One of my favourite TV shows is an off-kilter comedy on HBO called Bored to Death. I stumbled upon it I think late last year and became quickly obsessed with it. It’s the quiet, beneath-the-radar, little-engine-that-could kind of show I’m attracted to, primarily about a Brooklyn writer, Jonathan Ames, who moonlights as an amateur private detective. Also inhabiting his claustrophobic universe are his shlumpy wingman and best friend Ray (played by the new ‘It’ boy of post-fratboy comedy, Zach Galifianakis), a chronically out-of-work cartoonist who tries constantly to observe the often blurry line between artistic integrity and selling out, and George (played by a hilarious Ted Danson), the aging, flamboyantly narcissistic editor of the literary magazine Jonathan sometimes writes for who is grappling with the new literary world order and his current position in it. It’s right up my alley, not simply because of its screwball, farcical nature but because of the truth about the artist’s life it tells at its core. These characters aren’t simply floating about on the virtual edges of a world I understand and am interested in, they’re immersed in it. Better than that, though, their portrayals about the struggles have given my own ambivalence about the artistic life shape and perspective. I love it when TV does that, don’t you?

Jason Schwartzman stars as Jonathan Ames, the struggling novelist who drinks too much and smokes too much weed. Of the three, I understand this character best. He is based on the creator of the series, the real-life Jonathan Ames, himself a novelist and essayist for more than 20 years. In the series, the Jonathan Ames character has published a first novel, and has tried to sell a second, which has been stoutly rejected. He doubts himself and the early success he had as a writer.

I can empathise with him; writing is such a risk. How can one thing you write be successful and the other thing so reviled? I understand the complex literary no-man’s-land a writer can find himself in, especially after a first book. I haven’t completed a second book myself, not, contrary to what some may believe, because of any paralysing fear of rejection — although there is the potential for that — but because I’ve been busy and unfocused. How can I find time to write the novel I so badly want to write when I have to do the other writing gigs that will pay the bills now? At the same time, it’s only writing. How can I complain about not being able to write a simple story? It’s not as though I’m finding the cure for cancer. In trying to validate his or her existence, it’s the question an artist wrestles with every day.

Just watch the fey Schwartzman, with his courtly, polite demeanour, and you’ll be struck by the underlying depression and lethargy Jonathan experiences regarding the surreal highs and lows of being a writer. To counteract the ennui that he feels — because this is what you do feel as a writer — he decides to live out a fantasy and places an ad on the infamous Craigslist pretending to be a private eye. Before he knows it, he’s doing work for an endless stream of paranoid spouses and assorted freaks.

The truth is: writing is an unsexy profession. It’s tedious. Therefore, it’s easy to become distracted. Every other profession seems to be more fun. In the series, Jonathan is a procrastinator. He fixates on backgammon and crossword puzzles. I get that. Often, when I should be writing, I’m online doing nothing productive. Case in point: I discovered the show in an attempt to blow off some writing assignment I had. Don’t be fooled: writing isn’t as easy as it appears. The human brain doesn’t give up information in a chronological, ordered way; to arrive at a story that’s halfway decent, the challenge is to collect the information the brain yields and arrange it into something that will shine. That’s a difficult thing to do. Most times you don’t know if the words you’ve strung together connect to form something memorable or even meaningful. ‘Bored to death’ therefore becomes almost a metaphor and an apt description of not just the process of creating art but the end result of distraction. I checked my computer files recently and was taken aback by the hundreds of half-finished manuscripts of short stories, essays, serialised fiction, etc I had abandoned. Because you often can’t see the finished product, and, let’s face it, even if you could, the very nature of art is that there are often many twists and turns along the way, so it’s difficult to stay with it. The real Jonathan Ames said in an interview, “I’m not very productive at all… I’m someone who procrastinates, worries, for most of a month, and then I’ll have a flurry of manic productivity with a sense of great urgency and fear for like two days.” Honestly, that’s how I feel, and always lurking like a rain cloud is this feeling like much work isn’t being done. Were I a nurse, for example, would I feel this way, I wonder.

The truth is: writing is an unsexy profession. It’s tedious. Therefore, it’s easy to become distracted. Every other profession seems to be more fun. In the series, Jonathan is a procrastinator. He fixates on backgammon and crossword puzzles. I get that. Often, when I should be writing, I’m online doing nothing productive. Case in point: I discovered the show in an attempt to blow off some writing assignment I had. Don’t be fooled: writing isn’t as easy as it appears. The human brain doesn’t give up information in a chronological, ordered way; to arrive at a story that’s halfway decent, the challenge is to collect the information the brain yields and arrange it into something that will shine. That’s a difficult thing to do. Most times you don’t know if the words you’ve strung together connect to form something memorable or even meaningful. ‘Bored to death’ therefore becomes almost a metaphor and an apt description of not just the process of creating art but the end result of distraction. I checked my computer files recently and was taken aback by the hundreds of half-finished manuscripts of short stories, essays, serialised fiction, etc I had abandoned. Because you often can’t see the finished product, and, let’s face it, even if you could, the very nature of art is that there are often many twists and turns along the way, so it’s difficult to stay with it. The real Jonathan Ames said in an interview, “I’m not very productive at all… I’m someone who procrastinates, worries, for most of a month, and then I’ll have a flurry of manic productivity with a sense of great urgency and fear for like two days.” Honestly, that’s how I feel, and always lurking like a rain cloud is this feeling like much work isn’t being done. Were I a nurse, for example, would I feel this way, I wonder.

But I’m not a nurse. What I am is a writer, and in this profession, perseverance is the name of the game. Which is why I’m always confused by how staggeringly unaware of this fact writers I come in contact with seem to be, sending me stories and articles that feel like half-masticated food spat up and left on a plate, work that is many drafts away from being the polished, finished product it ought to be.