The Validation Tango Face it. They really are out to get you.         -Victor D. Infante         There are easier ways to get validation. Seriously, if you want validation as a human being, find yourself a Labrador retriever. It’s an effective way to keep unadulterated affection and devotion on tap. Same could be said of a spouse or children, but really, when it comes right down to it, they’re human beings and inclined to tell you you’re full of it when you deserve to hear it. People who love you will be honest with you, and that usually hurts.         Writing will do many things for you. It will be your therapist at 2:00 a.m. when even the weird-ass Japanese anime has flickered off the screen. It will be an outlet for that nasty urge to take a stick of dynamite to the kids down the street still blaring their stereo that ungodly hour. It can and will, if you’re lucky, keep you this side of sane.         But it will never love you.         Writing, to be anthropomorphic, is a user. It’s the corner pusher down the main drag who doesn’t care what the trip does to you, so long as you come back for more. Your muse is a whore and it only pretends to care about your needs, so long as it gets fed. And when you stop feeding it, it will go away. Undoubtedly, it has gone off with the sickly-looking Goth kid down at the coffee shop, who is wasting it on lousy suicidal poetry and wouldn’t know good writing if Nick Cave kicked him in the shins.         If I were you, I’d go kick his ass. Don’t mind me. I’ll wait.         There. Doesn’t that feel better? No?         There really isn’t any substitution for the joy of inspiration, is there? Here’s the pathetic truth of a life in writing: if your muse dries up, so do you. You will develop strange mental disorders and lose your fashion sense. There are at least 15 skin diseases found only in failed screenwriters, and a whole order of neuroses only seen in slam poets who’ve been recycling the same poems for at least three years.         Dried-up novelists will wander deep into the woods rather than allow people to discover what has become of their urinary tract. It isn’t pretty.         There is only one remedy to this malaise, only one thing that will prevent you from becoming that crumpled shell of a person sitting on the street corner smelling vaguely of cabbage and holding a sign that says, “Will Network for Food.”         Don’t fail. It’s as simple as that.         There are only two paths to destruction for a writer: success and the complete and utter lack of success. Either can kill you faster than carcinogen. I’ve had my share of both, and both have bent my head into positions yoga masters only dream of.         Success hurt worse, if I were to be completely honest. For me, it came through poetry. I had a particularly good streak. After many halfway decent years, I’d written one book, “God’s Country,” that I was extremely happy with, then a book-length poem called “Cancer” that was immensely well received and, eventually, republished in a literary journal that people actually read. Then, I finished a book called “Invisible Ghetto” which, for the first time, was a series of poems that did exactly what I wanted it to.         Modesty aside, I was writing kick-ass, detailed poems that I was extraordinarily happy with, that were getting all kinds of acclaim and making me no money whatsoever, which was OK. Poetry rarely makes you money. But they were good poems, and people were publishing them, and coming to my readings, and showering me with praise and not pelting me with bricks. Which is nice.         But then something strange happened: I couldn’t write poetry anymore. I’d sit down to try, and what came out was prosaic and uninspired and as interesting as a Boise telephone book. I’d stay up late into the night, smoking cigarettes and staring at the screen as garbled lines mocked me in 12-point type.         It took me years to figure out that, what was really happening to me, was that I’d written so many good poems that I was now completely, utterly terrified to write bad ones. Fear of failure is a nasty, nasty bugaboo on even the best of days, but once you’ve actually done it right a few times, your ego—You remember your ego? The ogre sitting on the couch eating your Doritos and watching “Cowboy Bebop?”—can drive you into a paralyzing state of paranoia about ever writing anything less good than what you’ve previously done. That, for me, was my first defeat: not writing the next damn poem.         The second defeat came when, smartly, I decided to try my hand at other writing genres, notably, screenwriting. Now, this whole time I’d been working in journalism, and that’s an area which I’ve had little trouble with at all, probably because I’ve been neither wildly successful or a miserable failure. It’s a job, and thus, I’m able to keep it all in perspective. Hold onto that thought.         Screenwriting was new and exciting. I breezed through a couple TV spec scripts for practice, then set my eyes on telling a bigger story. I envisioned a flashy little story called “Nihilist Chic,” and set down to hash it into reality. It became a passion, of sorts, in many ways rivaling my passion for poetry. I finished it, and began the work of trying to do something with it, all while starting my next one, “the List.”         I mailed scripts. I called agents. Producers called me. I traded e-mails with people. I didn’t take lunches because I live in frigging New England. People liked the script. People hated the script. Sometimes the same people hated and loved the script. One guy called me about the script, and when I returned his phone call 5 minutes later, he’d forgotten completely who I was.         Eventually, I didn’t have the strength left to continue. The scripts are still out there. Every now and again, I get an odd e-mail about them, but nothing comes of them. The third screenplay is plotted in my head, waiting for me to write it into existence, but it hasn’t happened yet.         You see, I let the bastards beat me. I became utterly convinced that I was a lousy screenwriter, and that I had no business trying anymore. There may have been a case of whiskey and a parade of cheap hookers in there somewhere. I don’t remember. But, the point is, the failure wasn’t my inability to get the script produced, it was not writing the next script, or the next rewrite, or whatever.         Success doesn’t have anything to do with getting a poem published or a screenplay made. Those, ultimately, are validations from other people, and seeking validation from others can kill you. And getting validation from others can kill you. At the end of the day, you need to remember which pusher is ultimately supplying your drugs, and that would be that fickle muse of yours.         If there’s one lesson to be learned in this cautionary tale, it’s this: writing can be a passion, or it can be a job, but at the end of the day, all that matters is that little prickle at the back of your neck that tells you that something you’ve written is worthwhile. Seek opinions, certainly—sometimes people see things you don’t—but don’t look to others to validate your writing and, consequently, your worth as a human being. If your mommy likes your poetry, keep in mind that it may well be because she’s your mommy. If she hates your screenplay and thinks you should give it up, remember that it’s probably because she’s a bitter old hag who resents you not following her into accounting. Producers are full of it. Publishers are full of it. Harold Bloom is so full of it he’s about to explode.         You are not Joss Whedon or Aimee Bender or Sekou Sundiatu, and even they are sitting up some nights watching infomercials, smoking cigarettes and wondering how the Hell they’re going to write the next thing.         And that’s the secret: Forget the critical acclaim. Forget the rejection slips. Forget the write up in the Hollywood Review and the restraining order from the New Yorker. It’s all a distraction.         Get over yourself and write.         (Victor D. Infante is the author of seven books of poetry and two screenplays, and has begun delving back into those fields again, thank you very much. Visit him online at http://www.quantumredhead.com/victor.) (c) WriteMovies.com 2003

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