A Cool Hip Writer Who Has Definitely Had Sex Finishes #NaNoWriMo

T.S. Eliot was wrong; November is the cruelest month. Each autumn my timeline fills to the brim with the pathetic mewlings of newborn would-be “writers,” fresh out of the cradle and fumbling towards a completed thought, a novel’s worth, even. Each fall feels like The Fall. I do not remember the prelapsarian world that existed before #NaNoWriMo. I thank the pagan deity I allude to often but do not worship that it is December.

All great artists have their imitators, or as they say in Latin, vulgus imitemur. But November marks the ne plus ultra of a growing coterie of my impostors. From laptop computers to my signature sparse moustache, to the adoption of thick knitted sweaters (a style of clothing I invented for fall), I can take it no more. After all, what are these infants playing at? Rome was not built in a day, The Rise and Fall Of the Roman Empire not writ in a month. One cannot simply pull on the vocation of “writer” as one might pull on a vaguely androgynous vintage silk shirt that you stole from your girlfriend because honestly, you’re post-gender and don’t care who that scares. A true artist participates in National Novel Writing Life. I once literally killed a mockingbird. I consider all of my jests infinite.

This #No was particularly bad, with many of those I thought colleagues participating actively on social media. I do not trust computers. I will not desecrate my work with tweets. I write all my first drafts in a pencil I whittled with my teeth. My new novel is a battle, a struggle, not a hashtag. I have worked for it, bled for it, wept for it. But as Dickens wrote, “we need never be ashamed of our tears, or our underage mistresses for whom we left our longterm partners.” My novel is Heideggerian in its phenomenological approach, its being-towards-death and its controversial though contested association with Nazism. A month is not enough to crack the surface, to even begin the foreplay required to seduce Sweet Lady Literature. My writing process is more opaque than my famously difficult prose poetry. To spare you the agony of attempting that which you are not ready for, allow me to let you in to a day in the life of a writer who Means It.

Upon rising, contemplate the sea.
I do this most mornings, Movember or not. My routine is this: awaken, Instagram then smoke the remainder of a joint beside my bed, curse the sky, drink black coffee, contemplate the sea. The sea is important. To write, a man must traverse murky oceans of images without drowning in the bottomless depths of metaphor or being eaten by a shark that is a simile. He must be in but not of the sea. This is why women cannot write great books. They are too full of water already.

The ritualistic murder of my doubts
Lying quiescent while asleep, my self-loathing often emerges just at the time I am closest to my novelistic zenith. Jealous of my own brilliance, thoughts like “No one wants to read a novel about whittling,” “You are not Goethe,“ and “The phrase ‘she squealed as he entered her’ is not appealing or even particularly accurate” can emerge, seeking to destroy the wings of a literary Icarus, flying too close to the sun. I write these thoughts down and destroy them, or leave them as Amazon comments on the works of my rivals.

Consideration of important topics for art
Great novels are about: old ships; fraught family dinners; a barren duchess; what is a gun; drugs; orgiastic cults/pleasure communities; hard drugs; melancholic smoking in strange hotel rooms; a story about a wolf where the wolf is masculinity; alienation in the modern world (make a big to do about smartphones); manipulative bitches with hot mouths; hundreds of pages of descriptions of a mountain; a man builds a ship but the ship is his dad; alcoholism onboard a submarine; a group of misfits hunting the most dangerous game (love); many prostitutes crying about a soldier; very, very hard drugs, like so hard you wouldn’t believe; a rich man who is disillusioned with capitalism; wood. These are the only subjects there are.

The unpleasant task of schedule clearing
The creative process is not the time for romantic liasons. While deeply entrenched in writing I rid myself of all distractions of the flesh (unless a member of my Woman Roster is interested in duties as a geisha-cum-amanuensis, for sexual note-taking). Rather than waste new, original words on a task so mundane, I often text the lovers in question a Raymond Carver story in its entirety. If she does not understand, she does not understand me, an important reminder of the power of solitude. Sometimes I will simply send: “I am a cigarette with a body attached to it.” Like, exactly.

Never forget that writing is hard
It’s torture. There’s nothing in the entire world that’s more difficult. And the worst part is, no one talks about how hard it is to write. Everyone thinks it’s easy. It is my calling, personally, to break the culture of silence around the epic challenge of Being A Writer Today. It is crucial to my process that those around me know I am writing a novel and it is Hard. That I am, in effect, a madman — compelled to share, forced to divulge, bursting at the anus with truth-arhea. I arrive at the page from a place of adulation, of a detached pride in my own bravery. It is my hope that more writers will speak out. That together we can reverse the stigma, and finally open up a line of dialogue about how difficult it is to write. God, it’s so hard.

Think about David Foster Wallace
Try not to masturbate.

Monica Heisey is a writer and comedian from Toronto. Her work has appeared in The Toast, The Cut, Rookie, Gawker, VICE, Playboy, and many other web and print publications. Her first book, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Better, comes out Spring 2015. Writing about herself in the third person is a nightmare.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons