danbarden.com

I had an apartment in the East Village for seven years after I got out of grad school. It was about the size of a suburban closet. It was near good cheap restaurants and there was a playground across the street where people ran their dogs at night. I could see the top of the World Trade Center from my bedroom window. I wrote in a small room beside an airshaft, and sometimes I met prostitutes and crack addicts in the hallway outside my door, but not too often: the neighborhood was quickly gentrifying. Actually, by New York standards, it had already gentrified. The whores and addicts were the afterglow of an earlier, rougher time.

It was in that apartment that I received the news of the death of my first novel. It had been rejected by something like 40 publishers, but, at the last moment, it was “optioned” by a beautiful book publisher in the South who asked me to rewrite the ending. Then, after working hard for six months by the light of notes given me by the editor, I got the big thumbs down. My agent gave me a call and said we should “put this one in the drawer.” And there went three years of my life. It was a weird moment. I was standing in my kitchen beside a bland Formica table that I’d bought at IKEA, and I thought that I should stop writing. The idea that I should stop writing had been a best friend for years. When I was in grad school, I started each day with an hour of meditation on whether I should have gone to Law School. This time, though, I thought I had better reasons.

What was interesting was the next thought, right after I hung up on my agent, standing there in my kitchen. Stop writing? What’s that got to do with anything? That’s like saying you should stop flossing your teeth.

That’s when I knew that I was completely screwed. Apparently, I was going to keep writing no matter what happened.

The time that immediately followed that “failure” was one of the most amazing in my life. I feel badly for people who never get crushed by their desires. Maybe God doesn’t love them as much as the rest of us. I spent at least six months with my face pressed up against the sour smell of my inability to accomplish my heart’s desire. I started searching for answers in places that I would never have thought to look before: metaphysical books, prayer, friends that knew nothing about publishing.

Then, one evening, I was talking on the phone to a woman with the unlikely but beautiful name of Anastasia Simone. She was a music video producer in L.A., and I have no idea why were talking. I was sitting in a salmon-colored overstuffed chair beside my window that looked over the playground/dog park and I was telling her how stumped I felt by my unsuccess. Anastasia said something that I will never forget: “Whenever I feel jealous of someone who’s doing better than I am, I find that, invariably, they’re willing to do something that I’m not willing to do. In my business, it’s usually the willingness to not have any kind of life. But it’s always something. A place that they’ll go where I won’t.”

I knew this was one of the best things anyone had ever said, but I couldn’t figure out how it applied to me. I worked hard, I knew the right people, and I was – forgive me for being blunt – more talented than I needed to be. I could have seen myself having a good career with half the talent I had. So, what, exactly, was Anastasia saying to me, and what was I supposed to learn from it?

We talked some more, and somewhere in the middle of the conversation, I got it. I thought: you’ve never been willing to stop being a victim of the publishing industry. In an instant, I got the whole ugly picture. I knew why my book hadn’t sold and I knew why my next book wouldn’t sell either. I loved too much the exact place where I was: tortured, failing, but with plenty of good stories to tell about why I was tortured and failing. My mouth made a big “o” and I got off the phone quickly. I don’t think Anastasia will ever know how much she helped me. I even told her once, but I still don’t think she knows.

There’s a question that writers get all the time. I used to think it was the most awful question anyone could ever ask: How’s the writing going? Forgive me for being an jerk, but I never thought that question meant what it pretended to mean. Mostly, I was convinced that people were asking, Hey, I was thinking about selling out on my dreams, and I just wanted to see if you’d sold out on your dreams, too? Can you help me out here? The trouble was that I always pretended this was an honest question, and so I would try to answer it “honestly.” Still, mostly what I said was bullshit or, to be generous with myself, a version of the truth that prominently featured myself in the role of victim. “Well, you know Algonquin optioned the book, but then they didn’t like the new ending. I did everything they asked, and then they didn’t like their own suggestions. Can you fucking believe that?” Stuff like that. Or worse, stuff like “pretty good. I’m still trying to finish the John Wayne book. I can’t complain.”

Nothing that I said was untrue, but it was a version of the truth that featured myself at the mercy of forces that were beyond my control: either the publishing industry or my own fickle “inspiration.” What I learned on the phone with Anastasia was that I had to tell a different kind of story, a story that lived on the other side of the truth. The side of the truth where I wasn’t a victim. I decided then and there, still perched in my salmon-colored chair, that the next person who asked me that annoying question was going was going to hear a different answer. I’d look them right in the eye and say, “Thanks for asking. My writing is awesome. I’m having so much fun, and this new project I’m working on is the best thing I’ve ever written. I’m breaking through with this thing very soon.”

When I put this spiritual discipline into action I discovered – almost immediately – that people were often uncomfortable with my new version of the story. Or at least it seemed that way to me. Maybe it’s just that people don’t have much to say when you tell them how well things are going. It’s not a story that begs a lot of questions: What exactly do you mean by awesome? Do you mean awesome like the best orgasm in the world or awesome like winning the lottery? No, really, I’m interested. At the time, though, I imagined that I was getting to them in some deep uncomfortable place that didn’t want to hear about dreams coming true. I figured it freaked them out. I’m more generous than that now – maybe – but I still think most people are freaked out by good news.

My life is very different now. For one thing, I no longer work in a tiny East Village apartment. I work in an attic of my house. There are skylights and room to dream big dreams. When my wife and I moved in, my mother-in-law took a look at my plan for my office, and she insisted that I turn my desk away from the wall and toward the middle of the room. She said this was feng shui, but she also made a sharp comment about how it looked like I was “being punished.” I asked her where she thought my desk should go, and she placed it at a jaunty angle toward the center of the room. More than anything else that happened my first year in Indiana, that set me free as a writer. People assume that because most writing is done while you’re alone that it’s an alone thing, like masturbation or prayer or clipping your nose hairs. I don’t think so anymore. When my desk was up against the wall – where it had always been – I think I imagined that my brain waves would bounce against the sheet rock back into my brain and thereby amplify the effect of my own thoughts. Turning my desk out toward the room and the sunshine and the rest of the world stood for a different way of doing business. Less a transmitter and more a receiver. Less a conversation with myself and more a conversation with the world.

Because I was born in a Western culture during the 20^th Century, I often have to imagine the workings of my mind and spirit as machinery. I like to think that there are teams of engineers in there who are responsible for all the operations of my life. At the point that I stopped complaining about my writing career – no, let’s just call it what it was: whining – the team that was responsible for stifling my achievement in the world had no choice but to close up shop. I imagine a little guy in a hardhat walking into the control room, touching thoughtfully the pens in his plastic pocket protector, and saying, “That’s it, boys. The funding has dried up. You’re all being reassigned.” And then all these little Nasa-style computer geeks throw down their headsets and switch off their computers and move onto other parts of me. Many of them, I have to believe, got reassigned to the Rationalizations for Bad Diet and No Exercise Department, a team that’s been consistently exceeding their goals for the last ten years or so.