“Looking out the window, that’s writing.”

In one of the four episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show I stayed up way too late watching the other night, Rob decides he wants to be a writer.

Laura points out that he’s already a writer.  Rob rejects the idea.  Writing for television doesn’t count.  “I’m not a writer that you read.  I’m a writer that other people say what I wrote.”

A writer, a real writer, as far as Rob’s concerned, is someone who writes and publishes novels.  In 1964, Rob would have been thinking of the likes of James Jones and Norman Mailer, of the recently dead giants, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, of the up and comers John Updike and Philip Roth.  In the show he’s specifically thinking of his old friend Harvey Bellman who’s just sent him a copy of his first novel.

Think of this.  Rob’s the head writer for the wildly popular Alan Brady Show and he’s jealous of a first-time novelist who apparently struggled for years in obscurity and penury to finish his book.

Well, not jealous, he assures Laura.

Envious? she suggests.

“Green with it,” he admits.

The world of Rob and Laura’s a long time ago now.  Can you imagine it, a television writer today envying a novelist?  Someone like David Simon or Matthew Weiner feeling a sense of failure or loss because what they’ve written for The Wire or Mad Men makes them not writers people read but writers that other people say what they wrote?

Two graduates of a prestigious writers’ workshop meet at a bar, and one congratulates the other, “Sue, I just heard you sold another script for Nurse Jackie.”

“Big deal.”

“What’s wrong?”

“The New Yorker rejected my short story.”

“Ouch!”

TV writers envying fiction writers.  That’s like saying what they really want is to be bloggers.

Isn’t it?

There’s still something about having published a novel, isn’t there?  To being able to go look yourself up in the library, to find your book on the shelf at Barnes and Noble and turn it face out or find a clerk and ask if the store would like an autographed copy?

Who reads the credits on a TV show anyway?  Who remembers the names of the writers of even their favorite episodes?   Lots of shows get praised for their writing these days, but when you get down to it the credit for how good these shows are go to the producers and the actors.  David Simon didn’t write every episode of The Wire, David Milch didn’t write every episode of Deadwood.  Thomas Pynchon, though, he wrote every word of Inherent Vice.  Jonathan Lethem wrote every word of Chronic City.

Maud Newton’s writing every word of her novel, the one that just won her Narrative’s annual award for best emerging writer.

When Maud’s novel hits the bookstores, she’s going to be my Harvey Bellman.

Kurt Vonnegut once said he’d rather have written Cheers than everything he’d written himself.  But I’d think that every writer who ever worked on Cheers, every writer who’s ever written for television, would be tempted to trade in their residuals to be able to say they’d written one novel like Slaughterhouse-Five .

Maybe.  Would depend on how old they are, I guess.  Born after 1980?  Can you name your own generation’s Harvey Bellmans?

Laura reminds Rob that he’s been writing a novel.  Rob scoffs at his own efforts.  To him, his unfinished novel is an abandoned hobby, like his friend and neighbor Jerry Helper’s attempt to teach himself Spanish guitar.  “I’ll finish my novel the way Jerry’s going to learn to play Malaguena.”

I have a small but satisfying reputation as a writer thanks to this blog.  I’m proud of some to the work I do here and grateful for the attention of my readers, of whom I would bet I have more in a year than many novelists have in a lifetime, which is a way of saying that many novels go almost entirely unread.   But I was born well before 1980.  I went to grad school with five or six Harvey Bellmans.  I’m not saying today’s one of those days, but there are days when I’d rather be able to go into a Barnes and Noble and find my own book on a shelf than have written a single post.

There are days, more days, however, and again I’m not saying today’s one of them, when I wish that instead of heading east to Fort Wayne out of grad school I’d headed west to LA with instead of the manuscript for a novel in my suitcase the floppy disc with a script for St Elsewhere to sell on spec in my jacket pocket.

A book is a fine thing, but for how much longer?  When books are all electronic and we’re all reading Harvey Bellman’s latest on our Kindles or whatevers, will having published a book feel the same when there’s no book in hand to feel?  Will having written a book feel any different than having written a TV script…or a blog?

If Harvey Bellman emails me his new novel instead of sending it via snail mail wrapped in brown paper and string and he types a note at the top instead of inscribing the actual paper title page with a pen will I be green with envy?

Will I be inspired to write a novel of my own?

Laura encourages Rob to use his long summer vacation to get back to work on his novel.  And he does.

Well, he tries.

He holes up in the den---back then, houses had dens instead of home offices---and for three days doesn’t get anything done.  Laura thinks he’s procrastinating but Rob insists he’s writing.  Writing, he says, isn’t only done with a pen or a typewriter while you’re sitting at a desk.  Writing is done in your head and no matter what else you appear to be doing you’re working at your writing as long as you’re thinking.

“Standing, that’s working.  Sitting is working.  Pacing is writing.  I do my best thinking then.  Looking out the window, that’s writing.  Brushing your teeth is writing.  Anything’s writing,” Rob says.  “The hardest writing is showering.”

Laura will have none of it.

“Darling,” she says, “You know the one thing that’s not writing?”

“What?” says Rob.

“Explaining to your wife what writing is.”

Rob takes her point.  But he says there are too many distractions at home.  He goes off to a cabin in the woods for peace and quiet.  He gets no work done.

It’'s not the book you will have in your hand someday that makes you write.  It’s the book that’s already in your head pushing to get itself down on paper…or onto the screen of your laptop.

Rob is a writer.  But he has other things that are more important to him to write at the moment.

You know what else isn’t writing?  Writing about a television character not writing.

Time I should get to work.  Excuse me while I go look out the window.

________________________

Speaking of Malaguena.

Comments

[Kevin Wolf]

Is this comment of mine "writing"?

Good post, Lance. (And I'm a sucker for Rob & Laura.)

[actor212]

Speaking of writing a novel...*wink*

I know a few playwrights and even a TV writer (worked on a few NBC sitcoms in the 80s and 90s) who are desperate to try to finish up (or start) novels. I can imagine they would be in Rob Petrie's shoes.

Me, if I could, I'd rather do both. I imagine Michael Crichton might be one of a handful who were able to pull that off, but at a great and dear cost to his novels, which towards the middle and end of his career ended up sounding more like screenplays than books.

[julia]

See, now, LM, you know I heart you, but don't even.

You practically every day let stuff roll down from your brain and off your fingers, and I read it, and it's stuff I learn from, or at least (seems feeble, that at least) think is resonant and/or well put.

Which means you're writing. And if you're not writing in a form you feel you need to conquer, then do that, and I'll line up for a copy.

But you're writing. So don't.

[Victoria]

Memory:
Doing a TV movie rewrite under a ridiculously tight schedule. (Why do they always wait until 3 weeks before production begins to bring in the rewriter? Actors are being fitted for costumes in scenes that aren't even close to done. It's insane. "She'll be wearing a red velvet dress in this scene, make it fit, okay?") About ten days in, I made a quick trip to LA for some interim meetings with the production staff, so the day went like this: Have a meeting, go to empty office to keep writing, come out for another meeting, go back and keep writing, and so on. The switching gears part is terrible for digestion. But every time I was in the writing office, I would see the executive producer pacing outside the door. Like this would help, know what I mean? During one lull when I was sitting staring into space, trying to sort out the next lines, her pacing picked up. I shouted, "Marian, writing is not typing!" She went away. I loved that I made her gone, but - even though what I said was absolutely true - I still felt guilty for not having something to type in every second. In other words, Lance, I think the guilt, the gnawing dissatisfaction, the "I should be doing this better...maybe like that over there" is just part of the terrain for pretty much everyone who writes. Whatever they write.

[Mike Schilling]

I wonder who wrote that episode...

According to IMDB, it's Lawrence J. Cohen and Fred Freeman. They wrote one other episode together, and oddly, it's also about writing: the one where Rob and Laura write competing children's books. ("Danny was morose...")

Man, I love the internet. Seriously, if it didn't exist and I got one wish, it would be "Create something that let me look up anything about everything." (OK, that might actually be second after Catherine Deneuve.)

[Ken Muldrew]

When I read this post I immediately thought about an old NFB animated short that I had seen about 30 years ago that showed someone "writing" by looking out a window, pacing the floor, sucking on a straw, etc. It turns out that the film, Getting Started, is actually about learning a piece of music (not spanish guitar, but why quibble). It's funny how much overlap there is between writing and practicing music.

[J.]

Thinking about writing is not writing. Planning to write is not writing. Writing is writing.

http://thinkexist.com/quotes/with/keyword/writing/

[Lance]

Julia,

Ok, ok, if you insist, but the first editor shows up with a six figure address, I'm out of here.

Victoria,

Great story. Funny you should mention the guilt. Have you seen that episode of DVD? It starts with Rob out in his front yard digging a hole for a new shrub. He's proud of himself because he's made the hole perfectly round. After he gets the news about Harvey Bellman's novel he makes fun of his hole. He says he only dug it to bury his guilt at not finishing his novel.

J. Thanks for the links.

[Cleveland Bob]

I'm with Julia on this one, Lance. You're a wonderful writer whom I read nearly everyday. You're focused, clever and have a style that suits your sensibilities...and I have no idea what that means, but it's true.

My claim to fame so far is being published as a member of the original cast in a Samuel French script.

Here's the link...

http://www.samuelfrench.com/store/product_info.php/products_id/2244

[Chris G.]

I am fairly certain that Vonnegut was said that about Cheers, not Frasier.

[Lance]

Chris, you're absolutely correct and I'm ashamed of myself for blowing that one. Thanks for the catch. I made the correction.

[Chris G.]

No problem. I just remember Vonnegut saying that because it was a turning point in my understanding writing.

[Lou Gravity]

I first became aware of David Simon through his book Homicide, which predated and inspired the tv deries of the same name.

[Gary Farber]

"Someone like David Simon [...]feeling a sense of failure or loss because what they’ve written for The Wire or Mad Men makes them not writers people read but writers that other people say what they wrote?"

Maybe someone like David Simon -- if there is someone else like David Simon -- but probably not David Simon, because I thought his book was fantastic long before he wrote for televsion.

"Who reads the credits on a TV show anyway? Who remembers the names of the writers of even their favorite episodes?"

Since you're asking: me. Me.

"David Simon didn’t write every episode of The Wire, David Milch didn’t write every episode of Deadwood."

J. Michael Straczynski wrote, to lazily quote Wikipedia, 92 out of the 110 Babylon 5 episodes, notably including an unbroken 59-episode run through all of the third and fourth seasons, and all but one episode of the fifth season. He also wrote the four Babylon 5 TV movies produced alongside the series. Miniseries get written by single writers. So do, I believe, a number of British tv series.

Fiction is, of course, as a rule, vastly less colloborative, than writing for the screen. (It's still somewhat collobrative, unless you're self-published.)

"But I’d think that every writer who ever worked on Cheers, every writer who’s ever written for television, would be tempted to trade in their residuals to be able to say they’d written one novel like Slaughterhouse-Five."

Sounds like a good question for Ken Levine.

"Lance, I think the guilt, the gnawing dissatisfaction, the 'I should be doing this better...maybe like that over there' is just part of the terrain for pretty much everyone who writes. Whatever they write."

I think Victoria is a wise woman.

"I first became aware of David Simon through his book Homicide, which predated and inspired the tv deries of the same name."

Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets. There's a reason it won an Edgar; it's a great book; you should read it, Lance. (It's nonfiction, to be sure, but so what?)

[Gary Farber]

Speaking of Ken Levine, he has a post here about a Dick Van Dyke Show episode, by the way.

[Dutch]

"TV writers envying fiction writers. That’s like saying what they really want is to be bloggers."

LOL! Nice one!

[burritoboy]

"David Simon didn’t write every episode of The Wire, David Milch didn’t write every episode of Deadwood. Thomas Pynchon, though, he wrote every word of Inherent Vice. Jonathan Lethem wrote every word of Chronic City."

That's a figment of the Romantic depiction of the artist. Many people now think that Homer was two poets, not one. Collaborations are common in Elizabethan drama. One of the most interesting books in modern philosophy is Alexandre Kojeve's Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Which is actually Raymond Queneau's class notes from Kojeve's seminars, not a book actually penned directly by Kojeve himself. Thomas Aquinas' De regimine principum is now thought to be half-written by Aquinas (a monarchist) and half by his student Ptolemy of Lucca (a supporter of republics).