You can see it by clicking on this sentence.

I think everyone who meets me can sense that I have a very high opinion of myself. I’ve found that high self-regard is hypnotizing. People don’t spend much time pondering the attributes of other people. They’ll usually accept people on basically the terms in which they present themselves. If you’re self-deprecating, people will definitely think, “Oh, you’re humble and honest,” but they’ll also think, “Wow, I guess you’re not as intelligent and talented as you seem.”  I rarely fall into this trap. My motto is, “If you keep telling people how smart you are, they might think you’re a jerk…but they’ll also believe you.” Since I was raised in a milieu where seeming intelligent was very important, I’m willing to settle for this.

But sometimes I also think, “What the hell am I doing?” I mean, I might be smart, but how in the world am I qualified to say anything worthwhile about the world? I aspire to write stories that are truthful and beautiful, but I don’t really see that there is anything in my life or my background that entitles me to some special insight into the world.

My writing process does not alleviate this worry. The way I write is extremely mechanical. There’s very little thought–or even imagination–involved. I just sit down and write sentence after sentence and then reject them. I write story beginnings and then reject them. I write first drafts, and then I reject them. I write a second draft and then reject it. I write ten versions of the ending and reject each one. Finally, I come to a version that I’m unwilling to reject. Even the rejection isn’t particularly intelligent: it’s just an instinctive sense of the difference between good and bad.

Sometimes I do allow analysis to enter the writing process. I look at a draft in progress and think, “Oh, the narrative balance requires a parallel event right here” or “Oh, this story starts too slowly” or “Oh, my character needs someone to talk to.” But these insights are not as common as I would like them to be.

When I see the rate at which literary writers work, the very intense Flaubertian spend-all-morning-deciding-to-add-a-comma-and-then-spend-all-evening-deciding-to-remove-it method that means you take five years to write a novel, I think, “Yeah, that seems like it’s about the right amount of work.”

There’s something really protestant in me that things that I don’t expend enough mental and physical energy in the process of writing for me to produce anything that’s worthwhile. This is not a request for puffery. I know that I work harder than most aspiring writers, but at the same time, I don’t work that hard. If the goodness of a novel has to be directly proportional to the time, energy, and mental effort that was put into writing it, then I don’t see how my novels are ever going to be as good as I want them to be.

But my philosophy is that the above model is, basically, false. Effort is important. It’s the baseline requirement. But it’s not everything. Writing requires something more than effort. It requires something beyond intelligence and talent and personal virtue.

When I think about my life, it becomes immediately obvious that nothing I achieve can primarily be the result of my own personal virtue. There are many worlds (some of them just down the street from where I live) that are not conducive to the hobby of writing down stories. And the majority of human beings have lived in these worlds. The fact that I don’t is not through any virtue of my own. It’s because of the conscious and unconscious struggle of millions of people.

The fact that I even have a language to play around with is the result of a hundred thousand years of struggle. I didn’t invent these words, but someone did. Every word that I use…every rhetorical device…every structural and story element…was a result of someone’s inspiration.

And the same is true of ideas or plots or pleasant turns of phrase. Every idea that I’ve had which is even mildly original is just a slight improvisation on something I’ve read or heard or seen. And the person who gave the idea to me was also engaged in that same process of making slight refinements to someone else’s idea.

And if I eventually tell a story that’s worthwhile, it won’t be because I worked hard…it will be because the story was out there, lurking almost pre-assembled. It’s because a million other storytellers had picked it up and worked on pieces of it. It’s because a billion other people had rolled the words around in their mouths. When I write it, I might perfect it (or perhaps just produce a frustrating failure that will be refined by some future writer), but I won’t have created it.

My job as a writer is to just be open to sensing those stories and writing them down. Of course, it’s possible that I won’t find any, but if that’s the case, then the only way I am at fault is if I somehow blocked myself off or perverted the stories that came to me. But if those stories do find me, then most of the credit doesn’t belong to me; it belongs to the billions of people who originally dreamed them.

This quasi-mystical theory on writing is basically a mash-up of two lectures. The first is Elizabeth Gilbert giving an amazing TED talk on inspiration (originally sent to me by my friend Bradley).

And the second is Barry Lopez being interviewed by Bill Moyers (which I originally saw via Mumpsimus, several years ago).

In this last interview, Lopez says

Kazumasa San said to me, “Your work is to take care of the spiritual interior of the language.” And he said in Japanese this word we use, kotodama, means that each word has within it a spiritual interior. The word is like a vessel that carries something ineffable. And you must be the caretaker for that. You must be careful when you use language to look at every part of the word and make sure that you’re showing respect for it in the place that you’ve given it to live in the sentence.

But I see all of us engaged in the same thing. And that is the invention of the story. And the story to me is the brilliance of storytelling is that it’s the only and the best protection we have against forgetting.

I think, what is at the core of every story. I mean, how many novels have you put down and said to yourself, “Oh, I never knew that.” Mostly you know it all, but you forget it. And you close a book and you say, “I knew that, but I’d forgotten it. And I am so glad to be reminded of what I intend to do and who I am. And what– and how I want to conduct myself in the world.”

Where I start from is ethical responsibility to an audience. The creation of something that is as beautiful as you can make it. And that in some way ensures that what we dream, what we really desire, not for ourselves, because that’s what you do when you’re a kid, but for children- how will you ensure some possibility here by making sure we don’t forget where we’re going or what we’re up to.

Nowadays, I try to write every single day (the last day on which I wrote nothing at all was July 6th, 2011). But on some days “write” means “scribble down a hundred words of useless surreality”. Because I’ve been travelling and kind of overscheduled and really sleep-deprived, the last eight days have been a lot less productive than I normally prefer.

Today was the first solid day for writing that I’ve had all week, and I faced a really interesting reaction. I was actually scared to open up the computer and commit to some serious writing. It was so odd, and in some ways it made me really nostalgic. I used to feel this way all the time. Every single writing day involved a monumental effort just to get started. I had to look at the blank page, then browse the internet, then look at it again, and go away and come back, and really force my fingertips onto the keyboard.

Nowadays, that almost never happens. I might procrastinate for a half-hour or an hour. And sometimes I’m like, “No, I’ll write later today…now I’m going to nap instead.” And other times I might decide, “Today is just going to be a one hour day”. But I rarely feel that fear*. Instead, I just fire up Freedom, allocate however many minutes, and start writing. I’ve bridged this barrier so many times that it’s not scary anymore.

Except…today it was. It was really interesting, and it really reminded me of how easy it is to for me to not write anything for weeks or months at a time. 

*I do sometimes feel other fears. For instance, sometimes I have no good story ideas, and I’m just sitting at my computer trying to free-write a story into existence, and I wonder how it was that I’ve ever before written a story in my life–it seems so incredibly dificult!–and I wonder if I will ever again be able to write a good one. But that fear doesn’t actually stop me from writing.

My really good reading streak terminated awhile ago (with Great Expectations). Since then, I’ve had a whole month of books that were only semi-satisfying:  Adventures Of Hucklebery Finn; The Performance of Self In Everyday Life; Put Out More Flags; and a few others. The month was really only rescued by two books. The first was The Power And The Glory and the second was Arlie Russell Hochschild’s best-selling 1989 book-length study  The Second Shift.

Unlike most feminist polemics (The Feminine Mystique; The Beauty Myth; The Female Eunuch; The Second Sex), Hochshild’s book is not a polemic (not that there’s anything wrong with polemics). It’s an anthropological study. Over a period of ten years,  Hochshild observed fifty or so households in which both parents had paid employment and had young children. The purpose of the study was to observe the ways in which men and women divided up the routine household work: fixing things, paying bills, cleaning, cooking, and childcare.

Even before this study came out, a number of time-use studies had shown that even when both husband and wife worked full-time jobs, women did the majority of the household labor. After averaging these studies, Hochshild concluded that, when household work and paid labor were added together, wives worked fifteen more hours per week than their husbands. This added up to an additional month of twenty-four hour days every year. Hochschild called this additional labor “the second shift”. The idea was that women work one shift at their job and then they come home and work another shift at home.

So Hochschild was not even close to being the first person to demonstrate this inequity. Her study was about something different. She wanted to get right into the nitty-gritty of marriages and look at how husbands and wives went about rationalizing this inequitable split in labor.

By the time Hochschild was writing, several waves of women’s liberation had come and gone. At least half the families she surveyed said that household work should be split evenly. Most of the rest said that the men should do at least one third of the household work. However, she found that only in very few of these households were these principles being born out in practice.

She observed husbands and wives in order to see how they, in fact, split the labor. And then she questioned them in order to figure out what she thought about that split. And then she selected ten case studies that she thought best represented the trends she’d observed and presented them in considerable detail.

The result is some spell-binding storytelling. This book is like nothing I’ve ever read. If it was a short-story collection, it would win the Pulitzer prize. There are many stories about the psychology of domestic tedium, but there are few stories that delve so insightfully into the compromises that are required to make a house keep running.

For instance, her first case study is about a couple–Nancy and Evan Holt–who have recently had a major dispute over labor-sharing. Nancy and Evan both have fairly decent jobs (he is a social worker, I forget what he does). And Nancy had given an ultimatum to her husband. He needed to start cooking. He needed to start cleaning. He needed to start doing half of everything. She built schedules. She made plans. He agreed to them. Then he ignored them. He didn’t cook or clean when he was supposed to. He let everything fall apart until Nancy did it.

At this point, most of the women in Hochschild’s study would have just quietly started doing the extra work. But Nancy stepped in and fought over this for several years. Finally, however, they came to a compromise that stuck. Evan would be responsible for the “downstairs” and Nancy would be responsible for the “upstairs”.

The “upstairs” included the living room, dining room, kitchen, and bedrooms. The downstairs consisted of Evan’s basement workroom (and the dog). They created a myth of equitable sharing that basically entailed Nancy doing everything (except walk the dog).

However, Hochschild felt that Nancy was quietly working on getting her revenge. She was winding up their son Joey and making him excited at night, so he’d have a hard time going to sleep, and so she’d be taken from the marital bed to coax him to sleep, every night. As a result, she’d stopped having sex with her husband. She’d also basically excluded her husband from any active involvement in their son’s life.

This was also the pattern with the Steins. In this case, two married lawyers used their money to buy their way out of almost every chore, except a few hours of childcare. But those hours were put in by the mother, Jessica and not by the father, Seth. Seth comes to resent Jessica because she has no time for him, and she resents him because he has no time for their children (time that would relieve her from some of the burden of childcare). As a result, she slowly, and unconsciously, estranges the children from their father.

I could go on and on. This book is full of amazing stories. And these stories are not rare. These are not horror stories. And most of these families would not be considered unhappy families. This book is not about some weird, crazy, fucked-up subset of families…no, to some extent, almost every family in America that had two working parents (i.e. your family, my family, and the happiest family that you can think of) fell prey to some of these pathologies.

In her afterward, Hochschild reviews some of the latest research and concludes that the work-gap has narrowed. Now, women only work, on average, seven more hours per week than their husbands. The second shift has gotten shorter, but it has not disappeared.

Yep, along with about 2,000 other people. Still, at least this means my pitch–the first round of selection was done on the basis of  a 300 word pitch–was not completely horrible. I’m not sure I’ll get through the second round (which is done on the basis of the first few chapters of the novel). At least one of the agents who has rejected me said, basically, that she liked my query but not my initial chapters. Still, whatever. I am going to market the hell out of this novel, but I am definitely never, ever going to revise it again. The door is so unambiguously closed to more revision on this damn thing. Thus, it doesn’t really matter to me what people say about the novel itself. It would be alot more troubling to me if the pitch was bad. Writing that thing was really annoying, and I definitely don’t want to have to rewrite it.

I am, however, currently thinking about my next novel project, which I hope to start drafting sometime in the next few months.

You can hear it here. I only listened to a few minutes, because I have already read this story way too many times to be able to spend half an hour listening to it, but those few minutes seemed pretty good. I think the story has a voice, tone and structure that lends itself well to narration (and Kate Baker is, reputedly, a very good narrator).

I feel bad that this blog has just been all self-congratulatory squibs since the end of December, but, hey, I’ve been busy. I’m still in Madrid, doing…things. I’m also reading Middlemarch. It is really, really, really good. I think it might be the most engrossing book I’ve read since War And Peace. I just keep reading and reading and reading and even though there’s still more to read, I’m actually  happy that I’m not done with it yet.

How do all these things keep getting past me? I was just reading the novel because it’s on all those lists of classics. I don’t think I’ve ever seen (or heard of, or read about) a single person saying that this book is unmissable. Like, how is it that I can have three dozen people tell me to read the new China Mieville or Catherynne Valente novel but can have exactly zero people tell me, “Hey, Middlemarch is really good. You definitely need to go read it right now”. Is there some corner of the internet where people work hard to distinguish between the stale classics (like, I dunno…Rousseau’s Confessions) and the ones that are still blazingly alive? Or did all the other people who care about this stuff just go and major in English in college and, hence, arrive into maturity already in full possession of this sort of knowledge (to them, I say….well…I sure do know alot about supply and demand).

My Terminator 2 retelling “The Driver” has been published in this week’s Nature. I only know about this because I google myself each and every day.

I’m in Spain, so there won’t be too too much blog updating in the next few weeks, but I’m just popping in to note that I sold a story to Apex Magazine. I actually sold it on January 1st, which was a great way to start the New Year. I’ve been submitting to Apex for five or six years now, ever since it was a fairly minor paper magazine. Since then, it’s gotten better at a much better rate than I have, and has reached the point where it’s actually publishing alot of interesting stories, so I’m really happy to have finally sold to them.

If anyone who knows me from Synergy ’06′-’07 is reading this blog, then you might perhaps have heard me expound (in a rather drunken fashion) on the idea that eventually became the genesis (five years later) of this story. Vive la Darcy.

Oh, also, my story “What Everyone Remembers” is up at Clarkesworld. I think that I like this story more than anything else I’ve ever published, so I encourage you to read it.