A Writer's Journal

Atwood, Lamott, Dillard: The Burgeoning Business of Writers on Writing

By Allen M. Jones, 10-09-05

That novel writing is a dangerous and mysterious business is a myth spun by novelists. Why not? Every job (plumbers to bush pilots) should be uniquely difficult, requiring an expertise and dedication unavailable to the average Joe. A comforting thought, that we might one day be missed, that the gears of the world will have a hard time creaking along without our presence and approval. Writers need more reassurance in this regard than most. De Gaulle’s essential truth – “The cemetery is full of indispensable people." – is ignored best by those most intent in their pursuit of posterity.

Nowhere, however, is there a stranger business than fiction. Not dangerous, nor particularly mysterious, just odd. Consider the looming latticework of dependents – the networks of editors and copy-editors, agents and assistants, foreign rights folks, movie scouts, publicists, marketers, designers, reviewers, Barnes & Noble cashiers – all of them reliant on a single, anxious sap with bad posture, hunched over his or her keyboard, rubbing words together for the least little spark. Consider as well the burgeoning industry that is the modern creative writing workshop, the thousands of students who graduate each year capable of writing a pretty good short story. Unlike, say, diesel mechanics school, writing workshops have not necessarily excelled at producing writers. What they do produce, however, is that peculiar sub-genre of memoir, writers-on-writing. A century from now, academics will look back and recognize the early 21st century as having been the apogee of writers-on-writing. After all, there are all these full time instructors out there, each with their folder full of notes and collection of aphorisms, and they owe their publishers a book...

For years, my favorite example of the form was Annie Dillard’s thin book The Writing Life. Less an attempt toward nuts and bolts advice than an extended exercise in metaphor and poetic conceit, The Writing Life is a gorgeous bouquet, an exquisite arrangement of ribbons, a flamboyant fireworks display. A lot of icing, alas, not much cake. I forgive her. If you’re reading a writer on writing, shouldn’t you, after all, expect to be dazzled? Shouldn’t you come at it squinting as if toward a partial eclipse? It’s in this book that she gives still the loveliest piece of writing advice I’ve ever read. She imagines a question: How does one learn to write? And she answers:

“The page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly, affirming time’s scrawl as a right and your daring as necessity; the page, which you cover woodenly, ruining it, but asserting your freedom and power to act, acknowledging that you ruin everything you touch but touching it nevertheless, because acting is better than being here in mere opacity; the page, which you cover slowly with the crabbed thread of your gut; the page in the purity of its possibilities; the page of your death, against which you pit such flawed excellences as you can muster with all your life's strength: that page will teach you to write."

Alas, Dillard’s book has lately been eroding out from under me. Despite the quality of her prose, much of what she has to say is finally too personal to hold universally true. She falls into the ubiquitous, authorial trap of promoting as absolutes her own very particular work habits and methods. And insult to injury, not long after the above paragraph (as careful a verbal construction as the spinning innards of a pocket watch) she contradicts the entire tone of her work by (ironically?) declaiming on the meaninglessness of literature. She compares writing to shoe cobbling: “[No one] needs 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." Anyway, you’re not reading Dillard for consistency. You’re reading her because whatever she has to say, no one has ever said it with such lyricism.

Like hunting for seashells or arrowheads, once your eye is trained to look for authorial advice, you’re soon kicking it up everywhere. I treasure the first third of Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town, in which he says, “Make your first line interesting and immediate. Start, as some smarty once said, in the middle of things. When the poem starts, things should already have happened. If Yeats had begun Leda and the Swan with Zeus spotting Leda and getting an erection, Yeats would have been writing a report." The journals of Franz Kafka twist and contort with frantic, straitjacketed wisdom. “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us...we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen seas within us." Similarly, the journals of Virginia Woolf are the well-bred, gentrified counterpart to Kafka (Woolf was very conscious of writing her every word for published posterity): “The success of the masterpieces seems to lie not so much in their freedom from faults – indeed we tolerate the grossest errors in them all – but in the immense persuasiveness of a mind which has completely mastered its perspective." And the letters of Vincent Van Gogh, if you substitute the word writing for painting, are like having your hand shaken warmly by a beloved professor. “What an odd thing the touch, the stroke of the brush, is." Thomas Merton (that inconsistently brilliant Catholic crank) advises, “There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues." (I think I vultured this quote off of Dillard, actually.) And Victor Hugo: “One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil. To think is to do."

Anne Lamott, if I had to lay money down, has probably been as successful in the genre as anyone (excepting perhaps the ghost of John Gardner). In print for more than ten years now, her book, Bird by Bird, strikes just the right mix of confessional memoir and authorial benevolence. “The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth." And, “Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them." And, “Plot grows out of character. If you focus on who the people in your story are, if you sit and write about two people you know and are getting to know better day by day, something is bound to happen." Sage wisdom, every bit of it. Sage for Lamott, immediately wrong for the rest of us. Hearing it brings out the pugilist in me. Makes me want to write a strongly plotted un-truthful story with thin characters and do it in a terrific first draft. (It’s yet one more irony of the advice-a-torial memoir. Creative writing is creative. When you take good advice, it automatically makes you un-creative, thereby, by definition, turning the good advice bad.)

Perhaps it’s a reflection of my own psyche, the sieve that gathers and dries a certain kind of wisdom, but the writers I treasure most resist telling me how to write in favor of providing simple consolation. Commiseration with their fellow ink-stained key-punchers. Kurt Vonnegut: “This is what I find most encouraging about the writing trades: They allow mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence. They also allow lunatics to seem saner than sane." Toward the end of her life, Marguerite Duras wrote a longish (for her) essay simply called Writing. “...It happened this way. I was alone in this house. I shut myself in – of course, I was afraid. And then I began to love it. This house became the house of writing. My books come from this house. From this light as well, and from the garden. From the light reflecting off the pond. It has taken me twenty years to write what I just said." And Eudora Welty, the grand dame of the gentled-souled, finished her thin book, One Writer’s Beginnings, with the words, “...I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within." Meanwhile, Norman Mailer (in every way Welty’s opposite, save for ability), writes in The Spooky Art, “The act of writing is a mystery, and the more you labor at it, the more you become aware after a lifetime of such activity that it is not answers which are being offered so much as a greater appreciation of the literary mysteries."

Ask almost anybody, Margaret Atwood flirts with genius. Her best books (Alias Grace, The Handmaid’s Tale, Cat’s Eye) are each profound experimentations, fresh departures by a writer who insists on challenging herself. Her collection of lectures turned essays, Negotiating With the Dead: A Writer on Writing, is vigorous, learned, boisterous, unruly, angry, and perceptive. It's principal value, however (for me), is the insight that it provides into her novels, the sense of context that it allows you to later bring to bear on her real work. Turns out that Atwood has read damned near everything. The bibliography of Negotiating with the Dead starts with Kobo Abe, takes in a healthy dollop of Borges, diverts through a dozen or so British writers whose names are only vaguely familiar, goes on to Poe and Ondaatje, and ends with someone named Dudley Young, who wrote a book called Origins of the Sacred: The Ecstasies of Love and War. Leaving these essays, experiencing first hand the sticky, manifested convolutions of Atwood’s intellect, you have, in effect, been given permission to read previously unsuspected layerings into a body of work that might have been, on first reading, taking too lightly.

But the book that stays with me, the one that I finally carry around like a wallet on a chain, like my car keys, is an anthology of excerpted Paris Review interviews entitled The Writer’s Chapbook. As edited by George Plimpton, this is the literary equivalent of a well-made eclair (light, sweet, nothing close to a meal). It never fails to amaze, cracking open this anthology at random (as I just did) to find Patrick O’Brian placed immediately next to Edna O’Brien; Walker Percy beside S. J. Perelman, Philip Roth sharing locker space with George Seferis. These are interviews, so we do not come to them expecting art. They are excerpted in brief chunks, and so we do not look for consistency. They are only a parade of musings, an assemblage of egos grateful for the audience. E.B. White (of Strunk and White fame) said, “I’m not familiar with books on style. My role in the revival of Strunk’s book was a fluke – just something I took on because I was not doing anything else at the time." And at one time, John Irving (who won an academy award for his Cider House Rules screenplay), maintained, “Well, movies, movies, movies – they are our enemy, of course." And Pablo Neruda (Neruda!) said about Lorca (Lorca!) that he “was always asking me to read my lines, my poetry, and yet in the middle of my reading he would say, ‘Stop, stop! Don’t go on, lest you influence me!’"

Reading these interviews, writers waxing lyrical and wise about their craft (your craft after all, that preoccupation which has otherwise made you feel so alone), it's impossible not to feel a welcome sense of community. Such a comfort. Such a relief. No matter the brilliance of your predecessors, they never agree. This is how you do it; No, this is how you do it. Finally, the only real lesson to be learned – as you stand perched above the dangerous mysteries of an imagined book – is this: If there is one person who can possibly write the story you have in mind, it's you, and if you don’t know the secret then no one does. So, now. Just go write it.

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