Types of Writer

   In an interview for Jon Winokur's Advice to Writers, the late Harlan Ellison said this:  

   "I try to stay in possession of my faculties because I’m already completely crazy. I think you have to be something to be a writer. I’m astonished by writers who are quiet people, who speak softly, who are rational. I look at them and I say, “What the fuck is this creature?” You have to be mad to write. If you’re not mad in one way or another, what you’re writing is boring."

 I'm that type of writer, the type who would puzzle Harlan. I don't often drink to excess, my admittedly thorough experimentation with mind altering chemicals and processes lasted only a couple of years.   

 Because, in the end, very little of that was interesting. Beyond observing other people- which I found that I could not do as well when I was as fucked up as they were, anyway. 

 Additionally, I am not a big yeller or stomper around. I have a couple of friends who also write, and who wear their eccentricity with bold pride, who stride across rooms and launch themselves into conversation as if the were the prettiest, mostest interesting thing within earshot. 

 Now, I can do all of that, and I have, in the past, done a lot of it. But for most of my time as a creative sort, I have been the composed guy in the corner, with a gleam in his eye, happily and quietly watching the show thrown by everyone else.

 It's not that I am any less mad. But- as I would have said to Harlan- we quiet fuckers are the infiltrators. We're not the bomb throwers, but the poisoners. We aren't painting little airplane silhouettes on the sides of our fighters,  but we have spots in our gardens where you'd best beware of the plants. Which not to eat, and which will eat you. 

  And so it goes.