I was trying to explain to a friend my compulsion for literature. I felt unequal to the task. Or I was afraid I sounded like a fool. Proselytizing for literature. I said that maybe what it involves is the use of metaphoric language, how one thing is always an analogue to something else. Then I recalled Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s explanation for poetry in the Paris Review: “It comes down to all the standard figures of speech. Simile and metaphor. That’s what makes a poem.”
A reflective weekend in the country reminded me that I wanted to put some pithy words in a minimal context. Maybe I wanted to return to poetry, having not written any for most of the year.
I have always been uneasy with that notion that writing is expression. As if it is merely that, which seems to imply it is good for nothing more than itself. Why would we spend so much time with language unless there was a sense of it opening outward to something more worthwhile? Though I hesitate to say it is merely about being useful.
I tried to take it a step further and tell my friend that I wanted to understand motivation. Of characters. Or of human nature. But this only explains the drive to write fiction, and I had started out talking more of writing in general. I recognized I was trying to explain why any writer writes. But whenever I read general proclamations, such as, Writers are interested in X because of Y, it has the stink of dogma; such explanations don’t fit me.
There is a cachet to being a writer. People want to be known as writers. Defined as writers. Though I might have started out with that motivation so many years ago, it became something else.
I sense of lot of writers don’t necessarily feel that intrinsic drive to write, but rather engage in it as a kind of horse race. It is almost inevitable that in the journey they will be fixated on amassing heft. It’s hard not to be a quantifier when you start to accumulate pages. Such writers like to say, “I wrote 1000 words today,” without any acknowledgment of quality, as if it is reward enough. I’m guilty of this, too, and at one time I was drafting 1,000 words a day over an autumn so I could have a 100,000-word draft of a novel. Lately I’ve been aware, perhaps through writing poetry, or song lyrics, that I’d much rather focus on the substance than quantity. 250 words of a poem can have more impact than 1000 words of prose.
My irritation with my own publishing prospects has certainly altered my enthusiasm for the writing of a long novel. There is a deep well that the novel can set up for the writer, a project so varied and full of possibility, though it takes an equivalent intellectual bandwith. I’m not sure I want the heartbreak of immersing myself in that experience again and having it come to nothing.
But to get back to the basics of creative writing 101: There is a contrivance, the sense that I’m going to write what has never existed before. The belief that I can achieve that. Writing rewards itself.
Reading Elena Ferrante’s In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing, I sensed again it is the mechanics of the process, be it expression or to make meaning, that pull me toward my fixation. Ferrante’s book, from a series of lectures, is in the spirit of those writers who are fascinated with the process of writing, which usually begins with their own process.
I was struck immediately by Ferrante’s elitism: “Any of us can do something good, in writing, when the world gives us a shove, but a true writer is inevitable only when we recognize in the work a unique and unmistakable universe of words, figures, conflicts.” I feel my hackles rise: who is Elena Ferrante to characterize a true writer versus an average writer? I don’t belabor too often these distinctions, particularly as my own woeful lack of recognition, which once felt like shame, feels more like a badge of honor.
Every piece of writing is a contrivance, takes a form. Here’s Ferrante: “even Samuel Beckett, the extraordinary Samuel Beckett, said that the only thing we can’t do without, in literature and any other place, is form.” Beckett, my lodestar.
Another writer we might agree on is Gertrude Stein, and the composition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. In my graduate thesis I wrote that what Stein achieved is “the difference between writing a life (retelling a history) and inventing the story of a life. […] Stein set out to document her own life, while subverting the conventional autobiography through the compositional approach of cubism.” There is the mind-tripping opening up of point of view that Stein achieves. I want to say revolutionizes, as this is also what can happen (the pure possibility) with literary work. Of course, in the elitist, even (dare I say) sexist view of Ferrante, it’s not without taking a dig at Hemingway, whom, as Ferrante has it, Stein believed “confined himself to “confessions”—so she called them—comfortable confessions that, she insisted, were good for advancing his career.”
I would argue that Hemingway revolutionized the language, and our way of seeing, and reading, as much as Stein did. Whether a writer is popular or a revolutionary is largely out of the writer’s hands. People are still reading these dead authors long after they have lost the popularity contest or become cancelled. Joan Didion revealed her apprenticeship was writing out Hemingway’s sentences just to understand what made them tick. Undoubtedly a great exercise, one that led her to an essential notion about writing, one that I is revealed in everything she published.
This is a reminder that writing begets writing. I used to think what was important was what I was writing. But in the moment, it is the fact of writing. There is a wonderful process that takes over in that flush of production. There is a sense that this will be the best thing I’ve ever written, or it will at least be something. And yes, it’s often after getting a shove—as Ferrante has it—but just as often, not. It’s a bit like trying to start a fire. It takes either a methodical approach, and the right conditions, or you throw everything at it, and almost burn the whole place down. Because here’s the thing: the fire wants to burn.
Whether one is a “true” or “just average” writer—whatever that means!—one thing that is undeniable is the body of work that comes from years of pursing a practice. It’s a kind of honor, and an honoring, I think, to be able to return to the well of one’s writing. That’s also the gift of writing.