The Book You Most Want to Read

If only you'd remember before ever you sit down to write that you've been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart's choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won't even underline that. It's too important to be underlined. Oh, dare to do it, Buddy! Trust your heart. You're a deserving craftsman. It would never betray you.

-JD Salinger

This is part of one of my favorite passages of all time. About 12 years ago I was having dinner with a writer and she pointed me to it and I was smitten. I wrote it down and posted it over almost every desk I had from Somerville, Massachusetts to Santa Cruz, California. It seemed like such a simple equation: write the book you most want to read. I kept searching for a way into that book, made stabs at it, mostly in fiction, but found it shockingly difficult. The problem was, I knew the book I want to WRITE, but I didn’t quite know the book I most wanted to READ or at least I couldn’t see the difference. Yet there is a BIG difference.

Longtime readers of this blog know I am (for lack of a better term) an INSPIRATION WHORE. My suspicion is so are many of you, so I count myself among good company. I think WE ALL have found The Artist Way, taken it Bird by Bird, written down the bones, lived juicy, and SPILLED OPEN. The one thing that always bugged me about these inspiration books is that they were all written by people who didn’t hold down “regular” jobs. SARK had 250 jobs, but had been living a very seemingly miraculous life off the grid since her mid twenties. Anne Lamott wrote books and occasionally taught, which seemed to me a job talking about writing, which sounded downright ORGASMIC to a talker like me. Julia Cameron also occasionally taught, while living in Taos and riding horses and renting an apartment in New York on Riverside Drive. The list goes on. None of them appeared like me, going to jobs they hated, stuffing down their artistic selves from 9-5 and living the rest of their lives in the cracks of time. My job felt like a burden to me, a badge of suffering, separating me from “real” artists like the ones I read and poured over and romanticized and secretly resented. Where is the REAL life in these books I wanted to know. Where was MY reality?

Summer Pierre, welcome to the book you most want to read.

Seymour Glass, quoted above, was right in a way. The idea is so terrifyingly simple, but to find that tree through the thick forest is the trick. I wanted to read a book about the specific reality of holding down a job and being an artist. I also wanted to read a book that would address the person like me who often could be described as a NEGATIVE NELLY. A person that walked around feeling eternally SCREWED. So this is where I began. I think it was SARK who said in one of her books that if someone asked you “how do you live your life?” how would you answer? This is one way I would answer it. There is not a single thing in this book I haven’t done or lived. It is my hope that those who find this book will see their own lives and reality mirrored back.

Dear book, welcome to the world. I am so glad I got to write you.