The myth that the most important thing to do if you want to write is read, the actual truth about writing, missed day of stairs, badly burnt, edits, letters, Judy Garland, Powell and Pressburger

Friday 6/13/25

I didn't run stairs yesterday. I'd just written so much, you know? Which isn't to say that most of the times I run stairs I hadn't just written a great deal. But sometimes, it adds up and catches up. I write so much every day. And it's not "drafting" or "just getting things down." This is highly precise, intense work.

People like to say that the most important thing you need to do in order to write is to read. That's not true. Reading is pretty close to the least of it. You have to write every day. Hours and hours. But more than that, you have to always be writing, every second of your life. In some way. It has to be how you see and feel and hear everything. How you are. Then there's what you expose yourself to. I'd say that a record is more important than someone else's story or book. A show, a film, a scene outside. An animal. A memory. A mistake. Word patterns, thought patterns. Architecture. Math. All of these things are more important for writing than reading someone else's writing.

One reason people make this claim is because without imitating others, they'd have nothing to say and no idea how to anything.

If you write anything that is at all like anything by anyone else, to me, you've failed. To my standards. I expect unique work. Or I wouldn't read it. I'd do something more useful with my time and energy. Almost all writers and people who teach writing use reading as a crutch, not as a way forward or a means to writing better. Your whole life has to be writing to write well. Just to write well. Not to create masterpieces. It is the hardest thing in the world to do well. And it will take everything you got. Or, you can be one of millions of people producing the same shit.

These aren't comforting words, though, are they? And people--especially people who want to be writers, and pretend to be writers, and cosplay being writers and want the community that they think with being a writer which is really just a subculture of enabling and insincerity--want comfort. They don't want the truth. They want things to be easy. Not just as easy as possible, but easy. Look at all of the people now who have AI write books for them. They didn't even write their own books. They don't care. They don't see that as a problem. It has their name on the cover. And that's all they care about. And people lying to them. Telling them they're great, etc. And being able to have writing as their "thing" that makes them special. Their little party piece.

I left the coffee pot on all day yesterday. Didn't stop me from drinking what was in there this morning. To say it was burnt would be an understatement.

Received copy-edited version of the 3400 word Sleepaway Camp with two queries. Tended to the queries this morning and will create an updated file for myself which will go into the horror film book. This editor is very good at this kind of thing. The queries are always for minor things, which can usually be handled with the changing of a word or knocking a few words out and putting a couple different ones in. Usually I retain these changes in my final version. One of them in this case pertained to a reference to Thomas Wolfe--that's right, Thomas Wolfe near the start of a piece about Sleepaway Camp.

My friend Howard sent me two Judy Garland sets I've been looking for. The JSP label puts out really nice collections of her music. The artists that mean the most to me right now in my life are the Grateful Dead, Nick Drake, Laurel and Hardy, Powell and Pressburger, and Judy Garland. I've said that before, but it bears restating. With Powell and Pressburger, it really comes down to two films--A Canturbury Tale and A Matter of Life and Death. I first wrote about them in The Atlantic, pertaining to The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

Watching William Castle's The Tingler again, because I will write about it soon. Boris Karlof and Vincent Price are the two most important actors in horror history, and by a wide gap, I'd say. You can tell a lot of the story of American cinematic horror just between the two of them. Towering presences.

Here's a little behind the scenes peek from yesterday--an email from me to an editor as part of our back and forth. You have to realize, this is how I've always handled myself. This is who I am. I never did anything to any of these people. I've shared a number of emails, cover letters, responses, etc., in these pages over the years. To editors, publishers. The hatred stems from other things--never my conduct or what I do to anyone. The hatred stems from the ability, the track record. All kinds of things. Gender, skin color, how I look. Productivity. Legitimacy. That I am kind is also a problem. The effort I put forth.

Thanks! And I hear you. I guess I just think that the song itself is something that lasts forever and I didn't want to undercut that idea. I feel like as a society people have become so defeatist. You encounter all of these people who are like thirty-one-years-old, and they go on about how old they are. They want to quit early and have excuses to try less, and live less. To tap out, as it were. 

Whereas, Wilson's best work is about the opposite of that. Two days ago he was here, and now he's not, but in my view--and I think in the way that most matters--he is here in his art. The art is both the man and bigger than the man. And even that coda is to me less about a finite amount of time than it is a reminder to be present. To treat that which truly matters as things that are precious. That is, it's not a temporal thing so much as its a vitality thing. 

My first memories of hearing this song were as a kid at probably six or seven. Like on the car radio. And I thought about how different it was than anything else on that oldies station. It was sage. And brave. My father was someone I looked up to, and I could see him having asked himself those questions.

The person who is living well always asks their versions of those questions. I ask myself how to keep going, what might I write, or try. 

Age is age, yes, but calendars are misleading. And they can be shackling if we allow them to be. Of course, there are levels of meaning in the song. Something can not last forever on the one level, and last forever on another.

Worked some more on "Still Good." I have to think about whether this story should be in There Is No Doubt: Story Girls.