Technically the typewriter isn’t mine. I bought it as a prop for an upcoming scene of our feature film project, Vintage, which is about a washed up writer. Interesting that all of the main characters I write are often washed up writers of some sort or another.

It’s been a long while since I’ve hammered out any prose, being absorbed as I have by our ongoing documentary project and various other efforts, the job, family and occasional fishing trips notwithstanding. But when I brought the Smith Corona home and took it out of its case, laying it on the dining room table, I was struck with the overwhelming urge to try to become Ernest Hemingway again. There’s something about the smooth keys, the elegant slope of them rising up to the platen, the swinging arc of the keybars and that musical, mechanical thunk as they slam home. A typewriter is a thing of beauty and it makes you want to write with an urgency that a laptop or yellow legal pad just can’t inspire.

We live in an era of disposable objects. Our iPhones and MacBooks are lovely, but they’re designed with planned obsolescence in mind. They’re meant to be discarded after a couple years. But a manual Smith Corona, with it’s metal shell, steel keys, rugged case and anvil-like heft is an object that is built to withstand the ages.

Sitting in front of this old typewriter. Just breathing in the oil, ink and metal smell of it, made me fell more like a writer than I have in quite some time.

I don’t think either of us truly think that books are going away. I see too many kids absorbed deeply in books for that to even be a remote possibility. But we are going through changes.  A couple quotes that stood out from Keller’s piece.

When people say they love writing, they usually mean they love having written.

Writing is terrifically hard work. For me it’s like exercise – terribly painful when your doing it, but afterwards it gives you a healthy glow of accomplishment and allows you to not have to suck wind after running to catch the bus.

Another quote talks about the importance of life experience. This resonates with me, because as I cross the big four-oh with limited publishing success, I suppose the one thing going in my favor is the accumulation of additional years of life experience. For example, as I write this, I’m contorting my body in such a way as to fend off the most excruciating back pain of my life stemming from a day spent in the rather low impact activity of painting the house:

…there is no better qualification for writing about life in all its complexity than having lived it.

The whole article is worth a read. I think Keller and I would agree that books aren’t going anywhere. People may slow down on the consumption side, but writers are going to keep writing regardless.  And a few of the books will turn out to be pretty good, too.

All of us who prefer reading and writing in the long format rather than in sad little electronic dibs and dabs are staring at an unfolding revolution. I’ve come out on the side of this digital tsunami of change having a positive impact on storytelling.

But others aren’t so sure. The latest post on this subject that has taken my attention is this one by Johann Hari where he says:

The book — the physical paper book — is being circled by a shoal of sharks, with sales down 9 percent this year alone. It’s being chewed by the e-book. It’s being gored by the death of the bookshop and the library. And most importantly, the mental space it occupied is being eroded by the thousand Weapons of Mass Distraction that surround us all.

I’ve been hearing this for years and paying special attention given my own (albeit fading) preoccupation with making the list of top American novelists under 40. I turn 40 this year and other things, which include movies, work, a kid, red wine and fishing, are all conspiring to sap my energy for the sort of literary navel gazing required to write the type of novels I’m interested in. I’ve done the dance with agents and heard their lament all too often. They’re wonderful people, but they’re challenged by the state of the publishing industry. Here’s what one nice agent recently wrote me about a novel manuscript I sent her:

So I think you’re a strong writer – I have to say I enjoyed reading this and was very impressed by your talent which is obvious throughout.  You’ve written a difficult novel but made it engaging and tense, and kept the reader wondering.

But I feel that there are some big problems…at a different time I might have encouraged you to think about a rewrite and to show it to me again, but now it’s such a difficult climate for fiction, that I’m not going to do that.

I used to get that “difficult climate” line a lot.  Maybe it’s a way to let someone down easy…to pass on a manuscript but encourage a <40 writer to keep his chin up and keep at it. Maybe it’s a polite way to say I suck. Or maybe it’s an earnest reflection of the pressure they’re feeling as this era we love so much, that of the long form story in print, goes gently into a good night lit by glowing rectangles in various sizes. If it’s the latter, this tells me that in a previous era I probably could have had a shot at landing that top agent and staking out a modest career in the low stakes world of literary fiction.

But instead I’ve moved on to making documentaries and other distractions, and I’m finding less and less time to write.

But I’m still a reader. If I don’t have at least two books on my nightstand in various stages of completion, I feel a hole in my existence that can’t be filled by either the lesser experiences of social media or the Great American Lobotomy Machine. And being a reader of both long stuff and very old stuff gives me several distinct advantages that make me relavent in a tightening marketplace:

Advantage one: Russian novels and endurance

If you can read a long, rambling Russian novel with a myriad of characters each of whom inexplicably has three or four names, all of which sound similar to those of the other characters, and if you can concentrate long enough, and hard enough, to get through a thousand pages and then be so moved that you weep like a child when it all comes together in the end…then you can pretty much analyze any situation, no matter how dark and tangled, and find your way through to the other side.

People who don’t read Russian novels might reach points in their lives or careers where they feel stalled or impossibly entangled. What you learn from Russian novels is that if you just plod through, if you just focus and turn the page, eventually it will come together. Through sheer brute tenacity, you can reach the conclusion of any given situation.

This has helped me survive any number of challenges, from persisting through numerous creative obsessions to surviving crazy bosses and any number of seemingly hopeless situations of the personal or professional variety.

Persistence pays off. And if the reading of long-format books is truly dying in this age of 140-character interpersonal communication, then I’ve got a secret weapon the next time I face that brick wall and start slamming my forehead against the mortar. I can keep myself sharp through this long slog of life and career, and the fewer folks out there who know this Secret of Dostoyevski, the better the chance that I’ll reach the other side first.

Advantage two: the “creative guy”

I’ve acquired a reputation, not quite honestly, as being something of a creative guy.  I’ve heard it over the years at various corporate and institutional jobs. “Hey, you’re the creative guy, you go figure something out.”

It’s always felt unearned. Mainly because I’m not that creative. My creativity stems largely from stealing things written by dead guys who can’t sue me. That advertising copy? That was a riff on Dylan Thomas or Ovid. That story concept? Straight out of a letter by Flaubert, with imagery from Rilke. The latest commercial script? Heavily influenced by Walt Whitman, whom I read a snippet of daily to help me earn that creative guy label.

Of course, I’m not the only one who “collaborates” with Walt Whitman – the best advertising people all do this, and some aren’t afraid to admit it:

Advantage three: a refuge

Some folks spend small fortunes on psychotherapy or golf, trips to the Far East, yoga classes, you name it, all to achieve some sort of meditative balance in their lives. I’ve got my own distractions that cost me in both time and treasure, not the least of which are wine and fishing. But a paper book is the perfect, portable, inconspicuous, low-cost way to slip into a different plane of existence in order to achieve that distance from the electronic cacophony that is our daily lives.

A novel habit could be the very thing that keeps you sharper than the competition, especially with fewer and fewer folks out there who hone the same required level of concentration that allows you to read something good. If you have an easy, accessible, inexpensive place to retreat for a few hours or moments at a time, then you don’t need that trip to the day spa or those pricey extra eighteen holes to get away. You can save your coins for more important things such as red wine, vitamins, or maybe an MBA degree.

I’m not afraid of books going away. I can go to our local library book sale and load up on really good stuff for five dollars a box. There are so many classic works going back some two thousand years that I have yet to read that, should the practice of writing books cease tomorrow, I could still map out a lifetime of reading.

So I’ll always have this refuge, this bargain retreat that can take me to the Great Russian Steppes or down the Mississippi on a raft with that pesky Huck and my long-time hero and mentor, Jim.

In closing: Seek and Destroy

So in the end, I’m not afraid of the cessation of publishing or the disappearance of reading from mainstream culture. Why? Because it’s always going to be my thing. I frankly don’t care if other people (other than my wife and daughter) continue to read stuff or not. I want my kid to read because it will give her the same advantages that I perceive reading gives me. I don’t have to worry about her, because at seven she is obsessed with collecting fairy books and she begs to hear more chapters of Little House on the Prairie every night. She’ll be just fine when it comes to reading.

If publishers stop publishing and people stop reading, maybe the box loads of books at the library book sale will drop from five bucks to two-fifty.

If publishing and long-format reading collapse, I’ll retain my secret advantages. I can remain the creative guy thanks to Walt Whitman. I can retain my strategy for plowing through difficult situations.

So if long-format books become “my thing,” I’m fine with that. I recall listening to this little known band from the Bay Area when I was a kid. They were called Metallica and they had this album called “Kill ‘em All” that none of the radio stations ever played because it was too raw and angry and poorly produced. This meant that the only way to hear their music was to read about it in some photocopied, pathetic little music zine or to have a friend hand you a copy.

Once you’d discovered Metallica, you became part of an underground movement, a sort of greasy, black tee-shirted clan of socially awkward individuals who possessed this power of frothing, addictive music that they only shared with others of their kind.

To connect with this clan, all you had to do was hum, in a nasal falsetto, the opening bars of “Seek and Destroy” and you’re fellow clansmen would begin banging their heads: “bwananaa, bum bwananaa, bum bum bum bum bum bwanahh!” You then knew that you could safely talk about music and anarchy with them.

Later on, when Metallica’s fame grew and and you could find them in records stores and on the radio and in music videos, our desperately awkward clan lost our secret muse. When the band ceased to be underground, they ceased to interest us. When they stopped eating sandwiches of stale Wonder bread smeared with stolen ketchup packets form fast food chains, their mystique diminished. They were now “lame.” By virtue of earning a living, they had “sold out.” We had to look elsewhere because we now shared the secret with the general populace, and that wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t do at all.

So if books go underground…if they become the purview of a few strange individuals sitting around staring at bleached pulp for hours on end, I will not be afraid nor saddened. Instead, I’ll know who I’ll be safe to sit next to on a bus when I don’t feel like talking – someone engrossed in a book is less likely to start some inane conversation. I’ll know who I can trust. I know who I can safely talk to without being bored to tears. I know what I’ll be able to look for on park benches or in airport lobbies to find others of my kind.

If books finally begin to disappear from mainstream culture, maybe I’ll find my tribe again.

Here I am back in my hometown of Chicago, slouching toward the birth of the new year, the year in which I’ll hit the big four-oh. Maybe it’s too soon to start in with the hand-wringing that usually accompanies the reaching of the rough middle point of one’s journey across this great green and blue rock. But navel gazing is a specialty of us writer-types, especially those of us educated by the MFA writing program industry.

Midlife crises are nothing new to me. I’ve been having them on and off since my teens when a sudden growth spurt ended my unlikely gymnastics career. I then turned to tennis, the Chicago Board of Options Exchange, a stint with a rock band, a pair of failed attempts at the Foreign Service Exam, three stabs over a fifteen year period at writing a Great American Novel, a solid near miss at writing for the screen and my current preoccupation with making a (low-budget) feature film of some sort.

Most of these endeavors have involved storytelling of one form or another. Partner that with my career in public relations and institutional communications, and it involves a whole lot of fiction. In short: bullshit. This penchant for stories arises mainly from a hell of a lot of movies and books over the years. I love both of these forms, and not a few of them have changed the course of my life as I’ve struck out in a new direction dragging my wife and kid along as I go. Books are dangerous and powerful things. Sometimes. Other times they put you to sleep. Often, at their best, they just make you smile and lay the pages in your lap, closing your eyes and savoring the funny way they make your brain feel.

Storytelling is an art and a craft and a compulsion. Some people do it really, really well. Some are just pretty good. Most suck at it. I haven’t quite figured out where I fit on that spectrum. What I do know, though, is that I’ve run out of roughly half of the time endowed to me to find out. And now the chances will grow slimmer with each passing minute. This doesn’t frighten or frustrate me that much. Sure I sense the sand slipping through the hourglass. But I’m also starting to approach an acceptance of the fact that I may never really know.

As a writer, I’ve been good enough to show well in a contest here or there. Outside my day job, I’ve earned a grand total of less than five thousand dollars for my scribblings. Not bad, actually. How many people have hobbies that pay them back? How many people approach, say, the watching of television like a part-time job? Instead, I tell stories. Sometimes people read them. Sometimes they even pay me for them.

Add to that a few plane tickets to LA, and one dinner in particular in Santa Monica that I recall where a producer asked me, without irony, who I’d like to play the lead role in the film of a screenplay I’d written. “What about Leonardo DiCaprio?” I asked. The producer frowned. I thought he might laugh. But he didn’t. He was thinking. “No,” he said, “don’t think we could get him. Who else?”

That film didn’t get produced. Neither did the next half dozen scripts I wrote outside of one short film, which I made myself with the help of friends. That turned out to be one of the more exhilarating storytelling experiences in this long, ambling and not very lucrative part-time career.

And while all of this other stuff was going on, this reading and writing and filmmaking, etc, I’ve wound up having a fairly rewarding actual career in another aspect of the bullshit biz. I’ve clawed my way up to middle management in a PR shop for a state institution, which sounds quite horrid but actually isn’t. I have no problems punching a clock, growing up as I did in a union household. My old man counted money in a dingy, smoky vault below crooked horse tracks under the direction of a state racing commission and various and occasionally nefarious wealthy families. For fun he golfs, dotes on a fancy car and for many years cared for and operated a speedboat, treating a host of family and friends to lake holidays over the years.

Instead of speedboating, I make up stories in my spare time. Instead of planning the union picnic, I make super low-budget movies. My endeavors may be a tad Quixotic compared to my father’s and his race track friends’, but they’re no less enjoyable.

I don’t want to give the actual, paying job short shrift. I’ve had some nice rewards, not the least of which being health benefits and a steady paycheck that over the years has enabled world travel and helped with the acquisition of not a few nice bottles of wine. We sent our daughter to a solid private preschool. Cutting corners means forgoing a vacation rental in favor of tent  camping or putting off buying a new lens for my camera for a month or two. We’re not rich. We’ll never be rich. But, right now, anyway, we’re not hurting.

And building websites and helping put together marketing campaigns online has brought some creative satisfaction and a bit of recognition. It amuses me that I get to travel around the country and give presentations to folks about some of the things I do on a job I never expected or wanted in the first place. That’s not to say I don’t appreciate or enjoy said job. It’s just that I always thought I’d be doing something else. Like cashing checks from New York publishers or Los Angeles producers.

But I’ve learned that this isn’t really how the world works. Maybe for some people, but not for the vast majority. As I slouch toward forty, I’m realizing that this kind of sucks, but then it’s also not really that bad. If I could have my choice of a career, I’d be sitting in a book-stuffed cabin near Sisters, Oregon with a view of the three volcanic peaks, hacking away at a vintage typewriter, amassing pages, which I’d slip into an envelope and send to an agent. Every so often, a check would come in the mail. I’d occasionally get up to split wood and feed the fireplace. I’d pick my daughter up from school and then fix dinner for the family. In the evenings we’d watch Francis Ford Coppola movies or I’d actually have time to read the New Yorker weekly. On weekends I’d fish for trout or sketch landscapes. Maybe I’d take photographs of flowers with a macro lens.

But that’s not how it works. Maybe reaching forty means that you begin to accept and realize what’s fantasy and what’s not. Right now my goals are less ambitious than the National Book Awards or the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. I’d like to get a little nicer house so that we can have guests without feeling cramped. I’d like a six-burner stove and more time to cook. I’d like to be a little less stressed at work and have a little more time to engage in bullshit artistry: I’d like to take a shot at another novel or script. Maybe one will be something I’m really, really pleased with, whether or not it’s ever published or produced. I want to fish more, go backpacking with my daughter, and increase the number of times per year that my wife and I take in dinner and a show.

All of these goals seem reasonable. I even hope to accomplish one or two of them in 2011. And the rest should be easily attainable sometime over the next forty years.

It’s been at least ten years since I first started thinking seriously about eBooks and getting excited about the idea.  I had a Palm Pilot for work, and the display was poor and the Internet connection was horrible. But I loved the idea of carrying an entire library in my pocket. Still, I never even purchased the first book. The Palm Pilot is probably in some museum right now. Maybe the Gutenberg Museum we recently visited in Mainz, Germany.

Well, it’s taken me ten years to finally give it a try. What I needed was the right device and a strong reason to jump in. I bought an iPhone a couple years ago. But still, I didn’t download the Kindle app and a book until  my friend Daren Dean released his amazing novel, Far Beyond the Pale, on Amazon. I downloaded the app and fired up the book, and now I’m thoroughly enjoying both Daren’s excellent writing and the experience of reading a novel electronically.

Readwriteweb recently gave five reasons why eBooks are better than their paper ancestors.Though they highlight some amazing features of eBooks that aren’t available in the dead tree format, I wouldn’t go so far as saying this makes them superior. There’s still nothing quite like the smell of a fresh (or old and dusty) book, or the feel of pulp in your hands. There’s a sensory pleasure in reading a paper book that can’t be replicated digitally.

But the actual act reading, of experiencing words, even on the iPhone’s small screen, is just as engaging as reading on paper. You can make notes, highlight, save your spot. The iPhone allows you to flip pages with your thumb, adding a new level of touch to the experience that pressing a button can’t give you. The digital annotation tools are more efficient than the analog system of sticky notes, highlighters, bent corners and margin scrawls (albeit aesthetically less pleasing). The price is also fantastic. Daren is self-published, but I was able to buy his novel at a price on Kindle that allowed him a better profit margin (per copy) than if he’d connected with a traditional publisher.

Some writers and book lovers may think that the advent of eBooks is a sad day for novels, words and books in general. I think that’s pessimistic horse shit.

There’s also something nice about the short page length on an iPhone…it gives you the feeling of headlong progress (through the 4,000+ pages that Daren’s novel reaches in this format). I thought I’d need time to adjust to thousands of micropages compared to the traditional200-400 page length of a novel, but it’s been no problem at all. In fact, I appreciate being able to flip a page or two between giving my kid a bath or waiting for her to brush her teeth. It seems easier to dip in and out of a novel than reading a fraction of a longer, standard-length page.

Some writers and book lovers may think that the advent of viable eBook platforms is a sad day for novels, words and books in general. I think that’s pessimistic horse shit. eBooks may just be what saves the novel form in this digital age. The new platform introduces the novel experience to people who are used to consuming all of their information on a mobile device and wouldn’t otherwise think to read something of that length. It saves trees. It allows self-published authors to reach a global audience in minutes. It enhances the opportunity to deepen the novel experience with, say, video of the author reading or social highlighting and notes that give you an instant book discussion group. The future of the book-length manuscript would be far more precarious if they didn’t translate so smoothly to the Kindle, iPhone and iPad.

And it’s silly to think that paper books will die as a result of the growing popularity of eBooks. We all now have keyboards and mobile devices that shoot video and record audio. People write blogs and online diaries and send volumes of digitally composed email. But personal journals are as popular as ever. Moleskine notebooks are on sale everywhere. I see them in every coffee shop in Oregon, but I also recently returned from Germany and Italy, and they’re all over Europe as well. Every corner in Florence seemed to have a fine stationary shop, where Moleskines were the cheap option, and antique leather notebooks fetched ridiculous prices. There’s still a place for the handwritten word five hundred years after Gutenberg. People will always read paper books as well.

While we were in Germany, we stopped at  the Gutenberg Museum. My daughter joined her cousins in making prints in the museum’s hands-on print shop. She was thrilled by the tactile, mechanical experience of creating art in a method not unlike Gutenberg used when he printed his first Bible page a half millennium ago. This experience could never be replicated digitally. The art hanging on the walls of the print shop was innovative, and had a warm, comfortable feeling. Prints will be decorating walls for as long as I’m alive. Gutenberg’s invention brought the Bible and a host of other materials to the hands of people who didn’t have access to them before. He created a world of readers, expanding the simple practice of reading to the great unwashed. eBooks have the potential of bringing novels and book-length manuscripts forward, not only reaching people who already read them, but even introducing them to folks who never would have thought to pick up a manuscript on their own before.

So for writers and serious readers, there’s nothing to fear from eBooks. Bookstores will still exist. Some will flourish, and some will close. But books and novel manuscripts will persist. Writers like Daren Dean will be able to share their stories with friends on the other side of the country, and hopefully even reach a wider audience. Far Beyond the Pale is a compelling novel with an engaging voice. It’s a little raw, but it’s better than a lot of the pap that I’ve bought from traditional publishers in the past year. It also has a feeling of personal authenticity that other novels I’ve read recently. Maybe it’s because I know Daren, or maybe it’s because the digital age is allowing novelists to engage readers without the filter of big corporate publishers.

Daren is an amazing writer who surrounds his readers with voice-driven prose and rich, tactile imagery that comes through just as well on screen as it does on paper. And even traditional publishers and agents have been telling him for years that he’s an amazing writer, though, “the market is just too tough right now.” But today he’s now able to reach the audience he deserves.

Gutenberg would be pleased.

In the end she died, and I took her out and buried her in the flower bed. We’ll plant a fern over her and find a concrete statue that resembles her in her prime, and we’ll remember an awesome goddamned cat.

Even people who hate cats loved Sammy. Partially it was that she acted like a dog: greeting you at the door, climbing all over you, desperate for affection, desperate to win your approval. She was cussed out not a few times when we tried to work and she’d be there calling for attention. She weathered the abuse of a growing child who treated her like a doll and carried her around the house once she grew too old to outrun her. When Bailey was an infant and we closed her in her room at night to cry herself to sleep because that’s what some stupid book told us to do, Sammy, who knew better, would sit outside the door with a look of pity concern until the crying stopped.

Within minutes of meeting her, even the most hardened cat hater and most macho dog lover would be absently petting Sammy as she snuggled into his lap. You couldn’t help yourself. She worked harder at melting hearts than any creature I’ve known. You open yourself up to ridicule, I suppose, writing a eulogy for a cat. Even a cat lover like Hemingway wouldn’t stoop to this. But I gave up being a serious writer a long time ago. Screw it, I’m going to eulogize.

Sammy sat on my lap while I wrote three thousand pages of drivel…two finished and unpublished novels, and two stillborn epics never completed despite amassing an ungodly number of pages. She outlived my desire to be a Great American Novelist. She spent many late hours purring patiently as I wrote a few screenplays that fared a little better than my novels, and as I burned oil until well past midnight launching armadas of marginally useful emails for what is colloquially referred to as a “real job.”

In the end, she never judged. She just wanted a warm hand to slick back her fine gray fur. She wanted to wedge her chin against your cheek and make a burbling noise not unlike a coffee percolator that would slowly unravel your frayed nerves and remind you that you aren’t alone in the world with your toils, and how the simple things, like the humble acknowledgment of the fact that other creatures exist and breathe and want nothing more than a scratch under the chin, can change your attitude. Sometimes it takes another species to remind us that we’re human.

Sammy had a good life. Nancy picked her out at a shelter fifteen years ago. She was scrawny, wearing her rib cage like a corset, blowing snot and twisting her bony, patchy body around our legs. For some reason, this little mongrel won Nancy’s heart even though she didn’t look like much to me. We spent a couple thousand bucks, which was a lot when you’re making $6.50 per hour on the night shift at Kinko’s, getting her healthy, and she spent the rest of her life showing us her gratitude.

Thanks, little gray buddy, for the gift of your friendship. I’m reaching out my hand now, and for the first time in fifteen years a grumbling, mewing, sleek little creature isn’t leaping out of the shadows to arch her back under my fingers. That’ll take some getting used to.

I just returned from a trip to LA to meet on a project in development. I came back with a head full of notes and a deadline for the next draft. And somewhere along the way back to the job I saw my kid and realized that she had grown in the few days I was away.

Jim Harrison's latest book of poetry is called In Search of Small Gods

This can all be overwhelming and serves to dampen creativity. Add to that the fact that the vet told me my cat was probably dying, and you’ve got a recipe for creative impotence.

But then I found a package from Amazon buried under a stack of bills and I ripped open the box to find Jim Harrison’s latest book of poems. For those who don’t know, Jim Harrison is the greatest living American poet. He’s a true American writer who makes love to the landscape and lives for the small details like the shapes he finds in the undersides of bird wings or the damp smell of a thicket after a rainstorm. He’s also a fine novelist and a retired screenwriter.

His latest book of verse, In Search of Small Gods, is absolutely amazing. If you’re a screenwriter and you don’t read any poetry, you should think about that. Poetry exists for the richness of language and imagery. In many ways it’s like writing for film, though for a theater of one that exists within the soft, mushy side of the skull.

I pick a poet depending on the script I’m working on. For my first optioned script, it was Pablo Neruda. For my current project, it’s Whitman’s, Leaves of Grass. But Jim Harrison’s poetry works for just about anything. I tore open the box and read the first poem and was quite choked up. Rescue your creativity. Read good poets.

I believe in steep drop-offs, the thunderstorm across the lake in 1949, cold winds, empty swimming pools, the overgrown path to the creek, raw garlic, used tires, taverns, saloons…

That’s about all I need. I’m ready to get started. Thanks Jim.