Why We Write (15 page)

Before I wrote my first book in 1989, the sum total of my earnings as a writer, over four years of freelancing, was about three thousand bucks. So it did appear to be financial suicide when I quit my job at Salomon Brothers—where I’d been working for a couple of years, and where I’d just gotten a bonus of $225,000, which they promised they’d double the following year—to take a $40,000 book advance for a book that took a year and a half to write.

My father thought I was crazy. I was twenty-seven years
old, and they were throwing all this money at me, and it was going to be an easy career. He said, “Do it another ten years,
then
you can be a writer.” But I looked around at the people on Wall Street who were ten years older than me, and I didn’t see anyone who could have left. You get trapped by the money. Something dies inside. It’s very hard to preserve the quality in a kid that makes him jump out of a high-paying job to go write a book. It gets squeezed out of you.

I took a dumb risk, and I never paid a price for that. Instantly I had a book that sold a million copies. Since then it hasn’t been a very difficult living at all, but that was fluky.

There’s no simple explanation for why I write. It changes over time. There’s no hole inside me to fill or anything like that, but once I started doing it, I couldn’t imagine wanting to do anything else for a living. I noticed very quickly that writing was the only way for me to lose track of the time. That’s not as true anymore as it was when I started, but it still happens, and it’s incredible when it does.

It changed, and it changes

The change has less to do with what’s inside me than the structure of my life. It’s amazing how few demands I had on myself when I was twenty-three years old, and how many I have now. It’s just extraordinary. Only by ignoring the vast majority of requests for my time do I have any kind of life at all.

When I was writing my first book, I was going from eleven at night till seven in the morning. I was very happy waking up at two in the afternoon. My body clock would naturally like to start writing around nine at night and finish at four in the
morning, but I have a wife and kids and endless commitments. Which is good; I like ’em. I want ’em, and there’s a price. I make breakfast. I take the kids to school. My natural writing schedule doesn’t work with my family’s schedule. I actually do better when I have pressure, some mental deadline.

What disturbs me is that the act of writing is associated with work, rather than pleasure. In the beginning it was associated only with pure pleasure. Now it’s a mixture.

The reasons I write change over time. In the beginning, it was that sense of losing time. Now it’s changed, because I have a sense of an audience. I have the sense that I can biff the world a bit. I don’t know that I have control of the direction of the pinball, but I can exert a force.

That power is a mixed blessing. It’s good to have something to get you into the chair. I’m not sure it’s great for the writing to think of yourself as important while you’re doing it. I don’t quite think that way. But I can’t deny that I’m aware of the effects my writing will have. It will be read. It will cause some stir.

And money changes it. When I started, I was paid nothing for what I wrote. Now I’m paid vast sums for the worst crap. That’s a reason to write now that I didn’t have before. Someone will call me up and ask me to write three hundred words. I dash off something in the morning, and I get paid a hundred times what I used to be paid for a piece I’d spend weeks on.

Once you have a career, and once you have an audience, once you have paying customers, the motives for doing it just change.

The other thing that changes is that the threshold that gets me interested in writing about something is higher. When I started, there was nothing I’d have deemed not worth my time
as a writer. Now I’m getting choosier and choosier. I’m able to turn things down. And I’m older, so there’s less unexplored territory all the time.

Writing makes me sweat

Two things happen to me physiologically when I write that are maybe a little weird. My palms sweat, so my keyboard gets totally wet. Also, my wife says I cackle.

Apparently while I’m writing, I’m laughing hysterically and sometimes talking to myself. Once I was revising a screenplay and Tabitha was in the next room and she said I was actually performing the lines of dialogue, and I wasn’t aware of that.

I used to get the total immersion feeling by writing at midnight. The day is not structured to write, and so I unplug the phones. I pull down the blinds. I put my headset on and play the same soundtrack of twenty songs over and over and I don’t hear them. It shuts everything else out. So I don’t hear myself as I’m writing and laughing and talking to myself. I’m not even aware I’m making noise. I’m having a physical reaction to a very engaging experience. It is
not
a detached process.

When I’m working on a book, I’m in a very agitated mental state. My sleep is disrupted. I only dream about the project. My sex drive goes up. My need for exercise, and the catharsis I get from exercise, is greater. When I’m in the middle of a project, whether I’m doing Bikram yoga or hiking up the hill or working out at the gym, I carry a blank pad and a pen. I’ll take eight hundred little notes right in the middle of a posture. It drives my yoga instructor crazy.

Even if I’m trying not to think about it, I think about it. I
get into an agitated mental state. So I can’t do it all the time. You read these biographies of novelists, like John Updike, who get up early every single morning and write six hundred words. That’s just not me. It would kill me to do that.

I’m mentally absent for months at a time. The social cost to my wife and kids is very high. Luckily, I’m a binge writer. I take a lot of time off between books, which is why I still have a family.

I get told all the time that I make writing a book look easy. I think my readers would be surprised to know just how agonizing it is, how sweat-intensive, how messy, how many drafts I write, how much doubt I have about the quality of prose. It might deter them from wanting to be writers.

Binge. Rest. Repeat.

Those piles on the windowsill? Each one is a project, a gathering storm. Right now those piles represent two magazine pieces, a screenplay, and three books. That may be the next five years of my life. Something could jump in and assert itself into those piles, but they’re all real projects.

At any given time I usually have eight new ideas. But when the book is done, do I want to go do one of those ideas? No. So the eight ideas get pushed into one of those piles. I need time between projects. It’s like a tank filling up. I can’t just go from one to the other.

There’s some cheating. Some books are just collections of magazine pieces, that kind of thing. It’s never that I have writer’s block; it’s more that I lack the energy for the project, because the energy required is so great. And I know that the social
cost to the family is pretty high. I’m here, but I’m mentally not here. I check out and check in.

When you have three kids in three different schools, you have no day. Right now it’s softball season. I coach the two girls five days a week, two and a half hours each afternoon. There’s not much left. You have a small window in which to write.

But it’s nice to have those periods. It’s nice to have the flexibility to say, I won’t write much right now, but later I’ll hit the gas. That’s a function of money.

Money changes everything

Commercial success makes writing books a lot easier to do, and it also creates pressure to be more of a commercial success. If you sold a million books once, your publisher really, really thinks you might sell a million books again. And they really want you to do it.

That dynamic has the possibility of constraining the imagination. There are invisible pressures. There’s a huge incentive to write about things that you know will sell. But I don’t find myself thinking, “I can’t write about that because it won’t sell.” It’s such a pain in the ass to write a book, I can’t imagine writing one if I’m not interested in the subject.

The first time was the best time

The high point of my life as a writer was seeing my first book when it actually physically arrived. As it happened, I was living next door to Judi Dench in London at the time, and she told
me, “When your book comes, just drop it on the floor and listen to the sound it makes.” I did that, and it was just
great.

The best moment I’d had up until that point was when I knew the first book was working. When I heard the tumbler in the lock, like cracking a safe. I remember exactly where I was. It was eleven o’clock at night, and I was in the New York City subway, having just come from a dinner with a Salomon Brothers broker, when I realized how it was all going to fit together. It was going to be my story, the story of the markets. Oh my God! I thought, this is going to be fantastic. I had the fish on the hook. I saw how big it was. The only way I’d lose it would be to screw it up.

Those are the best moments, when I’ve got the whale on the line, when I see exactly what it is I’ve got to do.

After that moment there’s always misery. It never goes quite like you think, but that moment is a touchstone, a place to come back to. It gives you a kind of compass to guide you through the story.

That feeling has never done me wrong. Sometimes you don’t understand the misery it will lead to, but it’s always been right to feel it. And it’s a great feeling.

B
ack in the literary stone age (pre-1980s), any writer who happened to be gay was a “gay writer,” and few gay writers were published by mainstream houses since it was widely believed that only gay readers would buy a “gay book.” And so there were gay publishers whose books were sold in gay bookstores, along with gay newspapers, gay calendars, gay records, and gay gifts.

Many factors contributed to the changes that have transpired since then, but a major one can be summarized in these two words: Armistead Maupin. In 1976, when Gerald Ford was president, a postage stamp cost thirteen cents, and
A Chorus Line
won the Pulitzer for drama, Maupin launched a serial in the
San Francisco Chronicle
called “Tales of the City,” featuring
real, live gay people living alongside real, live heterosexuals. Ground was broken.

Maupin hasn’t just made equal-rights history; he’s participated in it. He married his true love, Christopher Turner, in San Francisco, mere weeks before Proposition 8 made same-sex marriage illegal again. Until their recent move to Santa Fe, the two shared an elegant, cozy, quintessentially San Francisco hillside home where they offered those in their social circle large doses of Southern hospitality.