In Praise of Shitmakers

Imposters of the world, unite

You know what they call a player in Major League Baseball who strikes out, on average, 7 out of 10 at bats?

An All-Star.

You know what they call the pitcher who throws, on average, that many strikeouts?

Nothing.

It’s never happened. Not 7 out of 10, not 6, not 5, not 4.

I’m not a fan of sports, much less sports analogies, much less sports analogies as applied to writing, but if you’re a writer, it’s worth noting these numbers because they underline a rarely acknowledged truth:

We write shit.

You, me, Rushdie, Atwood, Twain, Faulkner.

All of us.

I am telling you this because I have been telling myself this of late as I work on a new novel. I have hundreds of pages written this far, and maybe, if I’m lucky, one or two of them is any good. Sentences, I mean, not pages. Two good pages would be an absolute miracle.

Some years ago, I wrote a 300-page draft of my novel “HOPE: A Tragedy,” culled down from thousands of pages of notes and scenes. It was garbage. From that draft I saved one sentence, and started again. That’s worse than God ditching everything from Adam but a single rib. There are 206 bones in the human body; my percentage of shit is way higher than His.

99 percent of what we write is utter garbage. You, me, Rushdie, Atwood, Twain, Faulkner. Horrible, terrible, “Max, please burn all this shit when I’m dead” rubbish. To call ourselves “writers” is to put a very positive spin on it: we are, more accurately, writers of shit. Pages and pages and pages of shit.

Beckett’s “Watt” Shit. There are four more volumes of this.

One afternoon, some men came to Dostoyevsky’s home to inform him of some prize or honor he had received. They praised him, lauded his work, told him he was the greatest Russian novelist of his time.

When they left, Fyodor sighed, turned to his wife and said, “If only they knew how awful I am.”

Dostoyevsky’s “Karamazov” shit

There is a steep cost to this overly-positive framing. We become frozen, “blocked,” fearful of the blank page. Then we tell ourselves we’re not really writers, that we’re (gasp) imposters.

We are.

You, me, Rushdie, Atwood, Twain, Faulkner.

Every last one of us.

We don’t “write.” We write shit. Some of us are desperate enough to write so much shit that eventually something non-shitty comes out. Then we get to prance around book festivals and award galas with our heads held high, noses in the air, as if we aren’t ordinary shitmakers like everyone else. We are, of course - just more desperate.

Kafka’s shit. Out of frame: lighter fluid, matches.

An honest baseball player, asked at a party what he does for a living, would reply, “I strike out.” An honest pitcher would say, “I give up runs.” Me, I write shit. Reams of the stuff. Also, I doodle. I draw bad cartoons, geometric shapes, 3-D letters like a schoolboy bored in Biology. What do I do for a living, you ask? Truthfully? I stare off into the distance while my coffee gets cold, then I write something shitty. How about you?

Accept it. Embrace it. This is the job. Writing shit. A garbageman may claim he’s in the recycling business, that he works in the environmental sector, but the truth is he collects trash. There’s no shame in it, unless we pretend otherwise.

When I first began writing, in my early twenties, I saved my Word documents with the name of the project - “Novel Rev 1,” or “Memoir Rev 2.”

It drove me mad. Nothing came out. How could it?

Now I name my docs “Shit 1,” or “Shit 2” or “Stupid Shit, New Rev 4.” It works. It frees me. It makes the dreaded task easier. Not easy – just easier. Because here’s another truth: writing shit is difficult. Writing shit is much more difficult than writing non-shit. Writing non-shit is easy: you dip your quill in the inkpot, write a bit, sit back, like what you see and write some more.

“I,” you say proudly, “am I writer.”

Capital W.

But do you have what it takes to write shit? To write utter drivel? Because that’s the real job. And I say, proudly, that shitmakers are heroes. Shitmakers are brave. Shitmakers won’t take no for an answer. You may want to write a classic like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 - but Joe wrote thousands and thousands and thousands of pages of shit, boxes of it, to get there. Shelves of boxes of shit.

Can you?

Hold your head high, Shitmaker! Run to make shit, as much of it as you can! The more shit you make, the closer you get to the non-shit!

A US army soldier who had served in the Gulf War told me that the soldiers took to writing “ETS” on the sides of their jeeps, tents and weapons. It was a message to one another, a reminder, and to the new recruits just arriving. This is what it stood for:

“Embrace The Suck.”

Embrace the suck, they said - the fear, the heat, the food, the death - and you might get through this.

Fight it, and you haven’t got a chance.

Yours in the fetal position, writing shit,

S.

all illustrations by orli auslander