Smoke and Poetry

I took almost a week off writing to quit smoking.

Writers just tend to smoke. It’s the image we have of writers from old black and white photos and movies, of the man pounding feverishly on the keyboard, an overful ashtray at his side, a cigarette dangling from his lips. Then he pauses, inhales, exhales out a plume of smoke together with inspiration – “That’s the word I was looking for: lachrymose!” he mutters and returns to the banging of the keys.

Maybe it’s just that everyone used to smoke, and we tend to revere the old novelists and poets of the 20th century most that writing and smoking seem to go together. Look at any old picture of any of the lions of literature, and there’s bound to be smoke in it. A cigarette as an accessory may point to the writer’s toughness or his insouciance, his manic intensity or his savoir faire. Visually, of course, it’s hard to beat: a smoke-filled garret looks a lot better than it smells.

I was already a prolific writer but I picked up the habit of smoking just before college, twenty years ago. I was so baby-faced and soft that if I didn’t smoke, the next best thing to do was get a tattoo. And in the late 80s, in the deep south, everyone seemed to smoke. The few people who didn’t seemed almost apologetic about it.

Through my 20s and halfway through my 30s, I couldn’t smoke at work, but that was about the only place I didn’t, and it gave me good reason to take plenty of breaks to puff away and think about video game design (“That’s the creature I was looking for: a goblin with an uzi!”) and screenwriting (“That’s the direction I was looking for: CUT TO!”). At home, in the car, in restaurants, in bars, I smoked and smoked and smoked. I met people smoking. We were friendly, bumming smokes with each other, lighting one another (a very intimate gesture when done right), falling into easy conversation while holding our cigarettes just so in a way which Freud would certainly recognize.

Bit by bit, I started smoking less and less inside. Probably in part because more and more of my friends didn’t smoke and I didn’t want to stink up the place. I wouldn’t smoke in my own home office, but go out on the balcony and then when I got a house, out on the back patio. There was still a ritual, but smoking was separating itself from writing.

I’m not an idiot though. Or not entirely an idiot. I decided that I had to quit before I turned forty (full disclosure: I had also decided that I had to quit before I turned thirty, and then thirty-five), so I went to the Meridian Center for Hypnosis in Westwood last Wednesday at 9:30 in the morning and let them do their thing to me. Honestly, I didn’t think it took. A few hours later, the cravings were intense. The next day too, and the next. What was missing for me though is the existential angst that hit me on my previous attempts to quit smoking, the certain knowledge that this wouldn’t work, that it was only a matter of time before I started back again.

So tomorrow will be one week since I quit, and last night I wrote five hundred words on the novel. And they were five hundred pretty damn good words.

Writing What You Know

It is inarguably the number one cliché of creative writing classes “Write what you know.”

In my professional career as a video game designer, I’ve written about three hundred sword and sorcery fantasy stories, dialogue from postapocalyptic soldiers, storylines from the perspective of giant robots that turn into cars, and conversations between 18th century pirates. In my semi-professional career as a screenwriter, I’ve written a dozen scripts where people are dealing with ghosts, serial killers, monsters, and saving the world with super powers. In my burgeoning career as a novelist, I, a 39-year-old man living in Los Angeles am, naturally enough, writing the story of a 82-year-old woman living in the fictional town of Athelstan, Ohio.

Why can’t I just write about me?

Thankfully my life isn’t dramatic enough to make a good story. To be entertaining you have to have conflict on every page of a novel, screenplay, or video game script. At best, my life would be a sitcom of the old-fashioned variety, with minor hassles that need to be dealt with and then everything is tied up neatly in 23 minutes including subplots and some pointless but funny scenes thrown in.

And then there’s the simple fact that as working video game designer, I gotta write what I’m told to write. I was never filled with a burning desire to expand upon the adventures of He-Man, a footnote of 1980s Saturday morning cartoons notable for his blond pageboy haircut and musclebound physique, too gay to be gay, and his battles against Skeletor, but that’s where my paycheck was coming from, and that’s what I did. And a reviewer was kind enough to call my effort on that “competent,” which is as good as I could hope for.

Unless you’re Emily Dickinson, and probably even then, as a writer you write to be read. You want the characters to fascinate, the theme to enthrall, the pages to fly (except when the reader pauses to reread the part where you describe an asphalt road with such lyricism it brings tears to the eyes), and copies of the book to be in every man jack’s hands.

So can the story of an old woman in made-up town have that sort of effect?

I hope so, but it’s been a busy couple of days, and I’ve only put another 5,000 words into the novel, and I’ve taken about 2,000 words out. The slow slog towards first draft is slow and, needless to say, sloggy.

But I know this old biddy like she was me.