Slaying the Monster

Slaying the Monster Narcopiteous.

Of all the strange and wonderful creatures the Forgotten Writer is likely to encounter on the Darling Plain, none is more fearsome, more sly and insideous, than the many tentacled serpent known as Narcopiteous, or in plain English, Self-pity. This ravenous beastie has destroyed more than one unwary Forgotten Writer who fell into its clutches, so I thought we’d devote a post, right at the start, designed to help newcomers to this realm recognize, combat, and slay the venomous villain.

Since he lurks in darkness and comes out only at night to attack his victim while it sleeps, you may never see one of these creatures face to face. But you will recognize him by the way his presence begins to warp and usurp your normal patterns of consciousness. If you find yourself drinking more and enjoying it less, avoiding bookstores and libraries, no longer drawn to literary journals, preferring instead vapid TV shows like "The Bachelor" and "Real Housewives of Bloom County," or cruising the web for alluring new forms of pornography; if you cringe at the mention of a young novelist who has been recently discovered by the literati, or you bristle at the thought of an older writer whose works are still widely admired (the cad!), you can be sure the serpent has you in its clutches. It’s only a matter of time until he subverts your intelligence and integrity to such an extent that you can no longer call yourself a writer at all, forgotten or otherwise. It is time to take drastic measures.

Step 1. Immediate sustenance required. Go to your own bookshelf and take down one of your own published novels, or a story in a magazine you were proud to publish in. Sit down in a nice comfortable chair and start reading. Allow yourself to enjoy the prose, relish the imagery, admire the sharply drawn characters and swiftly moving plot. Yes, you wrote these words. This was you at the top of your game, and weren’t you good at it? Like Dickens, you may wish to exclaim, "By God, what a writer I was then!" Of course you were. Did you think fools and amateurs ever succeed in this craft?

Step 2. Thus fortified, you move on to sterner measures. You go into your study, to the file cabinet, desk drawer, or wherever you have stored your unpublished manuscripts. Open the drawer and take one out. Make it one you once had high hopes for, though you know you didn’t spend as much time on it as you should have. Now sit down at your desk with a red pencil and start reading carefully, critically. Mark the stuff you don’t like. Cross out excess verbiage. My word, what a mess this piece is! How slowly it moves! How heavy and plodding the language! If, after five or ten pages, you can bear to go on reading, you must be seriously blind to your own failings. But sit back; reflect seriously; compare this garbage to the work you published. Is it any wonder your career had its ups and downs? Too much of this stuff and anyone would wind up forgotten.

Step 3. Now we’re getting somewhere. We’ve already lopped off several of the worm’s tentacles, but there are more to be destroyed. We proceed to the general situation in which you find yourself today. First, financial. If you taught at a certified public or private institution, you surely must have taken part in a pension plan. Are you now receiving that pension? Is it adequate to your needs? Great, now reflect that the pension was based on your salary, which was in part determined by your merit raises, which in turn reflected your publications. See, you are still receiving royalties of a sort! You haven’t been forgotten after all.

Now regard your domestic situation. Are you married, or happily shacked up with someone you love, or at least like a whole lot? Does he/she love you because he/she thinks you’re a great writer? Man, you should be in seventh heaven! Do you have children? Are you in touch with them? Maybe grandchildren you see on occasion? Are in you in reasonably good health? Do you have a few hobbies you enjoy? Golf, fishing, knitting, cooking? With every good thing you can identify in your life you have severed another of the worm’s tentacles. You are draining it of its life’s blood. I think it’s time to celebrate with a drink, and by taking your significant other out for a good dinner. Maybe afterwards you’ll stroll through a bookstore (if you can find one these days) and take note of the new titles by writers you’ve never heard of before. Wouldn’t it be fun to read one of these books? Noble to buy it? After all, we who live by the arts should also cultivate the arts. Noblesse oblige!

Step 4It is now time to look back on your entire life and ask yourself what else in the world you would have wanted to do. You were certainly not cut out for medicine, the law, business, the military, or any of those technical or manual jobs. Machines hate you. Labor tires you easily. Sales strikes you as a particularly unhappy way to earn a living. Computers? Forget it! So you correctly chose your profession and, judging from Step 3 above, you did fairly well at it. So you’ve been temporarily forgotten–but perhaps this exile here on the Darkling Plain is only temporary. One successfully published book and you’ll be right back in the limelight, with folks paying top dollar for your out-of-print books. That’s right, my friend–one more good book!



Step 5. We are now nearly finished with our short course in monster slaying, but there is one more, supremely important thing you must do to make sure the serpent is dead and stays dead. You must go to your computer and GET TO WORK! Yes, that’s right, friends–there is nothing that can banish that old demon self-pity like a day spent writing something new. Or at least revising something old. As the words tumble onto the page, as the ideas form in your feverish brain, as you transmit these phantoms into the living, breathing essence of fiction, you will once again experience the joy, not to say the ecstasy, of the living writer. It won’t be long before he who was forgotten will be found and the Darkling Plain will be but a gloomy splotch in your rearview mirror. Trust me, I’ve driven through this place before.



If any of you know of similar monsters and have found effect ways of coping with them, please do let us know. This blog is meant to be an open forum, so send me your comments and ideas. You will surely get sick of reading my stuff before long. Until then, this is your friendly blog-master, Sinbad the Sailor, signing off.