The Charlie Brown Syndrome

I saw a friend in town the other day, and after we’d been talking for a few minutes he asked, “Are you doing any writing?” My stomach caved in on itself, which was great for my profile, but lousy for my soul. Am I doing any writing? What are you writing? How’s the writing going? All questions writers dread, unless we’ve just inked a five-book deal with Doubleday, or a sold another screenplay to Universal. Otherwise, the question provokes consternation, remorse, guilt, and hopelessness. Or, as I like to call it, the Charlie Brown Syndrome.

Good ole’ Charlie Brown, in case none of you got it, grew up to become a writer. According to an article published in Psychology Today, Charlie Brown was a classic neurotic, “prone to depression and anxiety and paralyzing fits of over-analysis.”

Well, maybe writers aren’t all classic neurotics, like our Peanuts pal, but the question of what we’re writing can make us feel that way. The problem is that we’ve gone around writing things all our lives, and so people expect us to do that--write. Many of us have foolishly acquired MFAs, raising the bar further. Some of us have even published, in magazines, literary journals, and--worst of all--books. Thus the world looks at us and expects us to write.

But that’s not why we became writers, why we pursued the classification, or why we wrote anything in the first place. No, the real reason we became writers was the same reason a lot of people picked up guitars and played rock’n’roll: To meet girls. (This is true for many women writers I know, too.) Most of the writers I hang around with are about my age (the middle age, that is), and we’ve all been paired up with significant others. With meeting girls out of the way, that leaves only the writing to face.

That, and the rest of our lives, and often it’s the rest of our lives that defeat the writing. It’s not that I’m not writing at all--you’re reading this blog post, aren’t you? And have you checked out my personal Facebook page? How about my business’s FB page? And I just built two online classes that I’ll be teaching next semester--about a novel’s worth of words there. There’s also the correspondence--sometimes I feel like one half of the Jefferson-Adams duo, scratching out my thoughts by the light of a whale oil lamp deep into the night.

But none of that’s really writing. Writing is the thing you’re working on now. The novel. The screenplay. The short story. The scholarly article for The Writer’s Chronicle called “First Tracks: Warren Zevon, Alice Munro, and the Importance of Opening Stories.” The memoir. Whatever. That’s the writing, not the other stuff.

So when I saw that friend (by the way, I was in the gym at the time, working out, which is also not writing), I gagged when he asked, “Are you writing anything?” Oh, sure, I’m writing lots of stuff. Aren’t your reading any of it?