The Right to Write

I AM NOT IN THE MOOD to write today. My thoughts are cranky and resistant. I feel sluggish, irritable. I do not want to write. My body of information feels like that of an out-of-shape athlete. The only one who has been doing sit-ups is my censor.

No matter that I have been writing now, full-time, for thirty years. Today my censor is saying, “What do you know about writing?” One thing I know about writing is that you do not have to be in the mood to do it.

Being in the mood to write, like being in the mood to make love, is a luxury that isn’t necessary in a long-term relationship. Just as the first caress can lead to a change of heart, the first sentence, however tentative and awkward, can lead to a desire to go just a little further. All of us have a sex drive. All of us have a drive to write.

The drive to write is a primary human instinct: the drive to name, order, and in a sense control our experience. The drive to write, that primal glee we felt as children when we learned the letters that formed our name and then the words that formed our world, is a drive that has been buried in our frantic, electrical, telephonic age.

“E-mail” is a rebalancing of the wheel. People love e-mail because they love to write. Furthermore, because it is instantaneous, e-mail tricks people into evading their censor. E-mail isn’t “real” writing. It’s something more casual and quirky and inventive. It’s somehow naughty and anarchistic, like passing notes in school. E-mail tempts us into writing because it’s a nonauthoritarian place to write. We can dash off quick notes, break thoughts in the middle, say, “I’ll get back to you later.” E-mail allows us intimacy without formality. No wonder we love it. It lets us drop the rock.

When we let writing be a Big Deal, it is difficult to do it. When we find that without our wanting it to, writing has become a Big Deal, we need to learn to negotiate. I negotiate by bribes: “Write for twenty minutes and then you can watch that documentary on Henry Miller.”

“A lot of the time when I am not in the mood to face a whole project I will say, ‘Just turn on the computer and write one paragraph. That’s all.”’ When she does her one paragraph, Elizabeth usually finds that it leads to two, three, a small chunk of work that gets down because she “tricked” herself with the promise that she had to do only an itty, bitty bit.

“I’m not saying the part of me that writes is dumb, but it can be easily fooled and easily bribed,” she laughs. “I tell it ‘only ten minutes, sweetie,’ and then I write for forty. But I give it treats too. I make my writer hot chocolate or get it really pretty stamps for the letters it’s supposed to write. Mainly, I try to make writing feel very approachable, very daily.”

My mother died in 1979. A few months before her death, she came to visit me in Los Angeles. I was newly sober, newly separated from a husband I was still in love with, newly a mother, and running a rickety household in which I tried to juggle all these facts and writing. After she went home, my mother wrote me a letter. I keep that letter in a drawer in my bedroom bureau. I keep that letter in my heart. In that letter my mother said she was proud of me, she said I was running a remarkably workable household and that she was particularly pleased by my parenting. Now, my mother may have said these things over the phone to me, but what stuck was that she put it on the page. She cared enough to write it.

My mother was a great example to me about the beauty and power of writing as a palpable sign of love. She had seven children and, when we were off at school, she wrote to us. She also wrote regularly to her mother-in-law, Mimi, who wrote long and winding letters back, and to her sisters, who also wrote back often. Letters came and went from my mother’s desk with the same casual flow as, yes, e-mail. My mother did not make a production out of writing. She simply did it. She did it all the time. From my mother I learned you did not need to make a Big Deal out of writing. You needed only to do it.

Doing it all the time, whether or not we are in the mood, gives us ownership of our writing ability. It takes it out of the realm of conjuring where we stand on the rock of isolation, begging the winds for inspiration, and it makes it something as do-able as picking up a hammer and pounding a nail. Writing may be an art, but it is certainly a craft. It is a simple and workable thing that can be as steady and reliable as a chore—does that ruin the romance?

My friend Richard, who lives in Venice Beach, takes a notebook out to the sand. He goes for a daily swim with the dolphins, comes back in, towels off, and sets himself to the page. The swim keeps him physically fit. The writing keeps him mentally fit. He doesn’t negotiate about either practice. He doesn’t wait for the “mood” for an icy plunge into the ocean or onto the page.

Richard, by virtue of his writing and swimming practice, is a trained optimist. Whatever mood he has to begin with becomes the building block of a better mood. “I act my way into right thinking,” Richard says.

Acting our way into right thinking is putting pen to the page even when the censor is shrieking. It is choosing to write even when writing feels “wrong” to us—because we’re tired, we’re bothered, we’re any number of things that writing will change if only we will let it. It’s letting it that’s the trick.

Lately, I have been talking to Regine, a beautiful, passionate young writer whose poetry comes to her in sudden visitations, arriving perfectly formed like those miracle births you read about in the tabloids. (“I didn’t know I was pregnant until I delivered perfect twins!”)

I have been encouraging Regine to invite her creative pregnancies, to pay attention to her stirrings, to invite the Muse to tea at regular hours to see if her writing can become a little less mysterious and more matter-of-fact.

Regine is like myself in the rearview mirror, in the years before I accepted my writing as a commitment, discovering it to be as committed to me as I was to it. It’s a romantic notion that creativity is elusive, that it might leave at any moment like a lover whose heart flickers hot and cold.

“Just show up at the page,” I advise Regine. “Put your pen to paper and begin where you are. Begin writing and something will come to you. It’s like turning on a light switch. The current is there and starts to flow.”

Regine wants to be ravaged, swept away, “taken” by her writing. I do understand. Sometimes my writing takes me like a fevered lover—yesterday, finishing a novella—and it’s lovely when it does. More often, my writing and I meet halfway like a couple who want to make love amid a busy week and don’t know quite how to get started.

“Love everything you write,” I tell Regine. “Accept your writing as permanent, a person you are in love with who has good days and bad days, cranky days and euphoric ones. Let your writing be itself. Give it love and it will surprise you.”

I explain to Regine that I take my writer out for treats, that I buy it expensive coffee concoctions with foam like clouds. I take my writer on train rides to write and admire the view. I buy my writer journals, race-along-pens, an embroidered writing chair that I place by the window with good light. I try not to bully my writer or attack it. I try not to make it write only “shoulds” without also writing “want-tos.” My writer has learned to trust me, to enjoy my company, and to treat me well back.

My horses are staring at me through the study window. For my horses, my writing is a chore I do, something predictable. The sun comes up over the mountain, their owner gets up, drinks coffee, and writes. They see this by staring the fifteen feet from their corral to my study windows. This morning, Jack Merlin, my bright chestnut Arab named for Ed Towle’s detective hero, is nibbling at grass under the fence. For the past two days he has been ambitious about getting out and eating all the bright spring shoots on my tiny patch of lawn. It’s forbidden, and that’s why it’s attractive.

I am still writing because I am having fun doing it. This was, you’ll remember, a morning when I did not want to write. My sentences were at least as cranky as my horses. Just now the sun over the mountain is gilding Carolina’s particolored mane. She is preening her head over the fence, ears perked, listening. I have always thought the sound of a good typewriter reminded me of my childhood pony Chico’s rapidly tapping hooves.

MOOD

Initiation Tool

We often make the mistake of thinking that we “have” to be in the “right” mood to write. The truth is, any mood can be used for writing. Any mood is a good writing mood. The trick is to simply enter whatever mood like a room and sit down and write from there. Try this brief experiment.

Set aside fifteen minutes. Identify a situation in your life about which you have a recognizable mood or emotion. For example:

• I’m angry at my partner.

• I love the fall leaves.

• I’m sad about Mother’s health.

• I’m proud of my son’s schoolwork.

• I enjoy Laura’s humor.

• My lover and I are getting along especially well.

Writing longhand, “enter” a mood or emotion and write for ten minutes. At the end of ten minutes, stop. Take five more minutes and write about the shifts in your mood that the act of writing caused. Be an observer: I feel happier, sadder, angrier, less angry, hopeful, determined—whatever. Write a few notes on this process, a sort of field report on your experience.