Riff: ‘Be Wrong as Fast as You Can’

Illustration by Tom Gauld

Here's a partial, redacted-for-the-sake-of-my-dignity list of stuff I once aspired to write but never did: a "Mamma Mia!"-esque rock opera called "Bastards of Young," based on the songs of the Replacements. A sitcom set in Brooklyn that inverts "I Love Lucy," so that the wife plays the stable, amiable breadwinner while her lovable loon of a husband hatches ridiculous schemes, often involving the production of artisanal goods. A thriller about the ultimate rogue trader who concocts a single, diabolical transaction to blow up the financial system. An HBO show, called "Upstate," about a burned-out corporate raider who returns to his hometown outside Buffalo to save his father's failing liquor store and ends up trying to rescue the whole town from the double scourge of unemployment and alcoholism. Too depressing? How about this: A reality show in which retired hockey greats like Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier compete against each other coaching teams of — ready for the deal clincher? — inner-city kids who've never been on ice skates.

If you had the time, believe me, I could flesh out these ideas for you, explain their origins, describe in fine detail my vision of the characters and plots and how it would all coalesce into something awesome.

Or not. For at least 25 years, I've been serial daydreaming like this, recording hundreds of ideas in a sequence of little notebooks that I have carried around and then stacked in a shoe box in my closet, a personal encyclopedia of undone to-do's. Sometimes, when I'm searching for something in my closet and I see the box, I have a flashback to my first-grade report card: "Hugo has the gift of a rich, active imagination, but needs to work on his follow-through skills."

My situation, I know, is not unique. Who doesn't have big plans they never get around to acting on? Everybody swaps ideas with his friends about the excellent TV show they'd make or the groundbreaking movie they'd write. And a couple of my grand schemes got an inch or two off the ground — an agent lunch, a pitch meeting, a trip to L.A., a flurry of e-mail filled with exclamation points — though never much higher than that. And along the way, I also became editor of the magazine you are now reading, so it's not as if I became mired exclusively in a world of delusional ambition. It's just that for way too long, I held on to the fantasy of a completely different professional life, and I can't help wondering why certain creative endeavors just seemed impossible to make happen.

I know, writers have been complaining for eons about the weight of their burden, and it's not attractive. But I've been around it long enough to know that writing anything good that's longer than a paragraph isn't easy for anybody, except for maybe J. J. Abrams. You can't explain how people do it. Some of the most successful screenwriters, novelists, television producers and rock-opera librettists I know are about a hundred times lazier than I am. They take long afternoon naps, play lots of pickup basketball and appear to accomplish little or nothing for months at a time. And let me tell you, their ideas do not all crackle with scintillating originality.

So what am I missing? What is that elusive thing that turns some people's daydreams into their next novel for F.S.G.?

Earlier in my professional life, as I began to do all right as an editor, I naïvely discounted it as something I never intended to stick with. A respectable occupation, I thought, while preparing myself for the Masterwork of Spectacular Brilliance that would eventually define me.

One of my pet theories about why I could never actually produce anything of brilliance was that I was cursed with a comfortable existence. What might have been my creative prime was spent in New York City in the 1990s, a flush time for the young and college-educated. Magazine-editor jobs paid O.K. and were relatively easy to get, especially compared with now. Maybe I would've been better off in the 1970s, when a young person with ambitions like mine had to take a hard job as a means to his artistic ends. Would such sacrifice, I wondered, have sharpened my desire to make it as a writer?

All you have to do is read Mark Jacobson's classic New York magazine depiction of cabdrivers in the 1970s to know that's a joke. The story is about nighttime cabbies who aspired to be actors or poets or playwrights. Jacobson was one of them. His original plan was to drive three nights a week, write three nights a week and party one night a week. But as he watched his fellow drivers get sucked in to the working life, he realized how the daily grind slowly robbed them of their dreams.

"The Big Fear," Jacobson writes, "is that times will get so hard that you'll have to drive five or six nights a week instead of three. The Big Fear is that your play, the one that's only one draft away from a possible showcase, will stay in your drawer. The Big Fear is thinking about all the poor stiff civil servants who have been sorting letters at the post office ever since the last Depression and all the great plays they could have produced. The Big Fear is that, after 20 years of schooling, they'll put you on the day shift. The Big Fear is you're becoming a cabdriver."

Hugo Lindgren is the editor of the magazine.

Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang

Riff: ‘Be Wrong as Fast as You Can’

Dengan url

http://koraninternetonline.blogspot.com/2013/01/riff-abe-wrong-as-fast-as-you-cana.html

Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya

Riff: ‘Be Wrong as Fast as You Can’

namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link

Riff: ‘Be Wrong as Fast as You Can’

sebagai sumbernya