Write Anyway

Today's guest post is by (drum roll bitte!), Kevin Tudish. That's right -- the author whose book I just featured and raved about. 
I hunted Mister Tudish down, using my ultra advanced Google foo powers and sent him a fan letter. Yup, that's what I did. And, looky here, he graciously agreed to crosspost his GoodReads blogerini here. Obscenely awesome, n'est-ce pas?
******************************************************
When I lived in Los Angeles, when I hadn't been writing for a while but had been getting my creative fix from 3D animation, I walked into a book store across from the Beverly Center. Books floor to ceiling, wall to wall, bins and kiosks between the shelves.

Animation was fun, and someone wrote me a check every couple of weeks, but I wanted to start writing again. And there was a lot of tacit encouragement suddenly surrounding me.

And a feeling of "What would one more matter?" The short view of futility. And the long view: at some point, we're going to turn Earth into Mars and even Kafka and Fitzgerald and Hopkins won't have mattered.

I sometimes found Los Angeles an effective antidote to ambition. Not in any celebratory, Hunter-Thompson kind of way, but in a "here's 10,000 mg of lithium" kind of way. When I lived in Boston, I could drive out to Walden Pond and stand in the perimeter of Thoreau's cabin, walk through Emerson's house. There was a thriving guerilla art scene. In L.A., there were historical sites, but more along the lines of "this is where Marilyn Monroe stepped in cement" or "River Phoenix died of an overdose right here". And the zeitgeist was less about making the next "Citizen Kane" and more about making sure your jeans were ripped in the right places. Reality shows were becoming a genre. It wasn't steeped in the dream world of an English major.

What would one more book matter, and could it matter at all in a place like this?

I got out my rapidographs and worked on some pen and ink drawings. Analog art that didn't look like anything I made at work. Art, but not the art I wanted to be making.

Visual art was the first thing that made me feel like I had some kind of creative juice, that I could generate something out of nothing, contribute to the conversation, and have people listen. But language felt like a more natural medium, a more expansive medium for me. I could draw what I saw, but I was able to write what I imagined.

I hadn’t found anyone to pay me for what I wrote, but they’d pay for visual stuff. And I suddenly didn’t have to live two lives—artist and income generator. It was all the same thing and only 40 hours a week.  Which left lots of time for normal sorts of entertainment, which is how I met my wife.

Which begat a house, and then a child (whom I loved more than I ever loved art). By that time, we were out of L.A. and in San Jose.

We remodeled and relandscaped. I laid out the yard like it was my Giverny—nothing went on a canvas, but I created a garden. And had those internal conversations about what was art—the garden or the painting of the garden? Or both?

That thing was missing, though. That time with my imagination, that time to generate something out of nothing. To reach beyond a tactile world.

I started writing. An essay that was a couple pages. A story. Plays that never found a direction. A novel that was just as aimless. A longer one with more direction, but no end in sight. But I was writing. Every Saturday. Occasionally on a weeknight. The pages accumulated.

Then just part of that long story, something I could focus on, see the end of before I started.

Whether anyone would read it didn’t matter as much as writing it. Work was less onerous because I also had work that was my own. The essay and the story and the plays and the endless novel let me get my chops back, let me generate momentum in my life around my art. Let me feel that at least part of my week was spent doing something that was valuable to me. I was living two lives again, but happily.

The pages piled up and I had a book.

And there was Amazon to obviate any need to sell my idea to an agent and hope he could sell it to a publisher, and then hope the publisher took an active interest in finding an audience. Fuck em, I could do it myself, and have total ownership of my work.

But it all started with just writing, a little at a time when there was time. Getting a few words on paper, then a few more. Doing that thing for myself with no other motive initially than just involving myself in the process because it was good for me.

Crossposted on Kevin Tudish's GoodReads blog.