Gary Gives Advice on Writing

Hiding out at the dive bar, huh?

I guess that answers the--
'Did you see the Times review' question
That everybody's avoiding asking you

Brian, can I have a scotch and soda?
Thanks

Yes, I've been here before
Many times
There's even a chair named after me in the back

It's a great bar

Dark, dank, lots of stone--smells like an aquarium
The perfect place to go
When your book's been skewered

When I'm doing well
I can't set foot in the place
It just doesn't feel right
But when I'm low
It's like warm milk on a cold day
It calms me

Did I ever tell you about when I was in the tsunami?

Well, not in it
But running from it?

It wasn't the big one
It was a smaller one
But when you're running from a tsunami
Big and small are fairly relative terms

All I knew was that if I stopped running
I would die

I have bad knees
I've had them since college
You kill your knees when you play college football
But if you're bad at it
You decimate them
So I could barely run away from a kid on tricycle
But you see death coming at you
And suddenly my knees remember what it's like
To be fifteen again
And I'm running

Anyway, let me back up for a second
The Brown Basement had just come out
And it sank--I don't know what I was thinking naming it The Brown Basement
Even if it had been good nobody would have wanted to read it

So I take this trip to this island off the coast of wherever
To get away from it all
This was before I discovered dive bars
And I'm eating breakfast at the hotel restaurant
Which looked out over the water
And the next thing I know
People are running and screaming
And I'm running and screaming with them
And the one thing that immediately jumped into my mind and stayed there
The whole time I was fleeing was--

'Please God, don't let the last thing I write be The Brown Basement'

Somehow I survive
I climbed a tree or something
Suddenly I'm Tarzan
Anyway--

I survived
That's the point

And I came back to New York
And started writing, right away

My agent kept saying--Relax, you've had a book fail
And you had a wave thrown at you
You need to rest

But I didn't want to rest
I wanted to write
I wanted to create
In the face of death
I wanted to run from the wave

So the following year
I had another book out
Rushed out
To capitalize on my survival story

...And that one tanked too

Which wasn't supposed to happen
At least that didn't line up with the narrative I had created in my mind
So...

I kept writing

This was the nineties

When I had two flops, two successes, and one book
That everybody thought was 'just okay'

You know, the second big success
Came at the tail end of all that other stuff
And people said I was 'back on track'

I hate that expression

It implies that my failures
Were a deviation
From the path I was supposed to be on

When really, the failures were a crucial part of that path
I couldn't have written the good stuff
If I hadn't committed to the crap

You have to get it all out of your system
That's not the trick

The trick is to surround yourself with people who say--

We know you're going to fail
And we're going to stick with you when you do
Because we know eventually
You'll succeed again

It's easy to believe in success
What's hard is believing in what someone's trying to do
Even when they're failing at it

So when that publisher of yours drops you
Which he will, because he's a walking armpit
Say good riddance
And find someone who'll actually support you

That's my advice on writing
That it's not about the writing

Just like acting isn't about acting
And dancing isn't about dancing

It's about doing it without worrying about it
So that when you're running away from a wall of water
You're not thinking about what the asshole from the Times said about you

Now finish your drink
And go home

You've got some writing to do