Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

I’m a writer. Don’t you want to know my daily routine?

01.02.2013 by David Murray // Leave a Comment

When I was in college and wanted to be a writer, I read a book called Writers on Writing. It was a collection of interviews with famous writers—Isaac Asimov, Ellen Goodman, Ray Bradbury are three that I recall.

Many of those interviews contained writers' accounts of their daily routine. Which surprised me, because who cared how a writer arranged the day? Except, I cared, a lot. Because I still thought then that there was a writer-y way to be in the world, and it seemed like a good way to begin to be that way was to learn how a writer spent the day.

Like Kurt Vonnegut, whose writing routine was recently revealed in a letter to his wife, most writers did most of their writing in the morning. As they still do.

As I do.

I've been writing professionally for two decades. I even have a book out. I bet you want to hear all about my writing day.

I rise at about 6:30. (Note that because I'm a writer, I don't "get up." I "rise.")

I make the coffee and let the dog out and joke with my daughter while my wife urges her to brush her teeth and hair so they can get out the door. (Notice that all these mundane activities are suddenly charming to think of, because it is a writer doing them. He must be doing them in a droll and charming way.)

When the house is empty and quiet, the dog follows me upstairs to my study—(yes, my study)—and curls up on the floor, perhaps hoping, fruitfully today, that I will include him in a warm anecdote about the writer's life. His name is Charlie, and he's an English Springer Spaniel (a sufficiently writer-ish breed, wouldn't you agree?).

I procrastinate the way a writer procrastinates: by writing something other than what he's being paid to write. A nasty letter to someone who has it coming. A less soaring version of the national anthem, called The Rational Anthem. A blog post. Just to sharpen my knives for the real writing.

Then I write—(I do not, as far as you're concerned, go online to check my bank balance, do not call around for weekend tee times, do not call the motorcycle mechanic to check on my bike, do not check email every 10 minutes and Facebook every 15 and visits to this blog every hour, do not scour the Internet looking for a simpler Sloppy Joe recipe)—until about 11:30. 

Then I go for a run outside or I hit the heavy bag in the basement, depending on which you think is a more literary thing to do. (And often more literary doesn't translate to more eccentric. It's cool for a writer to have some regular-guy hobbies. Hunter S. Thompson was a big pro football fan, and I hear Ernest Hemingway liked to fish.)

I eat in front of MSNBC. If Andrea Mitchell is on, I know nothing important can be happening in the world. Then spend 20 minutes answering the routine emails I did not answer (as far as you were concerned) in the morning, while I was WRITING.

Then I lie down. The dog lies down next to me. We sleep. Usually after about 20 minutes, I wake up with a shame-filled panic feeling that years of daily routine have not dulled: Jesus Christ, I am in the prime of my earning years, and sleeping during the workday on a Tuesday!

The dog does not share this feeling, but follows me downstairs as I make a new pot of coffee or to microwave what I didn't drink this morning.

The afternoon, unless I am under an unholy deadline, is an essential winding down, tying up loose ends, making phone calls, gaping at PDF page proofs, or coolly editing the morning's frantic work. There is preparation for tomorrow's main creative task, which looms on a list written in active verbs—"hammer Vital Speeches," "attack video script." And finally, there is listing the ingredients for that "weekday" Sloppy Joe. Molasses is nice-to-have, not need-to-have.

And then I motor off to pick up my daughter at school, and we practice her spelling on the way to the grocery store and she gets the produce and I get the rest and we argue about who's the grossest skinny model on the magazine covers at the checkout line. If I'm feeling especially writer-y, in the parking lot I honk my horn at some jagoff in and teach her what "marplot" means (and how only a jamoke would use marplot when jagoff would do) and I go home and make dinner while having just the right number of drinks to satisfy the expectations of the reading public. (Vonnegut drank to "numb my twanging intellect," he said. I'll go with that.)

Depending on what I have left, a book or TV with my wife.

The writer-y life? As Woody Guthrie would write: There's no such a thing.

Writing is no more and no less than what my novelist mother wrote once in a diary: "Am a writer. Get to call myself that because I write."

How about you?

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // Kurt Vonnegut, the writing life, writer's daily routine, writers, writers on writing

Getting old is like getting young again, almost

01.16.2012 by David Murray // Leave a Comment

I would hesitate to divulge the original size of my ego, if I thought my readers hadn't sensed it long ago.

In a college notebook that I filled in 1989 when I was a 20-year-old English major at Kent State University (and living at Sunrise Apartments). I was preparing to become a writer—writing about becoming one—and I predicted (forgive me, Fitzgerald) that I probably wouldn't feel satisfied if I became the next Kurt Vonnegut, the next Ernest Hemingway or even the next William Shakespeare.

Yes, my notebook really does say that. Someday you'll be able to look at that it at the Smithsonian, but you'll have to wear special white cotton gloves.

And now I'm reading the new biograhy of Kurt Vonnegut, and I am finding out that though Vonnegut was a "reliably funny" guy, he wasn't happy or even all that pleasant, and his children considered the great humanist a distant and even scary presence. (Though you'd be scary too if you had seven kids tearing around the house while you were trying to write Slaughterhouse Five.)

Anyway, this new information surprisingly returns to me the courage of my youthful conviction, that no, I would not be satisfied to be the next Kurt Vonnegut, because the the last one didn't even like the job.

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // And So It Goes, Kurt Vonnegut, writing ambition

Friday Happy Hour Video: Gonzo, going bald

11.04.2011 by David Murray // 3 Comments

Going to Copenhagen tomorrow, to do my Speechwriting Jam Session for Danish scribes attending Rhetor Logograf 2011.

For the two-b.m. plane ride, I'm taking one last volume of Hunter S. Thompson's letters. Why last? What was once a young freelance writer's inspiration has become a middle-aged dad's guilty pleasure. More of an anxious pleasure, really.

Here's Thompson, in a drunken panic, trying to be the thing he pretended to be at 28, at 43.

I'm determined not to cling to a dying branch because there's no live branch within reach and the dying branch is better than no branch at all and the dying branch got me up this far, didn't it?

Like every older, heavier man who still insists on climbing fucking trees, I need to reach for big green branches. Publicityphoto--Algren(In my most recurring dream, I am unable to bring myself to reach for something for fear I'll fall off the thing I'm holding onto.)

My writing hero Thompson never found the next branch—just kept holding, awkwardly, onto the first one until it broke and he fell out of the tree looking mostly like an asshole—and that's why Fear and Loathing in America (1968-1976) is the last batch of his letters I'm ever going to read.

Kurt Vonnegut seemed like a pretty graceful old man. Maybe I'll pick up the new biography And So It Goes in the airport bookstore, for the ride home.

Postscript: Just read the review in The New York Times: “And So It Goes depicts [the aging Vonnegut] as living in his 'own private rain,' stuck in a 'hexed' second marriage, nursing grudges and running out of writerly inspiration."

Maybe Robin Leach has a book out?

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // And So It Goes, biography, Fear & Loathing in America, Hunter S. Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut

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