What would you write…
…if you had one year to live? From today’s Writer’s Almanac:
It’s the birthday of novelist Anthony Burgess, (books by this author) born on this day in Manchester, England (1917). He went off and taught in Malaysia. He didn’t even want to go there, but he was drunk when he filled out the application and didn’t realize where he was applying. In Malaysia, he was often in trouble with the police and with his supervisors, and his marriage fell apart. But during his five years there, Anthony Burgess found his voice as a novelist. He wrote a trilogy of novels, Time for a Tiger (1956), The Enemy in the Blanket (1958), and Beds in the East (1959).
Then he collapsed on the floor of his classroom, was flown from Malaysia to London, and doctors told him that he had a brain tumor and only one year to live. So he began writing as fast as he could. He didn’t have a brain tumor, he didn’t die, but he kept writing novels as quickly as possible, and in three years he published nine more novels. He went on to write more than 50 books, including A Clockwork Orange (1962), Enderby Outside (1968), and Earthly Powers (1980).
So again, what would you write if you only had one year to live? Or would you write at all? Would other aspects of your life take precedence over your writing?
UPDATE: In comments, Alissa wrote, “But after this post about Burgess and the previous one on Chuck Palahniuk, I’m beginning to wonder if I shouldn’t write the stuff I really want to write, and not the stuff I think I have a better chance of selling.” There’s no definitive right or wrong answer to this question because there are people who sell scripts and set up projects who do it both ways, one approach to study the marketplace carefully and write for it, the other approach to write whatever the writer wants.
As luck would have it, I had this precise conversation today at lunch with Dana Coen who had a great run writing TV in LA until his recent move to teach playwriting and screenwriting at UNC. Dana made a point which bears repeating: There’s really no way to know in advance what the buying marketplace will be like 6–12 months down the road (typically how long it will take to develop and write a spec script), so why not write what you want?
This point was echoed by one of my writing students Lisa Joy who was a staff writer on the late, lamented ABC series “Pushing Daisies.” Lisa was my guest for the Writers Studio course I taught in LA. It was great for the class members to hear Lisa talk about how she transitioned from wanting to be a working writer to becoming a working writer. Lisa told the class that now is the time for them to write what they want, once they break into the business they’ll have plenty of projects they may not really have a lot of passion for, but will take the assignment for the money — that is a fact of life for working writers. Before they sell a spec script, the writer has total freedom to write what they want.
Now there is a valid point to be made about being mindful of the marketplace, aware of basic elements buyers are looking for in scripts, but let’s save that for another time. Burgess’ story — how the possibility of his death within a year — does drive home the point Alissa makes: Shouldn’t we write stories for which we have deep personal passion, stories we care about? Doesn’t it stand to reason that the characters we create will be that much richer and more real, the feelings the story evokes that much deeper if we truly care about what we’re writing?