on writing
From The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard:
Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex that it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself. In the democracies, you may even write and publish anything you please about any governments or institutions, even if what you write is demonstrably false.
The obverse of this freedom, of course, is that your work is so meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except you cares whether you do it well, or ever. You are free to make several thousand close judgment calls a day. Your freedom is a by-product of your days' triviality. A shoe salesman—who is doing others' tasks, who must answer to two or three bosses, who must do his job their way, and must put himself in their hands, at their place, during their hours—is nevertheless working usefully. Further, if the shooe salesman fails to appear one morning, someone will notice and miss him. Your manuscript, on which you lavish such care, has no needs or wishes; it knows you not. Nor does anyone need your manuscript; everyone needs shoes more. There are many manuscripts already—worthy ones, most edifying and moving ones, intelligent and powerful ones. If you believed Paradise Lost to be excellent, would you buy it? Why not shoot yourself, actually, rather than finish one more excellent manuscript on which to gag the world?
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Why would anyone read a book instead of watching big people move on a screen? Because a book can be literature. It is a subtle thing—a poor thing, but our own. In my view, the more literary the book—the more purely verbal, crafted sentency by sentence, the more imaginative, reasoned, and deep—the more likely people are to read it. The people who read are the people who like literature, after all, whatever that might be. They like, or require, what books alone have. If they want to see films that evening, they will find films. If they do not like to read, they will not. People who read are not too lazy to flip on the television; they prefer books. I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place.
There is a woman at work, a writer, who has offered, like many smart and engaging women in my past, to mentor me. It is tempting, but I have read about writing before, I am not unwarned. I know not to take such a thing lightly. It's exciting, to think that I could do this, I could pursue such a beautiful and intricate thing. But I'm weighing the costs. It is a 24-hour-a-day job, a constant attention to everything, a pondering of all the angles at all times, a willingness to try things and work for months writing pages only to discard them because you finally recognise that it is not working and you need to start again.
But then I read this, also from The Writing Life:
A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, "Do you think I could be a writer?"
"Well," the writer said, "I don't know... Do you like sentences?"
The writer could see the student's amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am twenty years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, "I liked the smell of the paint."
And then I remember why I started my degree in English, and then in Linguistics. I thought at the time about how I believe in perfect sentences, and had read a few of them, and that I wanted to know why they were perfect and how the author had known to write it that way. Was it the syntax? Was it the discourses it drew on? Metaphor? The rhythm of those words together? Would Linguistics tell me such a thing? In the end, no. Linguistics taught me many fascinating things, but I still haven't plumbed the depths of how words combine to make beauty. Maybe I need to learn it from the other direction. Maybe I need to write sentences and fail to make them beautiful for ten years until I stumble upon something that works, until I gather a sense for how such things are done.
I'm letting this thought marinate for a while.
