The Folly and the Failure
Or, Why Write?
I’m trying to write. By this, I mean I am thinking about writing, talking about writing, dreaming about writing and, even, writing about writing. I make tea, sharpen pencils, seek the clean legal pads. I make lists, jot ideas, and dream the bones of story. Me and everyone else. But I don’t write much, not really.
What is it about words on a page? Is it any different from the endless chatter swirling around us every day? How I wish we all would just shut up sometimes, myself included. How is raving on a page any different? Perhaps because the page may endure. We need the future to remember us, somehow.
But why?
There’s a whiff of narcissism in creativity, an arrogant need to fill the wild with our own voices. Writers want to be heard — we all do, I suppose, and we flail about in our noisy attempts at attention. I write to connect, to join the conversation. I have a big, loud, opinionated family — writing it down allows me to finish a thought and avoid the ready answers of my audience.
Reading is my passion, my addiction. It offers escape and wonder and teaches me how to be human, often makes me proud to be human. I feel plugged in to the thread of consciousness, the pulse of humanity when I read. I learn and, even if my waning brain can’t hold it all for long, it’s satisfying to know about the young life of Marie Antoinette or the mountain of pot shards in Rome — the birth of the concept of zero and what the Australian outback smells like. Armchair traveler, historian, scientist — the world awaits between the covers of a good book. Cliché, but true. And please tell me stories. What is more soothing and exciting, all at once, than stories?
And so it has followed, as with so many delirious readers, that I want to write. I’ve always wanted to write and have been happiest and most alive when actively writing something that pleases me. So then why is it so hard? If this thing makes me so happy, if I desire it so deeply, why do I expertly distract myself from it every day?
I promised myself that I would write each morning and here is what I did today in my logical writing window: walked dogs, sorted piles of clothes and papers, started laundry, washed dishes, read blogs, checked and re-checked e-mail, ate (a lot, at intervals), made serial cups of tea, recorded a tv show, took another walk, vacuumed, showered (because of the walks and the vacuuming), tried to find the source of the odd smell in the laundry room, planned dinner, got the mail, thumbed through a catalog, wandered — you get the picture. At the moment, I’m seized with the idea that, instead of writing this, I must clean the back back room immediately (that’s not a typo — I really have a back back room, where all the detritus of my life is pushed. It’s behind the back room, obviously).
I will do anything, even unpleasant, chore-type things, to avoid writing, the thing that I supposedly enjoy and desire so much.
I have ideas. I have half-baked, sloppy essays awaiting surgery. I’m excited about the potential of some of them. But there is some unseen force, a worm in my brain, that blocks my progress. It works in tandem with the voice in my head that whispers, “You’re not good enough.” And on the heels of all this self-generated negativity comes the memory of all the rejection I’ve faced when I have actually reached the finish line. Being a freelance writer is like asking the universe to reject you, over and over again. An uphill battle, all of it — and yet I still lay down at night imagining what I will write next, having conversations with myself about what must make it to the page.
Perhaps I’m just lazy. What must it mean that I can write an essay about my inability to write? “Write what you know”, is the mantra of some and I know plenty about inertia, blocks, distraction techniques. The books about writing all admonish, like Nike, “Just do it.” Ray Bradbury said, “Just write every day of your life.” Okay. I should be able to do that easily, breezily, happily because it is my life’s one true desire, to be a writer. This desire should be inspiration enough, right?
And yet.
Here come the justifications and excuses.
I fashioned some of this in the shower, on my walk — tweaked phrases while vacuuming and sorting laundry. All in my head, of course, and some of that just falls out, never to be found again. But, perhaps writing isn’t just putting your ass in a chair, as someone pointed out — perhaps writing isn’t just writing. Much of what makes it to the page is, for me and I imagine others as well, dreamed up while living.
Eavesdropping dials me into the music of language. My daily walks give me birds and fields, road-kill and impatient drivers. And the grocery carts of strangers are a goldmine. Perhaps, for a writer, it’s all just exercise. Perhaps, life itself is the inspiration.
Of course, ultimately a writer writes. There’s no way around the definition. If all that ‘exercise’ doesn’t result in something written, there’s no writer. One must, after all, put one’s ass in the chair and write. Ideas are nothing (or everything, I can’t decide).
Today I added one period — yes, only a period — to an essay. That’s it. My ass was in the chair — is in the chair — and now I’m writing this sentence. Does it count?
