Stop Writing, Start Talking

In a post-literate age, will talking be the new writing?

“The Nothing That is Not There and the Nothing That Is”

            Danny Rubin, who wrote the classic Groundhog Day screenplay and never had another produced, taught at Harvard, and on his faculty page, under “interests,” he wrote ,“Writing/Not Writing.”

When creative people aren’t working, are they working?  Does the time spent thinking about something count?  As a writer, I measure productivity in word counts, but there’s so much that happens before the blinking cursor moves across the screen. I think of Fiona Apple going on Jimmy Kimmel on one of her notoriously long stretches between albums, and she told him that she wished she was spending that time going to college—something she never did, and clearly didn’t need—but instead was watching episodes of Columbo.  But wait—on her last album, she had a song inspired by watching an episode of The Affair, a show where she happened to have the theme song, a very short sea chanty that she fit into other unproductive things.

            But how do we know when we’re unproductive?  One never knows.  Samuel Beckett was transcribing James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake—a book that takes much effort to read, and even more to write—and when Nora, Joyce’s wife, knocked on the door, Joyce said, “Come in.”  Beckett included it in the text.  When Joyce figured out what happened, he said, “Let it stand.” 

“Let it stand” is an unproductive mantra.  You could just transcribe your day without any filter.  Joseph Campbell, the most famous person to teach at Sarah Lawrence, my alma mater, coined a phrase when he urged people to “follow your bliss.”  I heard from a few of his colleagues that he was an anti-Semite, so maybe he didn’t mean everybody, probably not those colleagues and possibly not me if he had gotten to know me and I was not his favorite Jew.  Still, I’d like some bliss, please.  I don’t know if it’s mine to follow, but I’ll have some of it if I am allowed.

            But we are not living in the time of Joyce and Beckett, not by a long shot.  And fewer people know who said “follow your bliss,” and instead say that they are “speaking my truth,” as is one person owns the truth over another person’s truth.  It used to be everything was subjective, but now it’s somehow the opposite.  I’m not used to quoting Jesus, but he did say to Pilate, “What is truth?”  Is it something written down, or is it something that just feels true? 

            This brings me to one of my favorite living unproductive people, Fran Lebowitz, someone who published a couple of collections of essays a long time ago, one children’s book, and an occasional Vanity Fair piece.  She says she doesn’t have writer’s block, she has writer’s blockade.  For years, she has been making a good living riffing at college campuses and anywhere else what would have her.  Martin Scorsese became so fascinated with her, he made a documentary following around called Public Speaking.  Then, right before Covid dried up her speaking gigs, he made an entire Netflix series following her around New York as she complained and remembered when things were better, though she was complaining then, too. 

I, a writer with a few books behind me and jumping through various hoops to get the next one out there, am now wondering if I am going about this all wrong.  I’m banging my head against the wall to get my weird book into the world, and here is Fran, with two book contracts that will never be fulfilled now with a sweet Netflix deal and an always effusive audience with Marty—there was an SNL bit about it—all based on not writing.  And I see all these nervous young people trying to break in with their recently minted MFAs and that anxious moment of their agents getting their work out there.  Bars from Brooklyn to Iowa City and beyond are filled with these people who will drunkenly describe their thesis projects, the clips they are amassing, the contacts they are making right in that bar right now.  The memo hasn’t gone out yet.  In the future, I think we will all be in Franistan.  No one will have the attention span to read anything longer than, oh, I don’t know, a Substack column.  The less sharp the people are, but sharper algorithms will become.  There will be an MFA in talking, and creative writing all just become its own form of branding.  And if you don’t like to write, the future is coming really soon.  You will love it. 

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