Ecstasy in a vacuum

The highest moments of satisfaction in a writing career, it seems to me, happen when I am alone. I've just written, or more likely rewritten, a passage or section or work that really works for me. I finally got it right. Whoopee! Only nobody is around to celebrate with me.

Yet this, writing, is a kind of performance. One critic from the 1960s called it "the performing self" and I've always liked that description, right up there with "the unemployed magician" (Karl Shapiro) for a proper description of the literary artist. One of the advantages of playwriting over other kinds of writing is that the author can get a belated glimpse of audience response. Indeed, one of the highs of my writing career was when at the final curtain of my play Country Northwestern, a guy in the audience yelled out, "This play has balls!" This was more satisfying than a prize.

I was talking to a screenwriter recently who confided how lonely she's been the past year, with no one in her life to talk shop or share the craft with. Yes, writing can be a lonely occupation, which is why writing groups are formed, I suppose. One of the reasons. I've never been much of a joiner myself and have pretty much taken the journey alone. Early in my career I was blessed with important personal and editorial company and later I had good support from a couple of buddies. But I've outlived them, so now what strokes I get (and I actually don't need many) are from some fans scattered hither and yon, some former students.

Since I'm prolific, and since I always am interested in the current work more than anything else, often when I get a stroke, it's for something I don't give much thought to any more, which lessens the satisfaction. It's almost as if I'm no longer the writer who wrote the work being praised. No, I'm the guy writing this here now. There's a certain mystery to past work, especially when the past is far away. I look at my best short stories from the 60s and 70s and marvel that I wrote them, that I took that many risks and pulled them off. I couldn't do that today. I know too much now ha ha and wouldn't dare try some of the things I did. Youthful energy can blast ahead without worrying about what I worry about today.

Still, I think I'm a better writer today than in the past. I suppose if I didn't, I'd quit.