Entries from March 2003 ↓

I’m writing a longish story that’s part Raymond Chandler, part Clive Barker, but not nearly as good as either. And it’s driving me nuts. The first twenty pages just appeared, poured out of me like molten gold, and it was wonderful, an experience all writers dream about, not so much writing as transcribing the words that appear, unbidden, in your mind.

And then I stopped. Lurched ahead. Wrote three or four pages. Looked them over. Gagged. Trashed them. Wrote two more. Gagged. Trashed them. Took long walks, stared off in the distance, hid behind bushes and watched the place where all that beautiful story was before, waiting for it to show up again, mythical-stag-style, so I could spring out and grab it and force it onto the page where it belongs.

The story never showed up, of course, so I’ve spent the last month trudging through the swamp (metaphorical), looking for it. I find a piece here, a piece there. I tape the scraps together and slap it into my word processor and fiddle with it endlessly until I can sort of bear to look at it, then go out looking for more.

It’s painstaking, and not worth the effort. I’ve heard the old addage before, of course, just get it down on paper, don’t look back, just write it all down, you can fix it later, but how am I suppose to do that when I don’t even know where it is? What kind of advice is that? It’s like telling me to paint a house as quickly as I can and worry about the imperfections later, and then not giving me any goddam paint.

Aaargh.

So I’m watching my country lurch mindlessly into a war that I’m told we’re definitely going to win. Not only win: we’re going to bring peace to the entire Middle East, and democracy to its oppressed peoples.

Because here’s what’s going to happen: after we’ve finished bombing Baghdad back to the stone age and blasting its infrastructure into dust and burying its people under the rubble of their miserable, embargo-fueled existence; after we’ve installed our military government and started the process of simultaneously uniting the fragmented pieces of the Iraqi populace and shoving Western-style democracy down their throats; after we station our soldiers at Iraqi oilfields to protect our new investment and begin the process of bringing in American companies and awarding them lucrative contracts to rebuild everything we’ve just destroyed; after we do all that, Iran is going to glance westward, and see the dictatorship we’ve set up to supplant the dictatorship we’ve just dislodged, and watch Kurds and Turks carving each other up in the North, and Shiites massing against us in the south, and the tattered remainders of the Baathist minority being butchered by the people they have oppressed for so long in the middle; and they’re going to think, all those Mullahs and despots and bureaucratic stewards of that two-decade-old Iranian religious autocracy, they’ll think: “Hey, that’s a good idea! Let’s try democracy for while!”