In St. Paul’s epistles we often find the apostle greeting and saluting those whom he imagined being present as the epistle was read. For St. Paul, the act of writing was the act of making another present, and of making oneself present to another in turn. Likewise, Cicero pours out his personal and political heart to Atticus. Heloise cloisters herself off in words together with her Abelard. Shōtoku Taishi, the son of heaven in the land of the rising sun, provocatively greets, by letter, Yangdi, the Sui emperor, son of heaven in the land where the sun goes down.
Perhaps it is the anonymity of modernity, but it was forty years—and nearly two thousand since St. Paul wrote to the Ephesians—before I realized that anyone makes any connection between writing and speaking. Pace St. Paul and the others, but I maintain that there is none. Writing is writing, a separate act, a separate thing. Those who read their papers at conferences, or poets who read their poems in public, or novelists who give readings of chapters of their books, always end up oddly alienated from their own work, hitting all flat notes and eventually abandoning the futile exercise (often to polite and befuddled applause).
I have been speaking, or at least gurgling, since I was an infant. And yet, for as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be a writer. Were writing speaking, I should have been satisfied with mere sound passing my lips and filling the chamber of my sinuses. But this was clearly not enough. The more I spoke, the more keenly I felt that I should be writing.
Speaking was, and still is, wholly other to writing, somehow writing’s enemy. One could not say the things one wrote, and one could not write the things one said. It was not embarrassment, although there was also that. It was somehow not possible to combine the two things. I learned that it was better to keep silent and write than to jabber and have no words for the page. When I would steal away to my notebooks at night, I would choose all the words that I would never have said out loud—the beautiful and chandeliered words, the ones that radiated and crinkled in metaphysical splendor.
When I found the books of e.e. cummings I was confirmed, again, in my belief that to be a writer has nothing to do with the power of speech. Writing is for the eyes, not the ears. The writer is not a wordsmith but a graphic designer. His elements of design tap out morse code heart to heart.
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But you, young writer, already know all this. I am writing this for you precisely because you have this knowledge somewhere, in the same place that you know that you want to write, that you already are, in the order of things, a writer like all the rest. One recognizes instantly the thing in others. The man who gives himself over to his calling is as intelligible as a new penny in the hand. You are a writer, writer. The only question is, how to become one?
One writes to get out what is anyways aborning, aghast, perhaps even soteriologically so, at the horror of taking to the grave that which one was somehow put on earth to bear. In pursuit of this becoming, as a young adolescent I wrote cut-glass essays and stories, menageries of word-senses, dictionaries of neologisms, poems biting and puckish, plays like wild zoetropes. There was great joy in all of it.
But the joy was fringed with mendacity, for I loved the accoutrements too much, or, rather, I began to grow afraid of the power within me and took sly refuge in the trappings of writing instead. Fake birth is much less painful than real birth. I loved the writing of things, to be sure, but there was always a terrible mental pain that fixed words to a page. I therefore cheated by loving, falsely, the things of writing, the notebooks and their feel and fragrance, the exquisite yellow and sable and rubbery rose of a sharpened pencil, the way ink stains fingers, the way pens nest in borrowed cups set on desks.
I made a fetish of notebooks and pencils, not because I was afraid I would not be able to write, but because I was afraid of writing. I roamed stationery stores trying to supply-train my way clear of my duty and my burden. I bought a typewriter, pretending that writing was some kind of exercise in applied antiquity. I sharpened pencils, even sharpened ones. I looked again through my collection of pens.
When one is a poetaster, a poseur, one hurts dully, but not as much as it hurts to write, to overcome the false infinity of inaction and actualize a thought into a strip of words. So I kept on pretending. I idolized the sultry materialism of other writers. I loved the owly eyes of James Joyce in the photographs, the maned oracularity of Yeats, the level, workmanlike gaze of Kerouac, flared with firm purpose and smoking a gravure-blue cigarette. I loved the writerly mien, the wounded ferocity, of David Mamet, beret and all.. I could hear, like clear radio stations, the acrobatic thoughts in the mind of Jean Cocteau.
About cigarettes. These can be good friends, or partners in evading the pain that writing brings. I was young when I started smoking, too young to know that one must open one’s heart to pain. So I smoked á la Sartre and had writerly thoughts and sat in coffee shops, inwardly fulminating whenever someone at another table was reading a book whose author I did not know or whose title I did not recognize.
But writers do not sit in coffee shops and envy other writers. Writers write.
The alternative is a melodramatic despair, invoking the Muses, reading the opening of the Iliad in Greek—out loud, in the hopes that maybe the Muses will be more inclined to respond in their native language.
I was stung once reading a parody of a man, I think in a Dostoevsky book, who claims to be a writer but who is forever merely “gathering notes.”
You can avoid this rut, young writer. Now, there is a place for superstition. Never invite calamity. Avoid cats and ladders. Touch wood. But there is also a place for bucking up. At some point, the horse must be saddled. Writing will hurt, in the mind and in the heart, but you must do it anyway. Do it now and do not waste any more time.
******
As I learned the hard way, so will you. (For writers never learn in any other way but the most difficult.) There are many things you would rather be doing but your fate is not ease but suffering. Learn to suffer. It will serve you well. The first act of suffering is sitting at a desk and facing a blank page.
At first you will be swooned with a peculiar panic. A kind of mossy dread will steal across your squirrelish heart. “Now I am a writer, and look, I do not write. Everyone is surely laughing at me.” But your hesitation is the fullness of your sanity. Writing is a lost country, a kelped-over Atlantis. Your job is to rebuild the fallen civilization inside of you. It will take your whole life, and even then will probably never be close to finished. “Leaf by Niggle.”
Take some deep breaths. Your days are going to be spent, from now on and whether you like it or not, writing your way out of this foreign country.
There is no escape now, although you will make one last, desperate attempt. “Writer’s block,” you will cry. But that is a lie, and you know it. What you are saying, absurdly, is that there aren’t enough words to go around, that there is some Lachesis apportioning words and she is being stingy with your lot.
Words are not hard to come by. Go to a library and look through the Oxford English Dictionary. There are more words than any one person could ever use. Anyway, one does not speak of how many flights there are in a given species of eagle. Eagles fly. The flying is them. There is no separation, which is the beginning of all counting.
I equivocate here a bit. It is not just any words that one wants, but the words that fit the pattern whispered mysteriously into the mind. If—God forbid—a writer ever lose his only manuscript (here I very much touch wood), as happened to Lawrence and Carlyle, he will hardly shrug his shoulders and say, “They were only words. I will get others,” as though he had been carrying around a small sachet of sand through a trackless desert.
But words are for interconnecting, and there is no end to the elementals. The periodic table of language is infinite. There are no noble gases among words. All of them are francium. They will react to anything.
Once you have stopped with the silliness about “writer’s block,” you must reflect that you have won no victory. No honor is yours, ever. You are a midwife, never anything other. No mortal creates. No jot or tittle is ever added or taken away. All we can understand is that we scratch out simple shapes. Between the scratching and the writing is an uncrossable divide. Writing is a thing infinitely far away until the very moment that the pen goes against the page, at which point writing disappears and all that there is is scratching. Writing is a thing only told of, never witnessed, never really identified. It is the writer’s greatest prize, but he must give up all hope of ever possessing it.
Likewise, most writing happens while one is not writing. A writer is one who writes, but almost all writing is something else. A life of writing is a life lived outside of writing, for the sake of writing, but only squintingly, winkingly so. Never, ever try to write. If you want a bird to perch on your shoulder, you should quit staring at her and look off at something else.
Etching patterns from unknown sources is writing. Words are like catfish—they hate fancy lures.
Respect for mystery is the second hardest lesson a writer will have to learn, after learning how not to shoo away pain. He can write only by writing, but also only by not writing, and both at the same time. This is his secret, the real heart of his artful tenderness. A writer ought to take stock, and work harder, and not be proud. You are not the writer. Writing comes about through you. No wire boasts of the electricity passing through it.
This duality is your lot. Most men are free, but you are a slave. Get used to it and do not complain.
******
Now you have written, but you are not out of the woods yet. There’s one task left: editing. Editing is a thing one must do the way one takes cold showers or fasts or goes on hard pilgrimages. Editing is the discipline of the art punishing the deficiencies of the craftsman. Editing is the last alchemical mystery, the thing by which the guess goes closer to the form.
One can edit one’s own writing, but if one wants to publish something then one must turn over one’s babies to an editor. And to seek out editing is to submit. You will know the bruise of this when the editor returns the writing with his comments. Your last line of defenses will be gone. Your genius was a mirage. You will have to do more work than you feared.
Editors are like winters on the plains: they prove the folly of furbelows. Or they are like gravity. A duded-up, cockamamie screw-type proto-helicopter splutters and drops inevitably from its miserable, chicken-like antics. One might blame gravity for this. But no one blames gravity when a solidly-built house doesn’t float off into the sky. At any rate, the editor will show you that there is no such thing as whatever you thought writing was. Editors are the bad kings of Israel, sent to chastise a stiff-necked, inordinately proud people.
Born writers often bristle at editorial discipline. “This work,” writers say, “is too finely wrought to bear much manhandling by philistines.” To be sure, editors are to essays as boxers are to babyfaces. But think about it—are you making a balsa wood model, or do you want to build a real machine? Where I come from we have what’s called “percussive maintenance.” If your car isn’t working right, try hitting it in a good spot a few times. Likewise with your refrigerator and your TV. If a piece of writing can’t stand up under a few good licks, it’s doomed. If you think editors are philistines, wait until you meet the public.
******
Swallow hard, dig in, and hold fast. It is time to get to work. Put your hands to the oars, now, and pull.
