Writing is Anguish

I bite my nails when I write. They’re currently hacked to bits, sawed up, and jagged.

My wife tells me that people who bite their nails are nervous about something or are otherwise going through some kind of mental anguish. How do I explain to her, No, honey, I’m not in mental anguish; I’m trying to figure out this story?

I think I’ve figured out that the barometer for whether or not I’m doing any good writing is if my fingernails look like a sawblade. If I’m not biting them, that must mean I’m not wrestling with the writing; it must mean I’m not working very hard.

So, I like it when my hands are all a mess from writing.

Maybe writing is mental anguish.

I read somewhere (or heard it in an interview) that Stephen King can’t not write. Like how I can’t not breathe or eat chocolate chip cookies for breakfast.

The point was that he keeps writing because he doesn’t know what to do with himself otherwise.

In 2001, he got hit by a car while walking along the side of the road. His scalp was torn up, his right lung was perforated, and his right leg was fulla fractures.

“The orthopedist found all this infected tissue and outraged flesh,” he said. “The bursas were sticking right out, like little eyes.”

What do you think he was doing while his leg was a mess of screws and he was covered in bandages?

Writing.

When he started feeling better, he limped to Red Sox games, lugging his laptop along so he could edit his manuscript between innings.

Tim O’Brien called his computer an unblinking fool. Which is about right because all the computer does is stare at you and laugh while you try to put some words together in a sentence.

It’s a drill sergeant from the movies, all up in your face, breathing on you, saying, “Are you a writer, private?”

“Yes, sir!” you say.

“You’ve only written twelve words! Are you a writer, private?”

“Yes, sir!” you say.

Other times, you think you’re Hemingway. The Midas of words. Every word you type is gold.

The computer doesn’t blink, regardless. It knows you’ll come back to your gold words in twelve hours and find they’re—at best—base metals, like copper or zinc.

“I sit in my underwear at this unblinking fool of a computer and try to wrap words around a few horrid truths,” Tim O’Brien writes. He’s probably biting his nails.

Denis Johnson kept a 69-page document of writing advice on his computer. It was his pinup board of nice quotes to get the blood going. I don’t know how often he referred to it. Probably a lot. He always said, when asked about how to write better, “write in blood,” which was the truncated version of a Nietzsche quote from his 69-page document.

Of all writings I love only that which is written with blood. Write with blood: and you will discover that blood is spirit.

It is not an easy thing to understand unfamiliar blood: I hate the reading idler.

He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by heart.

I suppose all writing is this: digging into oneself to find the blood. Is it true if it’s found outside of you? It must be true if it comes from your insides. If you can grab hold of it the way Aztecs held hearts, and feel it pump and bleed. Then you know it’s real because it’s there in front of you. It can’t not be real. Maybe I bite my fingers all the time because I’m all anguished, rooting around my insides, trying to find the truth.

Or maybe I’ve had too much coffee.