THE CHATTANOOGA FIX

Stephen Burns is an aspiring writer from Toronto. He’s about to turn thirty-nine. He earns a living through other means, but he still writes—he still writes with discipline and passion and skill. I believe he still dreams of scratching out “aspiring” from his self-list of adjectives, but he’s deep enough into things to know that it might not happen for him the way he might have hoped, once upon a time.

He asked me to read a blog entry of his about his continued efforts to overcome some pretty terrible math, and I did. You should, too. It made me think a lot about my own career and some of the things I’ve written for this blog. It made me wonder about the true definition of success. It made me wonder who’s right, if anyone can be right about things like this. Over and over again these past few days, I’ve found myself thinking about the question Stephen and his hope represents.

I still don’t know the answer.

Really, it comes down to this: Is there a value in trying—is there a nobility in effort alone, regardless of the outcome?

Of course!—that’s the easy answer. It’s always worth trying. I want to believe that’s true. In my more optimistic moments—like when I wrote my last entry to Lydia, sitting in an airport lounge, a weird fog rolling against the windows—I believe it’s always worth taking that last mighty stab. It’s easy to tell people to go after their dreams. It’s easy to tell them that there’s no reason they can’t be one of the lucky ones.

Hell, we spend a lot of our spare time making struggle seem downright romantic. Heroes in literature, in movies, in song—how many of them battle against ridiculous odds? How many of them are celebrated even when they finish their journeys as failures, as victims? It’s better to burn out than to fade away. It’s better to drive your car into a canyon rather than live a life you don’t want to lead. It’s better to love and to lose than never to have loved at all.

Oh, shit, that’s easy. It beautiful and easy.

But is it fair? Is it fair to ask people to fight nearly unwinnable fights?

Let’s look at that terrible math a little more closely. Stephen has spent the last two years of his life working on a book. With an enviable work ethic, he finds a seat in a coffee shop nearly every day and writes to a 1,500-word quota. Day after day, sentence by sentence, he’s written 200,000 words. That’s a staggering amount of effort. That’s forty 5,000-word features. That’s Into the Wild times three.

And in his more honest moments—or in his more pessimistic moments, at least—Stephen has wondered whether it’s been worth it. Reading his blog, it sounds to me as though sometimes he’s fallen out of love with his book. There are times when he’s struggled to force himself to write, and who could blame him? He has battled those doubts we’ve all battled. Because maybe the book isn’t good; maybe it’s good but it won’t be published; maybe it will be published but it won’t be read; maybe it will be read but it won’t be understood; maybe it will be understood but it won’t be loved.

There are so many places for this train to derail. And Stephen’s managed to keep it on the tracks through every wobble and clang.

I admire that, greatly.

I’m also saddened by that, nearly as much.

Because I think false hope is a cruel and evil thing. I think it’s cowardly to encourage people when they don’t stand a chance.

And few things break my heart more than the idea of someone writing thousands and thousands of words, all for nothing.

Not to suggest that Stephen’s book isn’t good—it might be very, very good. Still, no matter how good it might be, the odds remain stacked heavily against him. They’re not insurmountable. He’s not fighting impossibility. But he’s fighting improbability. He’s fighting the short money. He’s pouring a lot of hope and effort into a lottery.

I know. I’ve done it myself. Maybe ten years ago now, I decided to take my shot and write a screenplay. I took a leave from my paying gig. My wife and I rented a little schoolhouse next to an old cemetery on a beach in Nova Scotia. It was a really pretty spot. Every morning, Lee lit the fire, and I went to work. I worked every day, most of the day, for six weeks. Page after page rolled out. In the end, I wrote 120 pages that I felt pretty good about. I called it Chattanooga Fix.

At this very moment, those 120 pages are sitting in a cardboard box, inside a metal storage locker, somewhere upstairs. They have never, ever been read by anyone else. On the drive back from Nova Scotia, I decided they weren’t good enough, and I never showed them to anybody. Chattanooga Fix doesn’t really exist—it never has—except for inside my own memory. That’s the only place in the world it has any shape.

Do I regret writing it? No, I guess not. But I do wonder whether that effort might have been better spent on something else. I do wonder whether, had I pointed myself in a slightly different direction, the result might have been something better, something that might be considered a success.

And Chattanooga Fix is nothing compared to Stephen’s 200,000 words. It’s a fucking whisper. It’s a gum wrapper.

So what’s the answer? The challenge is to find our purpose and pursue it, Stephen writes, even when we’re handed a life other than the one we expected. And if along the way we become the success that always seemed impossible, so much the better. Chances are, we won’t even notice.

I think Stephen’s right, except just there, at the end, when I think he’s wrong. I’m pretty sure of that. Success feels different from failure. I’ve known both, and for me, success changes every part of the view. Success means validation. Success means reward. It means satisfaction, and a nice bed, and a better night’s sleep. If given a choice between the two, I’d pick success every single time, and I think most people would. Failure sucks.

Too bad failure, then, some kind of it, is almost inevitable, for all of us. If you write at all, you’ve written something for nothing.

All I can hope, all any of us can hope, is that not knowing what you might have accomplished, that nag in your chest, that cigarette burn of What if?—because you never tried, because you did the math, because you sided with the overdogs from the first fucking step—hopefully that feeling sucks worse. Hopefully that wondering whether you might have been leaves a bigger stain than knowing you weren’t.

That’s why, in the end, it’s so hard to find the right answer here—because you can’t experience both feelings in one lifetime. You’re on one side or the other. You’ve either tried or your haven’t. You’re either on the side of theory or fact, of imagination or paper. You’ve either written the words or you’ve never written a single one.

Stephen Burns made his choice. He chose to write the words, 200,000 of them. Stephen Burns should never have a doubt.