Waiting for the Last Gasp – Adam Overland

The key to writing, I think, is to put pen to paper—to just sit down and write. If your fingers keep moving, your brain will eventually catch-up and make sense of it. 

Years ago, when I was living in Alaska in 1999-2000, I went to hear the humorist and author Patrick McManus (who passed in 2018) speak. McManus was a favorite of my dad’s, had a column on the back page of Outdoor Life magazine, and wrote numerous books (which have sold roughly 6 million copies) about hunting and fishing (mis)adventures. 

I’m not sure I’d find his books all that funny today, but I read them in high school and enjoyed them, so when I saw that he would be giving a talk, I attended. Plus, even mildly famous people just did not visit Alaska (the population too sparse, the payoff too small to justify the trip), but the outdoors were his bread and butter, and Alaska had an endless supply of that. McManus also taught writing at a pacific northwest university, and so was in Alaska to promote his latest book, Deer on a Bicycle, about the art of humor writing. 

One thing McManus said at his talk that stuck with me was that in his writing classes, he would have students write daily for the duration of the course. Every day, 7 days a week, students were to sit down and write for two hours. He said that after about 10 weeks, for those who kept with it, without fail something within them would give way and they would begin to find a voice and a kind of writing raison d’etre. The task itself would suddenly shift from chore to something more like joy, and would henceforth come with ease. I think he was full of shit. 

It took me more than a decade to give his advice a try, and so in about 2012, for 90 days straight, I woke up before work around 5:30 or 6 a.m. and sat facing my computer. I’d just start typing—it didn’t matter what. Sometimes I’d get a good paragraph out of it, sometimes a nearly nonsensical page of word garbage. After about 90 days, writing still felt difficult. In addition, I’d rather be catapulted directly onto the surface of the sun than to get up before the sun rises. So it was challenging, but at the end of that 90 days, I did have close to a dozen pieces of writing I was proud of. I’d written essays, poems, and even short fiction, the latter of which I didn’t know I had in me. 

Unfortunately, it took me another decade to begin writing consistently again (outside of work and freelance), which I started doing just this last February with the launch of this poorly read blog. What I’ve found in the meantime is that sitting down to write is no less challenging today. It takes discipline that I’m short on to create something for, essentially, oneself and a limited audience (some of whom I’ve forced to be here, but all of whom I am extremely grateful to). 

Despite this, I am approaching 100 pages and more than 50,000 words of “content.” And again I’ve written nearly a dozen pieces that I’m proud of—mostly these are essays that I still find funny upon re-reading them days or weeks later. 

Fortunately, writing isn’t just its own reward, because in the end all that effort has been rewarded with very few readers (clicks, in the parlance of our times), no money, and drawing the inevitable comparisons of yourself with other writers on this and other platforms and realizing that there are literally hundreds if not thousands of people trying to do essentially the same thing as you, except they’ve been at it longer and have been published in places like McSweeney’s, Slackjaw, Points in Case, the Weekly Humorist, and other publications I’ve never even heard of (although I’ve of course heard of McSweeney’s). 

Still, I got here late. I’m 45 and finally settling down to do something that I’ve felt nearly all my life I should be doing. I just haven’t been at it long enough. I’m kind of like a musician in the busking phase, kicking open the case and hoping for a few pennies while honing my craft and hoping someday I can make a living doing something that doesn’t require a boss. That’s the dream, anyway, and so I’m sticking with it. A person needs something in life to strive toward or you’re just waiting around to be mud again. This is me striving.