you mean? It takes five seconds for you to go “I’m a writer.”
Coldiron
When I was looking at the careers of really famous actors, I realized that it took them ten years to break through. No matter who they were or how old they were, it took them ten full years of practicing their craft, whether they started in the theater or whatever, to get to stardom. Naomi Watts, she had to do all kinds of bullshit roles, and it was about ten years after she started that she did Mulholland Drive. Tom Cruise is the same way. All the big big stars, that’s the time.
Then I started looking at writers, and it’s the same thing. It’s ten years. I tried to tell a young poet I know that, if you want to do this it’s probably gonna take you ten years, and she was like “What? Why would it take so long?” and I was like, well, you have to practice.
Higgs
You have to practice. I do honestly think that it’s just experience and practice. That’s the craft part of it. If you want to hit jump shots, you have to take jump shots. If you want to publish work, you have to constantly write and get rejected. I don’t know if the Gladwell thing is true or not, I mean, he seems to make a good argument for 10,000 hours. It’s a long time. I think you should probably put in a long time.
That’s not to say that there aren’t phenoms, but even the thing about a phenom is—excuse me for always making everything about basketball—Michael Jordan sucked his first few years in the league. Kobe Bryant sucked his first few years. The only basketball player I can think of that came in and made a direct impact and won MVP and a championship his first year was Magic Johnson. There’s only one Magic Johnson. There will always only ever be one Magic Johnson. No one else has.
I’m not thinking that there are no writers out there who hit the ground running and go, but for the most part, I think you’re probably right. Ten years sounds good. You need to put in the work. Young writers don’t want to hear that they’ve got to put in the work. I can’t tell you how many times in a creative writing class I’ve said that my first published book was probably my seventh written book. And their faces. The countenance. It registers in their mind, I’m still working on my first book and you’re telling me I have to write six more? It seems like there’s no way you could do it. But the fact of the matter is, you just have to.
There could also be the type of person who starts late. The story about Raymond Chandler is that he didn’t start writing until he was 44. So you gotta think, even if he didn’t start writing until he was 44 and he was instantly getting published, he was forty-four. I’m getting toward that, and I feel like I’ve lived two or three lives. At that point, if you start at 44, you’re a leg up just because you’re an older human.
Coldiron
I agree with that. Chandler’s a funny example to me, because I think he’s a natural talent. Whatever he does with his prose is indecipherable to me because it’s so good. But I think you’re right that that natural talent is what kept him from having to go through the ten years of misery.
Higgs
The other problem is that there could be someone who at a very early career stage writes something amazing and then that’s it.
Coldiron
There was an article in Wired years ago that did some big data studies on different musicians and the shapes of their careers. I’ve never been able to find it again. There were two patterns, they said: people who have an early peak and then slide down quickly and never recover, and then people who do a slow climb and stay at the top of their game for a much longer period. It sounds like, in basketball, mostly it’s the second one, and then occasionally there’s the early peak. In music it seems to be about half and half.
I think in writing it’s like basketball, where very infrequently do you have the early peak. I’ve seen how writers get uninteresting when they stop being interested in new shit. If you’ve written the novel that you wanted to write, then you just write that novel over and over again, whereas if you actually think about new things all the time, you’re going to keep writing interesting stuff. I feel like people like Updike, and Philip Roth, these giant male American novelists just wrote the same novel over and over because they weren’t intellectually curious.
I wonder if that’s the problem with people who have early success, or if it’s something more innate. Is that all that was in you?
Higgs
Could be a little of that. I always think of Salvador Plascencia, because he wrote The People of Paper which I think is a brilliant novel. But he has done absolutely nothing since then. in fact, I came across an interview where he basically straight-up said he’s not going to write again. That that was it. He did one and he’s done. That may be the case. I hope it’s not. But yeah. Some people have one thing.
Coldiron
Some people have one thing.
