Sorely Tested

How many parents ask their wee ‘uns what they want to be when they grow up, and are devastated to learn that their child wants to become a writer?

Why? Why would you want to be one of those, Junior? Be a plumber, or a janitor, or a felon; anything but a writer.

Sorry daddy, it’s deep in my soul and I can’t pretend it ain’t. But go ahead and make me second-guess my passion because I’m too young and inexperienced to distrust you. Maybe I’ll just follow your lead into a dead-end existence, and, like you, I’ll end up fat, stressed, broke, and bald; licking the balls of some corporate machine that knows me as a number.

Thanks for the great direction.

The universe has funny ways of leading its writers to their calling. Resist it all you want, but if your DNA is programmed that way, eventually, after what seems like aeons of slogging through shit, there will be no denying the truth.

To determine whether a person is destined for a literary calling, I think I’ve got a good idea for a writer-test concept. It has yet to be proven successful, but please hear me out.

Here goes.

To start with, live a lifestyle you despise for as long as you can drag it out, working soul-sucking jobs until the overwhelming disappointment of how badly you’ve failed at life finally outweighs the fear of starving to death, and then quit. Quit working in general, I mean. Just stop.

You already lost the sexy truck you were using to prop up your anaemic ego, even though you’ve been living rent-free on a foreclosure property for six months because your last peon job wasn’t lucrative enough to cover the ridiculously expensive vehicle payments.

This is just a scenario. It’s completely fabricated from past, ahem, "fictional" experiences.

Anyhooo, after losing the ego-crutch, you could then buy a shitty vehicle from a buddy for whatever you have left in your pockets, and live in it with your better half until it dies on the street. Well, split up the time spent living in said shitty vehicle with time spent staying on the dilapidated boat you’d previously abandoned for over a year at the marina. A boat that you’ve stupidly decided to pour thousands of borrowed dollars into. Dollars you can’t hope to pay back anytime soon because, as already stated, you don’t work.

The only reason the boat is still even yours is because your life story has been so pitiful over the last few seasons that the bigwigs running the marina can’t bring themselves to heap further disgrace upon your family. Disgrace that taking the derelict vessel would cause. A lil’ mercy bestowed upon your perpetual shame. That, and the fact that disposing of the boat themselves would be prohibitively expensive.

Anyway, when all of your foolishly borrowed money is blown, and your shitty vehicle eventually does die on the street, you, your lovely partner, and your son can push the dead automobile through the city to the parking-lot at your children’s fleabag apartment.

Now, let us just imagine that throughout your fairly long and very unorthodox life you have developed many, many skills, and are fundamentally employable. There’s less than a zero percent chance of not getting a job if you so desired. But, because you have chosen the path of the writer, you won’t.

You would rather die than spend another second under the yoke of indentured, yet sometimes ludicrously lucrative, servitude. You realize that such a life, for you, is worse than death.

It’s a good thing your kids learned at an early age to fend for themselves, because writer dad can sometimes be a little unreliable in providing luxuries like food and non-foreclosure roofs over their heads. They probably got motivated to be self-reliant after hunting birds for dinner with sharpened sticks. No birds that time. Thank the lord for apple trees. And flour. And mom.

Why do you guys love me? Idiots!

Thanks, idiots! I probably wouldn’t try and maintain any semblance of respectability without you. You save me from myself. Sort of.

OK, as we continue along with this totally fictional writer's test I made up completely out of my head, you could then move in with your self-reliant kids in their cockroach-infested apartment and convince yourself that you’re going to become a web-developer. And, seeing as you were barely stumbling around a computer not two years prior, this is an obvious no-brainer decision. You can learn anything, right?

In all the time you’ll spend strengthening your web-developer skills to the point where you’re absolutely certain in your conviction that being a web-developer is the last thing on earth you really want to be, you could have finished at least one book. But you will voluntarily piss away that valuable time because you’re so aware that everyone has to pay their dues to earn success.

While wasting time becoming a writer, by not writing, why not slowly sell off everything you have while continuing to boycott being employed? Admit it, that does sound like quite a plan. Be sure to sell everything that has any potential to earn you income, like all of your expensive tools.

OK!

During this time, your lovely other-half can work long hours for peanuts so you can both eat once in a while. She might even be able to throw a few dollars at whatever debt seems the scariest at the moment. Though, at this point, that fool’s errand is like throwing a steak behind you as you run from a pack of ravenous hyenas, praying it stops the entire slavering horde long enough for you to find a hole in the ground to hide in.

Lucked out yet again. Dive into the hole and feel safe for a moment.

Let’s celebrate our little victory by taking what money we have left and going out for dinner and a few drinks. This hole is full of snakes anyway, and the dogs will be sniffing around soon, so it’s best if we don’t have any cash left for them to smell. A bit of short-sighted frivolity should throw them off the scent for a bit.

By now you should have only a few non-saleable, cherished items left to your names (nobody is gonna pay shit for the kids’ grade-school artwork, that's for sure), and another shitty vehicle that your father-in-law begrudgingly bought you for attempting to help him and his massively fucked-up family get their disastrous lives in some kind of order. Your hopeless attempt to help will fail horrendously, of course. And not for the first time.

At least he’ll never appreciate it, or acknowledge you ever tried.

Shortly after wisely abandoning that soul-draining catastrophe, you and your lovely other half will eventually end up living in some backwater burg in the middle of nowhere, with someone you’ve only known for a few months. And they’re paying the rent, because, as usual, you’re broke.

Well, after getting to the point where you can’t stand the sight or sound of the person you’ve been living with for free, you should now be considering selling the vehicle your father-in-law bought you, and, consequently, the only thing left in your life of any cash value, and leaving the backwater burg of Buttfuck, Nowhere, to try your luck in the city.

With the fuel-guzzling beast exchanged for a little car and some cash, it’s now time to bounce from coffee shop to coffee shop in hopes of completing your pièce de résistance.

Due to your vast wealth of experience as a writer, this shouldn’t be an issue. You’ve been at it for months. All the thousands of other writers out there who’ve been at it for years and constantly get rejected are just hacks.

The race is on.

You'd better figure out how to get paid as a completely unheard-of amateur before you fritter away the only money you and your angel of a partner have left to your names. But, at least you have a tiny little car to live in for the remainder of the winter if things don’t pan out.

Now is the time you’ll likely start praying for divine intervention in order to avoid ending up living on the street. But, barring some kind of highly unlikely miracle (even as far as miracles go), it probably won’t come. The only upside being that the prolonged suffering you will now experience should provide ample material to draw from for many a future literary failure.

By this time, you’re in way too deep to even consider backing out, so, whether you like it or not, you’re committed. Write or die.