The Work of Who We Write For

The writing worth doing is the writing you needed to find when you were young and lost

The speech lasted four minutes. Matthew McConaughey stood there in his tuxedo, Oscar in hand, and laid out three things he needed each day. Something to look up to. Something to look forward to. Someone to chase. The Hollywood crowd shifted uneasily in their seats. Some rolled their eyes. The internet hot take artists called it corny, self-absorbed, overwrought even as they girded their loins to fight the Great Chill Wars a year later. But there was something in those three points that hit me right in the feels, even if I couldn’t articulate it until right here, right now.

McConaughey said he looked up to God. Chuck Palahniuk wrote something in Fight Club about how fathers become our models for God, especially when they're absent or flawed. Maybe that's why I look up to the failed writers who made me. My grandfather and my father. Both of them died with the words still stuck inside. They were my models for what it meant to try and fail at the only thing that mattered.

My grandfather had the story. He'd been working the tubes when his submarine fired torpedoes into a Japanese transport carrying 1,500 Allied POWs. He watched them drown through the periscope. He wrote it down in his diary, raw and immediate. But when he came home he couldn't shape it into the book he wanted to write. The entries were precise, detailed. The book needed to be something else. Something that could carry the weight of what he'd seen.

He'd sit at his desk with a couple cases of Stoney’s¹ and a legal pad. He'd write a paragraph, tear it up. Write another, tear it up. The story was there but the words weren't. Forty years of trying. Forty years of not getting it right. The diary sat in a drawer until I put it online. Not the book he wanted to write, but at least the words are out there now.

My father had his own chase. He'd started on the offensive and defensive lines at WVU as a sophomore and then played semi-pro football, excelling at the kind of positions where you do the hard work and nobody knows your name. Later he was a bar owner, car dealer, private pilot, and finally an unemployed elderly bum supported by the high school sweetheart he dumped 48 years earlier while en route to all that stardom he never quite achieved. He lived a dozen different lives in one lifetime. In college, he'd read Kerouac and Burroughs, later Hubert Selby, Jr. He wanted to write something that captured what it meant to live that particular American life in that particular American century.

Instead of novels, his impatient self wrote emails. Thousands of them. Stream-of-consciousness messages fired off at three in the morning from wherever he happened to be. Each one trying to nail down some piece of truth about football or flying or the nature of time. The emails pile up in an archive now. Not the Great American Novel he imagined, but maybe something more honest. The raw feed of a mind trying to make sense of itself.

McConaughey said he looked forward to his family. I look forward to my daughter. She's five now. Everything I write is for her in one way or another. The money goes to her savings account. The lonely nights at the desk are hours away from her, so they better count for something, even if it’s a couple hundred bucks a story. But it's more than money and time. I'm trying to build something she can find someday when she needs it.

Because that's what writers do. We draw maps for the people coming after us. We leave trail markers in the wilderness. My daughter will be 18 someday, confused about everything. She'll be 34, wondering if she took the wrong turn. She'll be 43, taking stock like I am today. Maybe she'll find that something I wrote that helps. Maybe not; maybe the digital gods will destroy all of it and unmake the Internet Archive where it could’ve resided. But I have to try. That's what looking forward means. Building something for the people you love to find later.

Then there's the chase. McConaughey said his hero was himself in 10 years. At fifteen, his hero was himself at 25. At 25, his hero was himself at 35. Always 10 years ahead. Never caught. That's the part the Hollywood crowd didn't understand. They thought he was being cute. But every writer knows exactly what he meant.

You're not chasing Hemingway or Fitzgerald or whoever they now tell you to admire in school. You're chasing the writer you're becoming. The one who finally gets it right. The one who writes the sentence that changes everything, who writes to end writing the way Jimmy Cannon did.

I know who I'm chasing. I'm chasing the writer my 18-year-old self needed to find. The one who could explain why everything felt wrong even when nothing was wrong. I'm chasing the writer my 24-year-old self was looking for in bookstores, killing time between shifts, hoping to find someone who understood. I'm chasing the writer my 34-year-old self needed when the life I'd planned fell apart and I had to rake something else from the rubbish.

I found fragments of what I needed. Samuel Fussell wrote one perfect book about bodybuilding and identity, then vanished.² Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, which introduced the world to Homer Simpson, was the best mean-spirited book that every literary person said nobody read. Paul Solotaroff’s “The Power and the Gory” was near-complete fiction, but it was one hell of a steroid story.³ But mostly I came up empty. So I started writing it myself.

That's why the work looks scattered from the outside. One day I'm writing about monkey torture in the context in the context of submarine warfare, pulling from my grandfather's diary. The next I'm covering professional wrestling or criminal justice reform or "had we but world enough and time" or some other beat that serious writers aren't supposed to touch. But there's a pattern. Each piece is part of building a body⁴ of work that younger me would have stumbled across and thought: "Finally. Someone who is doing this work who gets it."

McConaughey ended his speech with "just keep living." For writers, it's different. Keep alive the memories of the ones who tried and failed before you. Keep looking forward to the ones who'll need what you're building. Keep chasing the writer you're becoming, always a decade away, always failing better than you are now.

That's why it matters, even when it seems like it doesn't.⁵ Especially then.

1. For reasons never adequately explained to me, he carefully peppered the head of each poured beer to preserve it.

2. He did write one solid journal article to go along with it, but was far less prolific than his more famous parents.

3. His books are hit-or-miss, but the magazine work he did on the gay-for-pay origins of the modern Gold’s Gym is epic.

4. See what I did there? Also, read my bodybuilding bibliography — and share it widely, since I’ve dropped the paywall.

5. Which is almost always.