the back burner

i'm putting words together. please send money.

All the reading I’ve done about writing seems pretty discouraging, so far. On the surface, it looks like writers smoke a lot and don’t have to wear ties. Let’s all be writers! Who wouldn’t want to write? But when I read Annie Dillard or Anne Lamott or Joan Didion, I keep catching an echo of tragedy, as if the author has come to accept some internal pain or has chosen to pay some personal cost for what she does. The feminist literary theorist in my brain wakes up and makes some noise at this point, but I don’t think this is because they’re women writing in modern-day America. I’ll have to read more men to be sure, but I suspect they’re reflecting on some challenge that’s universal to writers on both sides of the gender line, writers who are human.

I think this because I resonate with the sentiment, myself. The process they describe sounds a lot like an exercise in faith. When Dillard talks about shoving your desk and chair out the window, then climbing up into them and getting to work turning the imaginative flywheel that keeps them suspended in space, I think about living overseas. When Anne Lamott talks about scaling back our expectations and writing thought-by-thought, notecard-by-notecard, word-by-word and bird-by-bird, I remember talking to francophones, religious and otherwise. And I say, yes, yes you’re right about something, ladies. Each interaction felt like a test of whether I really believed in what was about to happen. Each action and every decision posed a potential threat to my identity.

Writers seem to question their identity an awful lot. Awful, because it’s just the sort of habit I should be trying to kick. They throw so much useless material away every day. They get restless. Irritable. Frustrated. This can go on for days, by all accounts. Who wants this? Where is the balance, the fame and glory of being widely read and loved?

Apparently it doesn’t exist. Writers write because they have chemical imbalances.

Still, a man has got to eat. Not much, it turns out, but something regularly. A strapping young fool such as myself will probably want to eat at least twice a day, which requires an income. Does one try to make it from payday to payday busing tables, writing a little here and a little there? Or is it better to make a clean shot of writing for a living first, giving it all you’ve got and then picking up the pieces later if the big fish aren’t biting? The difficult thing to remember is that we’re not talking about people, here. We’re talking about me. The question isn’t how this normally works for people, although that’s helpful. What I want to know is whether I’ll end up hurt and alone and in rehab because I tried to be a writer. Or (arguably) worse: rich and responsible for putting things in print that destroyed people’s lives, living the good life without a soul. I almost feel I could handle total failure better than qualified success… not that the second is even within my grasp. Just planning for eventualities.

The really big elephant in the room, of course, is the thought I had a few paragraphs earlier: isn’t the difficult bit in written communication the same bit that’s difficult for us in any leap of faith? Guts, mettle, risk, daring-do, whatever you call it, the questions of who we are and what we can say about reality require a little more from us than do our daily routines. Daily routines are made so that we can collect the mail and buy vegetables without being confronted by the weight and direction of our lives. There’s not much prophecy in potatoes. Any daily routine worth its salt will avoid such tasks as reflection or imagination so that lists get smaller instead of larger. (Let the scholars deal with philosophy; we men of the world like to think of ourselves as men of business. Men of business don't write; they make lists.) Even so, there come to each of us those times when we ourselves must grip terrifying truths or laugh down crippling fears. Whether or not we’re writers hasn’t much to do with it.

This brings me around to one of those conclusions I’ve only seen before at early hours through unfocused and bleary eyes: being is a demanding calling. A noble thought, but it doesn’t help me with career decisions. Not much.

Posted by nickles at October 23, 2007 05:08 PM | TrackBack