Waiting for the Rain: Being Stuck in a Diner in the Desert with Alf

In the first episode of “Audio Drama School,” Joe Fisher gave us some homework. He showed us a photo of an unnamed man, and told us to write down a question we have and then ask him. See what he has to say.  Trapped in a hell of my own making, I decided to give it a try.

My Question: I find myself sketching and writing notes and being reluctant to actually get into the story file and the super easy part of finding words to put in an order to tell the story part of the story. What is up with that?

The Photo: The photo is of a man in what looks to be mid-life. His hairstyle and lack of a collar on his shirt suggest some time around the 1930s or 40s. His name is Alfred Stanley Burgiss and he’s American. I would have preferred a Canadian if only for a shared historical vocabulary, but I get what I get. Fred… Al? Alf? Alf works on machines, cars, trucks. He works at that gas station that appears in so many of my stories, the one at the edge of the desert. It has a small coffee shop—just three stools at the counter and two booths upholstered in cracked green. The place has that Bakelite feel to it, like it was molded all in one piece, was meant to be stylish but has given in to time. There’s a roof over the gas pumps, and beyond that square of shade the land is desaturated ochre and sage. The sky is white.

Alf leans in the big bay door of the service shed and squints out over the bleached blacktop, over the dry shrubs and through the cellophane air where heat wavers and prisms the distant whale humps of the hills so that they seem to hover over a mirrored sea. Clouds are gathering there. Alf wipes and wipes his hands on a greasy red rag—he’s forgotten about the rag, to be honest, and about what his hands are doing. He’s looking at clouds and thinking about rain and how it will sound like bacon frying, how it will push ahead of it a cool slick of breeze. The world will smell of asphalt and creosote and a memory of green. He doesn’t know about petrichor or negative ions. But he knows what it’s like to wait for rain.

Since I’m doing homework, I amble over to him and pose my problem. I want to write, I say. But I’m not writing. I’m making notes and doodling but I’m not putting words one after the other to make a plot at all.

Alf doesn’t look at me when he answers. He looks at the whale hills. “I seen you at the counter in there with your book scribbling all morning. Looked like writing to me.”

Yeah. But it’s notes and scribbles. The real writing happens on the computer. The bricklaying. Word after word, next and next and next. This… this is just, I dunno, eddying or something.

“You got that computer thing here?”

No. It’s in my office. I have notebooks here.

“Put the computer here.”

I could do that. But I like notebooks. I like pens. I like the way everything goes away when I have a notebook and a pen. But it feels unproductive.

“Then put the story in the notebooks.”

That’s not how it works. The computer is where the plot happens. The notebooks are where the playing happens.

“Then you got a problem.” He remembers the rag and stuffs it into his back pocket. “What’s wrong with playing?”

Nothing, per se. But I’m not moving the story forward. The world is getting bigger, deeper. I love it more, I realize as I’m talking. The more I doodle, the more I love the world. Am I infatuated?

“When’s it gotta be done? When they coming to get it?”

There’s no deadline, really. It’s just for me.

“Hm,” Alf says. He pushes away from the doorjamb and moves out of the glare into the not-perceptibly-cooler dimness of the service shed. “See this?” He waves a hand at the truck that sits with its hood open like it’s caught in the middle of a yawn. I feel like I’ve been in this place forever. The truck has been here the whole time.

Yeah. It’s a truck. What about it?

“Needs a part.”

Okay. So?

Sitting on a stool in front of the workbench, he pulls out the rag and uses it to polish a wrench before hanging it in its place on the pegboard. “Truck won’t go ‘til it gets the part.” He starts to sort and stow the tools and parts and gaskets and things I don’t recognize except that I know they’re innards of some machine. He doesn’t offer anything more.

I watch him sorting and polishing and stowing for a while and then turn to stare at the clouds perseverating over the hills. I go back through the dusty door into the coffee shop, find my stool at the counter and order tea. It comes in a little tin tea pot that burbles tepid water all over the counter when I pour it into the thick diner cup. I may have to take up coffee if I’m stuck here much longer. I open my notebook, wait for rain.

 Number 10 of a listicle called “25 Inspirational Writing Quotes” insists:

 “No need to force yourself to do something the ‘right way’ if it’s not your right way. Your job is to honor your process.” —Andi Cumbo

 That quotation (I will never cede the high ground. “Quote” is a verb, not a noun. Fight me.) arrives just at the right moment to back up Alf’s advice about being patient and continuing to polish my tools until the right part arrives to get my project going. But, to be honest, I’m unsatisfied. Yes, I am writing every day. Yes, my notebooks are full of deep dives into the world of my story. No, I have not added a single sentence to the story that I love so much and I feel I’m getting further from every day.

 Is it possible to love a story to death?

Is it possible to love a story to death? Is this my Velveteen Rabbit worn threadbare and eyeless by too much fondling? Or is it just a truck waiting for a part that has to come from somewhere at the end of a long, dusty road? Or am I just waiting for rain? Choosing a metaphor could take up a whole afternoon, as writing this has taken up the whole of my weekly meeting with my Writers’ Hour crew, saving me yet again from the horror of opening my story file and facing the prospect of letting my characters down.  

They aren’t real people, you know. They can’t be let down unless I write them that way. But they are luminous in my mind, real in the fears they can’t escape or articulate, in their hunger for beauty, their need to take care of each other and to understand the world. What if the part I’m waiting on that will make this truck go is a bit of out-of-stock, backordered talent, or worse, what if the problem’s not just a gasket or a pump but a catastrophic design flaw? What if what it what if? 

I’m caught in the “resistance of the medium” that John Dewey says makes art art. I’m stuck in a LaBrea tarpit of inefficiency and doing-it-the-hard-way that makes art art. I’m in what Roy Wood Jr. calls the “crying in the car” part of being an artist. It sucks. Alf just keeps polishing and stowing his tools and preparing his workbench. I keep doodling in my muddlebooks. 

I would like to counter Alf’s and Andi Cumbo’s advice with this performance of Sol LeWitt’s advice to Eva Hesse:

“Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder, wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, grasping, confusing, itching, scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling, stumbling, numbling, rambling, gambling, tumbling, scumbling, scrambling, hitching, hatching, bitching, moaning, groaning, honing, boning, horse-shitting, hair-splitting, nit-picking, piss-trickling, nose sticking, ass-gouging, eyeball-poking, finger-pointing, alleyway-sneaking, long waiting, small stepping, evil-eyeing, back-scratching, searching, perching, besmirching, grinding, grinding, grinding away at yourself. Stop it and just

DO”

 In the video of the Letters Live reading, Benedict Cumberbatch is redfaced. I jump in my chair as he roars that last word at me.

 Okay, but what counts as doing, I start to ask, and before I can even get the words out he advises, “quit fondling your ego.” I can see Alf polishing tools in the shed. Is he fondling his ego? Am I fondling my ego right now? I feel like Ziggy Stardust, getting sucked up intooooooooo my mi-i-ind! I’m drawing spirals in my muddlebook. Spirals and spirals. Eddying around the question: What is the purpose of this effort? What am I even contributing to the world?

 “you are not responsible for the world — you are only responsible for your work — so DO IT.” 

 You know everything, don’t you, Sol LeWitt. I feel itchy.

 He concedes that doing art and thinking about art are both hard work and that it’s not for everyone: “But if life would be easier for you if you stopped working — then stop. Don’t punish yourself.”

 I feel really itchy.  Microsoft Word tells me that I’ve repeated the word “itchy” too much and that I should find “more concise language.” Fuck off, Microsoft Word, I mutter, and add italics. Word wants me to remove that comma. I am not going to remove that damn comma, Microsoft Word. I’m not here to be concise or efficient. I’m here to do battle with the algorithm.

  “However,” Sol observes, “I think that it is so deeply engrained in you that it would be easier to DO.”

 But I can’t hear him anymore. I’m over here, writing as fast as I can, dodging suggestions from frigging Co-Pilot, being inefficient and inconcise and this post has veered off the path and into the weird. “That sounds fine, wonderful — real nonsense.,” Sol says.

 “Do more”

But I can’t hear him now over the thundering of the rain.