A Point of View

I do not know whether it is the fact that I have to go to the bathroom, or the fact that that the faster my boots come off, the quicker I can get into the shower, relieve and clean myself, put on clean clothes and sit down at my desk if it is dark or gloomy, and if it is sunny or cold, I sit in my reclining leather chair, but never recline it. I put a blanket over my legs on the ottoman, and my portable desk over the armrests. Either way, we start with a blank page, but more often than not, the leather chair will be in longhand. If that portable desk is in my bed, it is almost certainly longhand, where I go on spurts of 15 minutes of reading followed by 15 minutes of me trying the best I can to translate the feelings I felt from what I read into something that is authentically my voice, and hope the reader will hear that as well, as long as one has good taste, but I usually write at my desk. I love my office. It always has this Apocalypse Now! feeling, whether that’s blowing something up to surf those crescent Oxford Dictionary waves or the last words of a man dying of malaria, most people who have seen me in my office ask for a weapon.

Sometimes the boots don’t come off fast enough, and I write, smelling like and feeling like a rat that has greased itself with lard and has been able to get into a gutter that is clogged with a dead squirrel, or food. I believe writing at your desk without having showered, and a rat greasing itself to fit into a hole to eat a dead squirrel are the same, but most days I’m excited and smell good.

The first book I wrote was in an elevator room on top of a Marriott hotel in Seattle. Then I would write on the bus home, and then again on the way to work the following day, hoping that the bridge we’d have to cross would blow up. I wrote one draft that was 34,000 words long, and I thought I had written a novel, and I did. I walked to Golden Gardens Park and felt as if I had done something. I used to look back and laugh, having written unpublished books with numerous drafts ranging from 34,000 to 230,000 words, as if a word count permitted me to laugh at the naivety of a young, inspired artist who had done something. Still, in Seattle around 2018, I did discover the realities of the publishing world. The realities of any world you try to enter on your first try, not even knowing of all the other roads, methods, and happiness you wish to achieve through something I never thought was a choice.

It’s pompous and stupid, but I used to say, and still do, though I try to avoid the question in semi-public settings, the answer to, “Why do you write?” or worse, “What do you write?” I always chuckle and reply, “There’s a choice?”

Believe me when I say I’d rather be fluent in Chinese with a degree in engineering, but it’s not my fabric. I could write screenplays. That would bring in money, and I live in Los Angeles, but I’m stubborn. I think most artists are, hence why very few of us ever get our work out there, and that is something I strive for. Still, I am also completely happy with writing a thousand Reedsy Prompts, but now that my hands have retreated and allowed me to think of what I really want, because while you write, you never think of what you want. However, I only write for myself, my girlfriend, and my family; the subject and the way it is written are unconsciously how I would like it to be. I never write and think I want to hold my book one day, which is my real dream: to hold a copy of a novel I wrote. I don’t care if there’s only one, and there has been one. I self-published at Kinkos in Seattle. Printed a book with a cover I designed, and sent a few to friends, but what I really want to hold is a hardcover, made by someone else. I really want to see that font on a page that says, “For Grandma Finch and Papou.”

That would really be something special.

Every day, morning, lunch, or at night, I write, and I love it. I love having an idea, and the first sentence you type throws the whole idea away, and you’re writing about bears instead of orange juice in the late 1970’s. I’ve recently joined a few writers’ critique clubs, and I have been blessed with great readers so far. I’ve yet to encounter a critique partner whose read of a short of mine I didn’t agree with, and it’s getting better because there have been fewer and fewer things to point out. I was very used to long-form, and the other blessing is that the other day I read and critiqued a short, I believe, written by a youngster. He wrote a story about a guy who gets out of bed and discovers a bald, slimy thing in his laundry room. This kid was so good at describing how this thing talks and looks; it scared me, but everything else didn’t make any sense. There was a lot of, “He couldn’t pull the curtain because of his nature, but he did anyway.” In short, he did a lot of telling and not showing. I still have no idea what this one character’s nature is or what it had to do with anything, but the kid could write a fucking monster in the corner. God damn. Really good at description when you need it, when you need to scare in a scary story. I wish I could copy and paste his monster, cause it’s good, and the way he describes it talking is like an asthma inhaler that projects blood in weak winds. I wrote that, but he wrote something like that, and it was good, but the rest of the story, as much as I love a good strange narrative, was just full of so much, “I need a higher word count.” He has yet to discover the power of taking your best sentence that’s throwing everything else off in your piece and shooting it in the head (Use it somewhere else!). So many sentences that said, “His eyelids slithered open, and in the middle of the night, he got up, though he wasn’t expecting to.”

So the screen is blank, little bits start flowing down to your fingers or pen, and you’re off.

I don’t understand the memes or internet posts about sitting around, or that famous, I believe it was The Atlantic, article about a writer who sat around, picked up her kids, and at the 11th hour wrote 5,000 words about Osama Bin Laden, or Why The Obama Coalition is Here to Stay. Still, she’s a professional and makes a living writing words, something I have never had to rely on, but I can’t imagine pressure with writing. Even if I wrote something that everyone loved and bought, who cares? If you do, what are you in anything for? The ones that are successful and have long careers in the arts are lucky. They turn stuff out, some hits, some misses. Still, everything is fired away, under the sea of public opinion, until it blows something up, and in literature, you’re lucky if 11 people buy your book, and I’d be happy with that, cause 11 people might read it. It might be next to some great names, while I type away at the other thing that’s coming out in a year, waiting for the editor to send back what I thought was finished. Visions of grandeur.

I don’t want to be Hemingway or J.K. Rowling, Sally Rooney or Tom Clancy; I want to be Nick Matsas, in all my forms and mistakes, because that’s my style.

I had writer’s block for two years: 2020-2022, and though I am not a fan of his writing, Henry Miller’s On Writing can free anyone. I still wrote every day for those two years, but then I started writing like me again, like the hundreds of editors and agents who rejected my first book. I thought I had to change. I thought I could not write. I can. Take me or leave me. This is how I paint.