In the early morning, as the sky through the capillary tendrils of tree branches begins to take on the blue hue of gas flame, I read a few pages to get myself warmed up to write. In the hour that transpires, I find the momentum to write. I am almost always surprised by this process, which is usually productive, and which I’ve frequently come to rely on as a way of keeping myself grounded. I’ve always believed this is a meditative practice. In the sanctified space of writing, what gets in here is what I choose. That seems to me the only thing one can do if they are a writer, cultivate the space to allow the writing to occur. The subjects, the object, of scrutiny will come if one creates the environment, the practice.
I think about the writer William H. Gass, who must have cultivated a fine and happy practice, as well as having a sanctified space to write in. Gass has reappeared to me after having held onto his books (The World Within the Word, and In the Heart of the Heart of the Country) for at least twenty-five years before I finally read him, recently. Perhaps it’s true that many writers have a time for us. I console myself with the notion that I wasn’t ready for Gass twenty-five years ago, or I did not have the knowledge to appreciate his sometimes-flowering language, and the efflorescence of his thoughts, or I did not try hard enough. Gass can make a lot of writers seem to be merely playing around; to lack discipline and precision in their language. All those years ago, he made me feel like a kid in a sandbox. Gass’s essay on Gertrude Stein in turn sent me back to her work (which I was more prepared for when I encountered it in grad school), and her wonderful essay on writing, “Composition as Explanation.” Reading Gass on Stein now is an electrifying, and edifying, experience.
Writing and reading have always been in an essential symbiosis to me, and perhaps I’m not original in this thought, but I feel it needs to be said. When I read, besides the myriad reasons I do it, I am able to channel the thought process. Reading in turn opens me to writing. One is never simply reading, they are thinking about what is being read. I suspect the people who don’t read think of reading as filling one’s head with the thoughts of others. Superficially, it might be that, but reading is also a form of thinking, and it must be that one can process multiples more of information in the gaps of one’s reading when focused with intensity on a book or passage. Just as I write, I am thinking, but focused on getting my thought down on the page, how the word in the moment almost mysteriously leads to the next word. Writing, then, like reading, becomes a form of thinking. I am comfortable with suggesting that writing and reading are often one and the same activity.
The writing process, how we write, fascinates me. I have long realized a curious paradox: unless I write, I won’t have anything to write about. The sheer action of writing leads me to thinking, which is how I end up creating something, an essay, or blog post, a somewhat convenient and contained thousand-words, or perhaps, a work of fiction.
Often, I write about books because they are self-contained, while containing a world. I enjoy writing reviews, where I can write my opinions, my insights, and strive to be intrinsically objective. I want to see the underlying sense of things, the mechanisms at work, what the writer might be trying to do, or not; consciously or not. (It is always worthwhile to consider the agency of the writer. As a reader, you hope the writer under your gaze understands completely what it is they are writing about. The authority of a piece of writing is its coin of the realm. One cannot fake this. But then some writers insist on the ability to be deft fakers, and thus, it must be that writing for them is a form of subterfuge.)
I am drawn to essays that are essentially about the writing process. Sven Birkerts is a progenitor of this type of essay, and this pursuit is what I tend to cycle back to in my own essays, a questioning of how I got here and what I am writing about. Writing about writing is an inexhaustible subject.
Writing about how I might write myself out of the compulsion to write about process, my tendency, I naturally, or logically, thought this meant that I am almost always writing about myself. Part of why I thought this was not good was because I hear it often said that one should not write about themselves. This judgment call is often made about writing, and so I feel it necessary to be prepared to defend myself, as I become aware that the notion has crept into this essay. One of my advisors in grad school said to me that I write best when I concentrate on objects or things, and it shook me like a revelation. What I took her to mean was that I don’t write very well about people, and myself, I suspected, least of all. But writing about the self becomes somewhat inescapable when I write about books and writing. Birkerts, as much as he writes pithy observations that are the province of his unique and searching literary mind, cannot escape writing about himself.
Perhaps I could apply the template of my reviewing to my subject, the way I might carefully analyze passages of a book I’m reviewing. Treat the world, or my subject, like a finite book I want to understand, or laud, to analyze. This might mean taking more interest in the world and treating the things that my eye falls upon with utmost respect. Lose my selectivity of, this option is better, more worthwhile, than that option.
Overtaken with the physical act of writing, I naturally return to noticing, and I look again out the ground floor window. The light in the yard is almost at full morning glory, its space of green infused with a cool mist or fog, before the sun asserts itself. I write on, Uni-ball pen pressing into the callus on my middle finger because it seems I’ve never properly figured out how to hold the pen for cursive. I insist on writing longhand, its methodology evinced in stacks of journals I believe I will one day want to hoard for so much collected material. Certainly, this process would go faster, or I would generate reams more material, if I chose to write on a computer, but I don’t believe the writing would be any better. As much as I have written, I always need to write more. I always have more than I will ever utilize. At the speed of pen on paper, I am at the speed of thought. And if I am feeling sanguine, I can leave my sanctified space of writing until the next time, convincing myself once more that through re-reading and the deft artifice of editing, I am on to something.