Pictures of People in Straw Hats Writing in Sun-Dappled Fields

If you’re a writer, you know.

If you’re a writer, you’ve seen pictures of people with straw hats writing in sun-dappled fields.

If you’re a writer, you’ve seen hundreds of pictures of people with straw hats writing in sun-dappled fields.

You’ve seen them on the covers of writing guides, on advertisements for writing workshops, on posters for writing retreats, on applications for writing contests and on websites that sell acid-free writing notebooks and expensive fountain pens.

And if you’re a writer like me, they make you wish for nuclear holocaust.

I never quite knew why they annoyed me so much until the other day, when I stopped off at a local bookstore/cafe I had never before visited. There on the front window was a flier advertising a writing workshop.

And there she was:

“Finish your novel!” it said. “What’s stopping you???”

Well fuck, I thought. I guess it’s that I haven’t been writing in a cornfield. That was pretty stupid of me! Kafka wrote in the middle of a cornfield, did you know that? Every morning, Franz got up, put on his straw hat, struggled with his tuberculosis, coughed up blood and went to the middle of a cornfield with a mug of Chai Oolong (you know she’s got fucking Chai fucking Oolong in that mug).

Maybe she’s trespassing, I thought. Maybe the farmer is coming through the front door of his farmhouse right now. Maybe the farmer has a gun.

I’m an optimist.

To be fair, I was already in a foul mood. I had come to the bookstore to write, something I really didn’t want to do, not that day, not the day after, not ever again. My novel wasn’t starting, my memoir wasn’t ending. In the past week, I’d had two stories rejected and an op-ed killed. On top of that, I have sciatica from a life of writing hunched over a laptop, a stigmatism from staring at a screen all day, and high blood pressure from trying to earn a living off words.

“Fuck this writing shit,” I’d been thinking.

I’m done.

I’ll drive for Uber. I’ll deliver for DoorDash. I’ll suck dicks at truck stops. I’ll drive people in my Uber to truck stops where I’ll hand them their DoorDash and suck their dicks.

Beside the first flier was another, this one for a writing coach:

Look closely. That’s a manual typewriter. She carried a manual typewriter out into a sun-dappled field. Whose idea of writing is this? She doesn’t need a writing coach she needs a psychiatrist. On the plus side she doesn’t have a straw hat, but perhaps it’s off-camera, resting on the printing press she no doubt dragged out there, too.

The shit hit the sun-dappled fan, though, when I went inside.

Because God help me, the fucking place was beautiful.

It was stunning.

You know the kind: designer lighting, concrete countertops, pristine tables and matching chairs.

Like this one:

And this one:

And this one:

And I was pissed.

Bookstores should be ugly. Bookstores should be a mess. They shouldn’t look like Zara. You shouldn’t walk in and wonder where Menswear is. They should look like a madman lives there and he could come home at any minute, and he isn’t going to take too kindly to your looking through his madman writings when he does. They should look like the hastily abandoned headquarters of some underground rebel group: books piled everywhere, rickety chairs strewn about, old tables piled high with yellowing papers, tiny windows blocked by heavy curtains, the kind of place that gets its front door kicked in by The Authorities now and then. If they did look that way, I assure you more people would read. There would be lines around the corner. I used to work in advertising, trust me: crazy is our brand.

And so it was there, standing there at the entry to this depressingly beautiful bookshop, that I realized why pictures of people with straw hats writing in sun-dappled fields anger me so. It’s not because they’re unrealistic. It’s because I think they - and pretty bookstores - are genuinely destructive. Books literally saved my life. If I hadn’t met the voices within them when I was young – the mad, the bad, the crazy, the funny, the fearless, the fearful - I’m afraid I would have long ago come down on the “not to be” side of the Hamlet’s conundrum. Books were radical, writers were lunatics, bookstores had an element of danger about them.

Now it’s all just concrete countertops and pretty people in sun-dappled fields.

I think this is bad – bad for writers, bad for books, and bad for readers. It’s antiseptic. It’s soft. It’s “wellness.” It’s “creativity.” It’s Zara.

And writing isn’t.

Books aren’t.

When I see books and writing represented this way, I feel like a long-haul trucker must to see a hipster wearing a trucker cap: This isn’t a fucking game, asshole. This is important. If I ever teach a writing workshop, this will be the image I will use:

“Writing is very hard,” the headline will read. “You won’t make a penny off it. You should probably do something else with your life. If you absolutely must, call. No refunds.”

Gabriel Garcia Marquez said that the novel is the best toy ever invented for making fun of people, but I don’t believe that, and I don’t think he did either. The best writing examines the self, whether through fiction or non-fiction, novels or essays, whatever the genre and whatever the point of view. It’s like comedy – it isn’t a question of punching up or down; the very best work, from Lenny Bruce to Richard Pryor to Eddie Pepitone – punches across, at itself, at the teller. And that’s why writing is so damned hard, and so damned messy, and should be, even when it’s funny (especially when it’s funny). I don’t wear straw hats, you know why? Because they get in the way of me pulling my fucking hair out.

But that’s the job. And it’s important. And so I took a seat in a pretty chair at the pretty table, and I did the hard thing I really, really didn’t want to: I wrote. I turned the camera on myself. I laughed at my irrational rage, at my unshakable opinions, at all my foolish certainties.

This is what I wrote:

“Character like you: Guy who flies off the handle over nothing. Funny.”

That’s it.

That’s all I wrote that day.

It was bloody, but it was worth it.

Yours in the fetal position,

S.