The Constant Companion

Writer's block.
I had a friend who used to call it “Writer's Herpes,” because just when you need it least, it'll resurface making it impossible to sell yourself. I thought that was pretty catchy. Clever. So now, these days I say I've got herpes and it's a little inside joke with myself.
I've got herpes, but really I have writer's block. Sores in my mind keeping me from writing anything of any substance down.

I sold a story to some British copycat of the New Yorker when I was 20. It was some short I had written in high school about girls and how if a girl acts like a guy, they're considered “skanky.” My English teacher told me it was insightful, but I was just writing what I knew: I see myself naked in the mirror and revel in the fact that I have boobs, I think about sex so many times a day it's hard to believe I could find time to study, I'm forward and aggressive and I never fit in with other girls. They all called me skanky.
I wrote this down, and it was published in a widely circulated British rag. This is what people want to read these days: the mindless musings of a horny 16 year old American girl in a medium sized town. Nothing special, nothing real, nothing to change the world, just the way my body works. I thought writing was an art, but it's really just pencils, paper, and hormones.

Herpes hits you when you've had too much. The same with writer's block. You're exposed to too much, it all hits you at once and clogs the pipes. You're left staring at blank pieces of paper wondering where all the insight you were planning on spilling on the world has gone and why it's not writing itself down in front of you.
You light a cigarette and look out the window of your 21st floor apartment, paid for by Daddy's money because you were meant for higher things than real work, and you look out at the city that you've become a part of. Assimilated.
In college, English-Literature Bachelor's track, they teach you words to better express yourself, but all they do is – what's the word? Obfuscate? - congeal and coagulate until you can't even find the right words even to say how you feel about a puppy staring up at you. A good vocabulary can make you cynical if used correctly.
They teach you that behind every piece of good writing is the hidden, deeper meaning, that you're supposed to derive, implicit. That writing speaks of the author's psychology. Bad writing, however, speaks of psychology too: the psychology of needing to make money. Needing to see your words in writing to relieve your narcissism. Needing to die, but not having the guts to kill yourself, so you kill off your characters. The one that looks just like you, with her blond hair, long hairless legs, and melancholy demeanor.
Kill her off. Give her cancer from that cigarette. Throw her from the window of her 21st floor apartment. Blow her up. Use your imagination, but just kill her. Then you'll be free.

I was looking at one of the millions of reports that come through my office and find their way to my desk when Charlie Dawn came in with a question. His hair was all sorts of brown and fell over his left eye, lending him a mysterious aura. You could tell that beneath his shirt and tie was a body of pure muscle. And here he was in my office needing my help.
“Yes, Charlie?” I said, setting the report on top of the pile to give him my full attention. I wonder if I was being obvious, if he could tell how badly I needed him, right there, on the desk, right now.
“Ma'am,” he said, always the gentleman, “I need you to confirm...”
“Stop right there and kiss me.”
So he did, and if it wasn't obvious before, it was plain to see now.

My romance novels were all cries for help. The hidden message, behind the writing of what I know women want to read, is me screaming, “I have nothing to say! Why am I still alive, let alone writing for a living?” But if worded correctly, cries for help can pay the bills. I had sold and presold hundreds of Charlie Dawn and the boss stories. Women ate the first few up, fanmail coast-to-coast all saying, “I wish my husband could be like Charlie,” or, “I wish I was as strong a woman as the boss.”
The boss has remained unnamed, but I always write in the first person. I might as well just sub my name throughout the story. Not that it's a memoir, but rather a fictional resignation to be nothing. “As strong a woman as the boss”? The boss whose only business seems to be to fornicate with an underling? It's a miserable existence just writing about her. But this is me: the miserable, herpes-ridden, used up, nothing at the top of the ladder. The reports are fanmail, and I used to give each a brief look over, but now they just pass from one side of the desk to the other, and thence to a dumpster in the back. Thank you, secretary (who is, by the way, a man).

In college, they taught me that every novel is essentially a memoir because it's all about perspective: no one but Joan Didion could have written Play It As It Lies, no one but Ken Kesey could have put down One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The books were reflections of the people, even if it was a fictional story. In a book, you are, “peering into the soul of another person, personified in the main character.” It was all bullshit, but I guess I'm finding out it's all right. Every cheap romantic line I put down was still coming out of my mind, whether I thought it was stupid or not. So now I'm the romance goddess.
I've come such a long way since high school. When I wrote respectable things. So what if they were juvenile and stupid, they were still things. Now I write pages and pages of nothing. I look at the blank pages filled with words and wonder where all my real thoughts went.

Gin and cigarettes taste like cancer.

Writer's block is worse than death because of the very fact that you're still living. You still have to see the world move around you, while you're stuck. Paralyzed.

Convoluted! That's the word I was looking for earlier when I was talking about vocabulary making things worse. It “convolutes” things. All these words and nothing to express with them. If only I knew less, if only it was like high school, where my joy was in the fact that I'm a woman with a sleek and sexy body. If only I were just a body again, instead of a mind. Then something of substance would come to me without me even having to think about it.
But I am thinking about it. I'm thinking about how my typewriter yells at me when I'm drunk. I'm thinking about how stupid women with no selves read my books. I'm thinking about how I can't kill off the character that looks like me, she's locked into a 70 book deal with Random House. Even if I killed myself off, she's still on contract, and I would live on in vile, stupid infamy. Screwing Charlie Dawn on the desk in hundreds of different ways. Screwing my married secretary.

Writer's block is just like herpes. My friend's coinage is apt because, like herpes, it never leaves you alone. Even when it's not technically present, it's still there hiding just beneath the surface, looking for the opportunity of another outbreak.

“Stop right there and kiss me, Charlie.” Being the gentleman, he obliged, and we made love right there.