Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Jack Sheehan on how this getting words down on paper gig isn’t really all that bad, once you get past the first line

The o ther day a parent at our children's school asked me what I did for a living.

When I answered "writer," she said, "Oh, horses?"

It was obvious I need to enunciate better. "A wri-ter," I said. "Not a jockey." And I mimicked the motion of scribbling across a page.

"Oh," she said, seemingly not satisfied with the explanation. A suspicious look came over her.

"So where do you work?" she asked.

"At home," I said, which might have been apparent to her had she noticed that I'm usually wearing jeans and a ratty T-shirt in the middle of the day when I pick up our kids.

"Are you a reporter?" she delved further.

"Occasionally," I said. "But not really."

"Can you make a living at writing?" she wondered. (In fairness to her, my wardrobe may have prompted that question.)

"The life has its ups and downs," I said. "But I'm sticking with it regardless."

"Why?"

I fessed up and told her that writing was about the only skill in which I have even a minimal degree of competence.

"I'm pretty pathetic at manual labor," I said, "and I really suck at math and science."

At that very moment, another acquaintance came by and said he'd recently purchased a book I'd written and that he was enjoying it. His timing was both good and dreadfully bad. Good in that it validated my occupation for the last 35 years, but bad in that it totally altered the tone of the woman who had been interrogating me.

"Oh, so you write books," she said, lighting up like a halogen lamp. "Well, you're exactly the person I've been looking for. I have the most amazing Las Vegas story you've ever heard, and I just need someone to write it for me."

I hear solicitations like this at least once a month, and almost always when my wife and I are socializing over lunch or dinner among the madding crowd.

The clear implication when someone says he has a great idea for a book or movie and just require s a scribbler to put it on paper for him, is that the person making the pitch is holding all the valuable goodies in this proposition and that the prospective writer is just a necessary nuisance to be tolerated on the way to stardom.

This is akin to telling Herman Melville, "Hey, Hermie, I have this story about a big fish and a guy who's mad at it. If you can just toss some verbiage around and put the commas in the right places for me, I can take credit for one of the great novels of American literature. Oh yeah, the fish's last name is Dick."

The fact that the idea person's work is over at this point, and that Melville is facing five tortured years of agony and barrels of whiskey to get it down on paper, is somehow lost on the former.

My argument here is that any story on its face is insignificant in comparison to the art of telling it. Even the most compelling set of circumstances falls flat when told by an unintelligible interpreter. And the most mundane behavior imaginable can come alive and reverberate with meaning in the hands of an eloquent wordsmith. Think of how a great joke can be deflated by a bumbling joke teller, and conversely how relatively simple daily behaviors can come to life through the eloquence and style of a Garrison Keillor, or even a Jerry Seinfeld.

Or think of a story like " Driving Miss Daisy, " which in the hands of playwright Alfred Uhry became a great stage play and an Oscar-winning film. Should the accolades go to the person who said, "I have an idea for a movie. A black chauffeur drives an elderly white woman to town frequently and they become friends?"

Is that idea brilliant? Is it deserving of awards? Of course not. It's downright boring on its face and sounds like a breaking-racial-barriers story we've heard many times. But in the hands of a craftsman like Uhry, who understands how to create character, select the precise scenes that move the drama forward, and through action and dialogue bring the story to a moving conclusion, a simple story line is transformed into art and brings laughter and tears to the play's observers.

Ernest Hemingway put it beautifully: "A writer's problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly, and having found what is true, to project it in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it."

It's not hard to understand why people in my profession occasionally feel like Rodney Dangerfield, getting no respect at all. We do our work sitting down, and the casual observer at first glance doesn't see what's so tough about throwing some words on a page. We learn how to do that in the first grade, after all, but most of us grow out of it, right?

Through years of practice, I've come up with a response that usually ends the discussion when I'm told I might be useful in helping someone with a so-so yarn write a popular book or a screenplay. I'll say something like, "No one cares more about your story than you do. Your tale in the hands of an outsider will not contain the passion you have in your voice as you tell it to me. If you really care that much about getting this story told, you must write it yourself."

Of course, they don't do that because they can't. And the reason they can't is that good writing is grueling work, requires tremendous discipline, a certain amount of talent, and a truckload of experience to find what is true and get it right.

When I tackle an ambitious project, how do I know when I'm ready to compose the first line? I simply sit down at the word processor, take a slug of coffee, chase it with an unleaded Red Bull, and wait for the drops of blood to form on my forehead.

It's no more difficult than that.

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