How to Write: Lesson 27
Lesson 27: What to Write About
Lesson 27: What to Write About
Having lived close to eighty years I still don't know what to write about. These are quotes from Chapter 13:
It takes place in 1964. I was hitchhiking around the country, trying to find things to write about "so I could hurry up and write some god damn books and get rich and famous like Scott Fitzgerald and Ginny could be Zelda to her heart’s content." In the first instance I got thrown in the Tijuana jail along with a guy I'd gotten a ride from:
"I could have left him there. I had his car keys. I had his wallet. I could have taken them both and split. I didn’t. Whether that was worth writing about or not, I didn’t know."
The second instance was: "I’d been having a dream about this cute little Mexican chick at the diner where I’d spent most of the money I’d made shoveling horseshit. She was going to come with me to New Orleans but didn’t. Whether that was worth writing about or not, I didn’t know. Maybe so."
The third was "In Jackson, Mississippi, three guys in a red pickup thought I was a freedom rider. I wasn’t. They were members of an organization called 'Americans for the Preservation of the White Race.' One of them held a shotgun under my chin. He held it steadily, like he’d done it before. I told them in my best Southern drawl that I was on my way up to Memphis, looking for work. I was all for Negroes being able to eat at white restaurants and drink from white drinking fountains and go to school with white kids and not get themselves lynched every five seconds, sure, but the way I figured it was that Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy (Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Talking) were doing a fine job of fixing all that. I simply did not see how getting my head blown off would have helped. The guys in the pickup dropped me off at the north end of town. That might have been worth writing about, but I doubted it. (Mississippi John Hurt, CC Rider)"
The last was in New York: "I wondered what was going on back in San Francisco. I missed Ginny. Was that worth writing about? Fuck if I knew. Fuck if I know. Who knows what’s worth writing about? Not me. I know that for a total fact."
Woody Guthrie summed up one halfway decent thing to write about: "Hard, ain't it hard, ain't it hard to love one who never did love you. Hard, ain't it hard, ain't it hard great god to love one that never would be true." But that sounds kind of whiny.
Someday someone's going to write a book about racism in America: "From Slavery to Freedom, 1619 to 2019: Four Hundred Years is Nowhere Near Enough Time." There'll be chapters about how each race has its own country and will conclude with how only when all the races have biologically mingled so completely so as not to know one from another will there be an end to racism...and even then, people will find plenty of things to be racist about. Anyone can make up dystopian bullshit so, obviously, that's not worth writing about. But what is? I still don’t know.