The living room, in a classic literary twist, is the place where all the relics from the Great Self-Improvement Plan of ’07 went to die. My violin sits idly by the couch, destined to remain untouched for another hundred years. Where culinary mastery was supposed to create recipes expressible only through ancient slips of paper handed from generation to generation, there rests a jumble of takeout coupons on the coffee table. And the chess set has become an ad hoc calculator pedestal, assuming such furniture even exists, for a TI-85. Check and mate.
It’s not a complete wash, though, because all these pieces have been rolled into the Social Plan of ’08, the general idea of which involves doing things I enjoy and meeting people, rather than engaging for the sole purpose of socializing. There are limits, of course. The photos of the local chess club, for instance, look exactly as you’d imagine they’d look–a terrible judgment, I know–and I just don’t enjoy chess enough to wear actual blinders while playing.
But I suspect the chess club is having fun, even as I type another goddamn blog post in solitude, and therein lies the challenge. On one end of the spectrum, you’ve got the nerds who can happily congregate in chess or video games or epic fantasy warfare. You know, Dungeons & Dragons type stuff with cards and figures and +10 Odor of Unwashing. I’m a nerd, in case you haven’t noticed, and probably one of the worst variants: the self-conscious kind who sits at the table made of Elven Oak (i.e. particle board), wondering when the cool kids will break down the screen door (i.e. the Drawbridge of Gondor) to crucify me.
The cool kids gather at clubs and bars and Spring break, places where alcohol needs to be enjoyed, or at the very least tolerated. Chant the refrain all you want–”You don’t have to drink to have fun”–and you may as well serve me a pint of bullshit. The guy who only orders Cokes at the bar is, by definition, the odd one out. I remember sitting on a couch in a club one Chicago night and wondering, “What in blue hell am I doing here?” It’s like going to the barbershop because you love to read magazines, or making a stop at a bowling alley for the cuisine.
So there’s the spread. Too horrified by the prospect of pretending to be a wizard, too dry to understand the real magic of happy hour. If I were my own therapist, I’d probably punch myself in the face. I make no apologies for any of this, however, and I’m sticking to my guns. I need to make this work. Let’s see where this goes.
Right around chapter four of It’s Fark it occurred to me that the real writing wasn’t on the page, but on the wall itself: this reading kick is over. Mark Twain’s autobiography followed it down the return chute shortly after because, witty barbs aside, by and large it was a crotchety old dude telling me how time was. It felt uncomfortable, like volunteering at a nursing home where a kindly little Englishwoman named Adelaide grabs your right ass cheek instead of the proffered arm, all the way to the elevator. Hey-o!
But it’s the medium itself, rather than the content, that ultimately ended the read-a-thon. You get media by stealing, renting, buying, or borrowing it. Book piracy amounts to photocopying or printing 450 pages from a pilfered eBook. And I don’t even know if you can rent a book. Now, I’d purchase The Matrix in a heartbeat because, even after the twentieth viewing, what if Neo doesn’t know kung-fu? You can never be too sure. On the other hand, as good as Confederacy of Dunces was, I probably won’t read it again.
This narrows it down to borrowing, which seems to work on paper. When you borrow a DVD from someone, you aren’t constantly reminded of its lender. With a library book, it’s not just you and the text, it’s you and the dozens of other people who have read the text. I’m not talking about germs here, though some books clearly appear to have been dropped in the toilet, so much as hidden shopping lists, forgotten bookmarks, and, probably worst of all, incisive commentary written in the margins on every other page for Mrs. Goldfarb’s third period English class. Stuff like “childhood” or “humor” scrawled in bubbly pencil to highlight the key points in Twain’s life. William Safire it ain’t.
Call it what you want: persistence, confidence, stubbornness, or, as we’ll christen it tonight, the 10% Prick rule, but producing that one great work may very well require it. The first 90%, I think, is the swirl of factors–people you’ve met, things you’ve learned, places you’ve gone, jobs you’ve held–that’s brought you to wherever you are.
That final 10% gives you the edge, though it may make you seem slightly like a schmuck. Slightly being the operative word here, because anything more than 10% transforms you into a complete jackass. But it’s this idea of uncompromising forward movement. Circumstance may seize you and naysayers may buffet you from all sides, and yet you follow your own Polaris, carried on by the strength of your convictions.
This is all very abstract, I know, but I warned you we’d be visiting these here parts. The question we’re answering, once again, is how do you create a great work? How do you write a profound song, pen the great American novel, draft a speech that resonates through time, or build that compelling business plan? It comes easily to the geniuses. They just do it, very likely without asking these questions, but for the rest of us it’s a matter of working backwards, kinda a reverse engineering of greatness. And this is one small piece of it.