Here’s the first of my monthly writer’s forum where I get to sound my barbaric yawps, express my personal thoughts, life and experiences. It’s an amazing concept to me, for in spite of certain theatrical gifts and long-held drama queen status, I am your basic private, shy person.
Which brings to mind something I’ve been thinking about lately. It’s no new phenomenon for the writer, I know, but I’d like to know how you feel on this matter...
Imagine you’re at a party. You’re standing by the humus dip with a Perrier in your hand and a stranger strikes up a conversation.
(Or you could be hanging out at the bar with a nacho chip crumbs on your lip and slugging down a brew.)
The stranger says, So! What do you do?
I’ve come to realize this is a loaded question but I usually blurt out the truth. I answer between bites of radish flowerette and gingered orange rinds. (Or I may mutter the same between frantic swabs at the salt and cheese goo on my chest.)
No, really, what do you actually do? will be the response. Like for a living? (As though writing is not something one really does.) He says, You write anything I’ve ever heard of?
Depends on what you read, I answer.
The banter continues for the length of time it takes Louie Armstrong to sing "What A Wonderful World."
After he asks how much money I make, (which receives no response) he launches into a monologue on the reading habits of his family.
My uncle Jake, now there was a reader, he tells me. Hardly ever saw the
guy he didn’t have a book in his hands. My mom, too. Always reading.
What do your mom and Uncle Jake read? I ask.
Don’t ask me, he says. Books, he guesses.
I try to change the subject. Have you tasted the spring rolls? (Or: These pork rinds are a bit chewy, eh?)
I know what’s coming next. It could be preceded by a small silence, a clearing of the throat, a quick swig of something amber, or just a sudden burst of noisy confidence:
I’VE GOT A BOOK IN ME THAT I’M GONNA TO WRITE ONE DAY! He peals these words out of his mouth like a sacred edict.
He’s going to write this dynamite story he knows will be a best seller, look out Grisham and Koontz. Steven King has nothing on him. (And if I wrote half as good as Stephen King, he woulda heard of me.)
The book in him is a real zinger of an idea, he goes on. It’s this story about a guy who takes over the world, but the catch is, blah-blah-blah ...
A familiar picture: me standing with my jaw hanging open, listening to a non writer boast about the book he or she is going to write.
Have you begun writing it yet? I ask this finding consonants difficult to form.
Nope-- (said as though I’ve said something funny) --heck, there’s not enough TIME.
I think of the woman who told me how she began work on a family saga six years ago, but she just hasn’t had the TIME to get it down on paper. (And, did I do ghost writing?) Then there was the gastro-enterologist who was prepared to get famous with his yet unwritten memoir tentatively called Gut Life. The only glitch was finding the stomach and doggone TIME to write the thing. (His words exact.)
And how could I forget the lady I met at a museum opening who confided she had a true story within her just aching to be written about her grandfather. She hadn’t written it yet (TIME restrictions) but could I recommend a really good agent?
A young woman cornered me at Freshman Orientation at the college where I teach. She had an Ann of Green Gables meets Medusa novel in mind, a sure winner in her opinion. Her boyfriend, at her side, said he had an entire book of poems he simply had to get published because it will turn the world upside down -- it will, like, change history! --
-- when he gets around to writing it.
And she’d find time for her novel ,like, during spring break. Would I help them get published?
Every semester I have a couple of students in my creative writing classes who tell me around the first week of class they have great poems and stories in their heads. They tell me they were positively born to write. By the end of the semester these same would-be Dostoyevsky’s and Elizabeth Bishops have vanished in the abyss of the Drops List.
They didn’t have TIME.
Writing is an intimate art, as former poet laureate Robert Pinsky discusses in "The Double Nature of Poetry." Writing is comprised of the most public of all mediums, language.
Because we all speak a language and because we can, most of us, write that language down on paper, people might get the idea we can all do it if we had time and get rich like Steven King.
In other words, a writer’s calling is largely discredited because of the work’s dependence upon the commodity of spare time, which all so-called professional writers must have bales of. Shakespeare must have been a real slackard with nothing to do with his days but sit around in a dream state and twirl a quill on parchment. Proust, Pound, Eliot, Woolf, the lot of them – ne’r-do-wells with time on their hands. Our modern literary heroes like Morrison or Updike? People with lots of extra time on their hands. Like slugs on rocks.
Imagine Annie Proulx waking up one morning with nothing whatsoever to do and in order to kill time she whips off "The Shipping News" and wins the Pulitzer Prize. Did Don DeLillo decide to be a writer out of sheer boredom? Was he tired of sitting on a rock baking in the sun so he thought he’d write a little something, like "White Noise" and "Libra" and win himself some national prizes?
I’m fond of saying it takes as long to become a writer as it does to become a brain surgeon. Some of my younger students scoff at this idea. They are accustomed to thinking in terms of success and acceptance and not in terms of art and practice. I realize carving out great chunks of TIME to develop one’s art is a difficult skill to develop and maintain, especially when it includes failure, sacrifice, study, reworking and perseverance.
I get a thrill every time one of my students makes a leap forward in their work. It’s wonderful when they come upon a fresh and exciting turn in their story or poem, and when the final product has been written, rewritten, worked on and at last the best it can be. These people are the writers of tomorrow because they know the work it takes to get there and they’re willing to engage in it. Day by day. Page by page. Sentence by sentence. Word by word.
Time.
Back to the party and the snack table. It’s my turn now. Tell me, what do YOU do?
© Marie Jordan 2001
I encourage you to keep a writer's journal. With respect to this writer's activity and (I think) a necessary function of the writing life, I am going to include in my monthly Writing Life column an occasional portion of a well-known (and maybe not so well known) writer's journal. The following was sent to me by a friend from John Steinbeck's Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters. The book, published posthumously in 1969, is an edited set of daily letters written by Steinbeck while working on East of Eden, Jan 29 to Nov l, l951. The letters were addressed to his editor, Pascal Covici. "Journal and Working Days: The Journal of the Grapes of Wrath:" and they give great insight into the working mind of JS....From Steinbeck:
I think it is time for me to get on with my work now.
Labor Day today and for me the term could be used in its most strenuous and biologic sense. This is a blue day full of fears and little weeping clouds. Writing is a very silly business at best. There is a certain
ridiculousness about putting down a picture of life. And to add to the joke -- one must withdraw for a time from life in order to set down that picture. And third one must distort one's own way of life in order in some sense to
simulate the normal in other lives. Having gone through all this nonsense, what emerges may well be the palest of reflections. Oh! it's a horse's ass business. The mountain labors and groans and strains and the tiniest of rodents comes out. And the greatest foolishness of all lies in the fact that to do it at all, the writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true. If he does not, the work is not worth even what it might otherwise have been. As it says in The King and I -- "Is a mystery!"*
All this is a preface to the fear and uncertainties which clamber over a man so that in his silly work he thinks he must be crazy because he is so alone. If what he is doing is worth doing -- why don't more people do it? Such questions. But it does seem a desperately futile business and one which must be very humorous to watch. Intelligent people live their lives as nearly
on a level as possible -- try to be good, don't worry if they aren't, hold to such opinions as are comforting and reassuring and throw out those which are not. And in the fullness of their days they die with none of the tearing pain of failure because having tried nothing they have not failed. These people are much more intelligent than the fools who rip themselves to pieces on nonsense. And with that I will go to work. Two more weeks of it before I go into New York. Twenty more pages and I will be at my own writing board. And I will be glad to be there."
* The much-quoted phrase from The King and I was, "Is a puzzlement."
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