So You Want to Be a Writer

So this early Christian sect, the Syphileans, after life on the outskirts of the late Roman Empire had become completely unbearable, and they simply had to get out, the Syphileans wandered east—not unlike, they thought, the old Israelites in the desert—ending up, many years later, on a small island off the coast of India, a place where life was really, really miserable, in some ways even more miserable than it had been for them back when they'd been living under the thumb of Rome. The irony in all this was that, back in the old country, the Syphileans had been the strictest of any of the early Christians when it came to their religious laws; they stuck to the Bible's injunctions more rigorously than just about anybody. Remember, in that area at that time—I mean, the basic promised-land region—it was full of all sorts of different groups along the Jews-and-Jesus spectrum, who were all asking things like What do we do with this dead Jewish prophet guy? and What do we do now that there's no Temple? And they all had different answers, naturally; but the Syphileans were hard-core, so much so that when British anthropologists discovered the Syphileans a hundred years ago—having missed out on, you know, the Council of Nicea, Luther and his Theses, the Spanish Inquisition, whatnot—they were almost unrecognizable as Christians. They were like some old, beautiful, Middle Eastern fly, or flies, caught and preserved in amber. And one of the ways in which they were stuck in time was how throughly they were still sticking to all the laws about how to punish people who'd messed up. The trouble, though, was that the one copy of the Pentateuch that they'd been able to smuggle out of the old country with them had gotten sopping wet on the trip out to their new island home, and had partly rotted away in places, had completely fallen apart in others, and had had to get gently patched back together, with a little bit of educated guessing going into the patching, such that—and this was partly what was so confusing to the anthropologists—they still had all these strict laws, and they adhered to them strictly, but they'd gotten garbled up a bit. Did a man who sold doves for a living lie with his brother's wife after her monthly seclusion, but before she'd taken her ritual bath? Then they had to stone him to death. Did an angry woman drive her uncle's cattle to market and sell them for an unfair price to the priests? Then they had to mock her in the town square for three days, and then stone her to death. Did a man with a red or green boil on his skin forget to wash his clothes for a week before going to battle? Again—and, to be fair, this was how things usually played out in the original, pre-remix version, too—stoning. The great difficulty for the Syphileans was that, on this tiny little island in the Indian Ocean, there weren't any stones. And they couldn't find any adequate substitute either, like, say, coconuts, or a nice winter squash. Their island was all soft sand and dirt, and the trees were all rubbery, and the fruits and vegetables were all sort of pulpy, like ripe tomatoes. So what were they supposed to do? The priests all met to discuss the problem; after a while, they decided that, following the principle of an eye for an tooth, a tooth for an eye—some parts had just gotten slightly off—their god would accept a punishment that, even if it wasn't quite what was being asked for, was almost exactly as unpleasant. And they still had a knife they'd managed to bring along with them, and so when someone screwed up—carried burning food across running water, fondled his uncle on the Sabbath, and so on—after a brief trial, one of their judges would take the offender, cut open his stomach with the knife, and then gently slip into the incision one or two of the island's tiny, toothy, and highly irritable mongooses. Then the guy would get chased down the beach, around the outside of the island, by his family members—parents, ideally, if they were still around, but if not, siblings or children were okay, too—until, after this miserable, horrendous combination of the worst physical torture, and public humilation, and this high-school gym-class discomfort of exercise on top of all that, he died.

So you see what I mean? That is what writing should feel like. Otherwise, what the hell are you doing? Masturbating with a self-help book? Getting busy with a typewriter? That might be fun for a while with an old manual, like a classic Underwood or something, but definitely not an electric, no, because eventually, you come to the automatic carriage return, and then you'll know for sure you're not writing, because then, zip goes the platen, and, well, you're fucked.