the online process of Matt Slaybaugh
This Writer’s Creed
This is my chair. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
My chair is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life.
My chair, without me, is useless. Without my chair, I am useless.
My chair and I know that what counts in war is not the words we write, the noise that we make, nor the mistakes we make. We know that it is the time in the chair that counts.
Think you’re creative life is difficult? Think you’re keeping it real? Check out this “microinterview” with author Nell Zink, from The Paris Review.
Nell Zink’s novel The Wallcreeper came out in October and was listed last week among the 100 Notable Books of 2014 by the New York Times. Jonathan Franzen—who had earlier tried to interest publishers in Zink’s first novel, Sailing Towards the Sunset by Avner Shats—wrote, “Her work insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and stranger than the world you think you know.”
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Whatever I was writing at the time, I knew there was no market for it and never would be, because there’s never a market for true art, so my main concern was always to have a job that didn’t require me to write or think. So after I got out of college I worked construction, mostly. I waitressed some in winter.
Cheers to you if your success is as well-earned as hers. Mine is not.
I’ve got something on an entrepreneurial idea for making a WORKSPACE. A place that is ideal for getting work done, individually, as a writer. Not a coffee shop, not a co-working place with rented desks. Not a place to hang-out, not a place to chat with your website designer. A place to write.
Pursuant of that, I told Jen Schlueter about my idea and we talked around it a bit.
MS: What was your favorite place to write?
JS: It was in the basement of my house in Belfountaine. It was a shitty basement, it was not finished. But that’s where I wrote the vast majority of my dissertation because it was the place where I was most isolated and there was nothing else in there but the work. And that was really good for me with that particular project.
But the placed where I enjoyed writing the most – There was this beach house that I used to rent when we lived in Eugene. It was this cheap little salt box. It was not a good beach house; it was a crap hole. But it had a good view and it was quiet.
MS: That’s where you fantasize about going to write?
JS: Yeah, when I imagine my fantasy writer’s colony. But the truth is, I got way more done in my terrible basement.