A Discussion on the Nature of Writing

A Discussion on the Nature of Writing 

“It ain’t easy brother, Chester can tell you that. I wrote a novel, you know. A kind of spy thriller in which I had to stop a Soviet Squirrel named Natasha from giving my recipe over to the Russians. I worked for two years on that thing, while still putting in time at the studio. When I finished, I knew it was good, clean spy fiction, a paragon of the genre. But they told me I couldn’t publish it, not even under a pseudonym. Couldn’t afford to confuse my image, they said, as if they hadn’t renamed me three times already,” said the Cheetah bitterly.

            “Did you like writing the book?” asked the Rabbit.

            “It was crunchy,” said the Cheetah.

            “Maybe you could give it to someone else, and let them published it under their name?” suggested the Rabbit.

            “What?! Never! Chester don’t fuck around like that. Chester gonna stop doing this TV bullshit one day, and find himself a place in Brooklyn and get Paul Auster to help publish his books. Talked to Paul last year at a party in L.A. He says he’ll see if he can help Chester out.”

            “Oh,” said the Rabbit a little offended, “It was only a suggestion,” and then added, “I tried to write something once. It was a book of aphorisms, you know a la Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. But they only mocked me as always: ‘Silly rabbit,’ they’d say, ‘Silly, silly rabbit.’”

            “I used to write poems about me lucky charms,” said a sad little man, drinking hard ale from wooden cup, “Beautiful poems they were:

Frail the white rose and frail is the charm
Which she holdeth before with a spoon
Whose marshmallow sight
Was sure a delight
And it caused all the children to swoon

            “I remember one,” said H.G. Wells, suddenly barging in unannounced:

Our novel gets longa and longa
Its language gets stronga and stronga
But there’s much to be said
For a life that is led
In illiterate places like Bonga!

“How did you get here?!” I asked Wells astonished.
“I'm here to tell you to get back to work!" he roared, "Or quit writing books nobody wants to read and get a real job! No one's ever gonna read you if you spend your time whining about how its hard! You think writing the Time Machine wasn’t hard? You think I didn’t want to throw the manuscript for Twenty Leagues under the Sea, into the Boston Harbor?!”

            “Wasn’t that Jules Verne?” I pointed out timidly.

            “I’ll show you Jules Verne,” and he raised his cane menacingly, and I thought him about to strike me about the head, but instead he scattered the cartoon cereal mascots from my childhood, and disappeared.