I’ve begun this piece nine times. I’ve junked each beginning.
I hate writing about my writing. I almost never do it. Why am I doing it now? Because I said I would. I got a letter. I wrote back no. Then I was at a party and the same person was there. It’s harder to refuse in person. Saying yes had something to do with being nice, as women are taught to be, and something to do with being helpful, which we are also taught. Being helpful to women, giving a pint of blood. With not claiming the sacred prerogatives, the touch-me-not self-protectiveness of the artist, with not being selfish. With conciliation, with doing your bit, with appeasement. I was well brought up. I have trouble ignoring social obligations. Saying you’ll write about your writing is a social obligation. It’s not an obligation to the writing.
I’ve junked each of nine beginnings. They seemed beside the point. Too assertive, too pedagogical, too frivolous or belligerent, too falsely wise. As if I had some special self-revelation that would encourage others, or some special knowledge to impart, some pithy saying that would act like a talisman for the driven, the obsessed. But I have no such talismans. If I did, I would not continue, myself, to be so driven and obsessed.
I hate writing about my writing because I have nothing to say about it. I have nothing to say about it because I can’t remember what goes on when I’m doing it. That time is like small pieces cut out of my brain. It’s not time I myself have lived. I can remember the details of the rooms and places where I’ve written, the circumstances, the other things I did before and after, but not the process itself. Writing about writing requires self-consciousness; writing itself requires the abdication of it.
There are a lot of things that can be said about what goes on around the edges of writing. Certain ideas you may have, certain motivations, grand designs that don’t get carried out. I can talk about bad reviews, about sexist reactions to my writing, about making an idiot of myself on television shows. I can talk about books that failed, that never got finished, and about why they failed. The one that had too many characters, the one that had too many layers of time, red herrings that diverted me when what I really wanted to get at was something else, a certain corner of the visual world, a certain voice, an inarticulate landscape.
I can talk about the difficulties that women encounter as writers. For instance, if you’re a woman writer, sometime, somewhere, you will be asked: Do you think of yourself as a writer first, or as a woman first? Look out. Whoever asks this hates and fears both writing and women.
Many of us, in my generation at least, ran into teachers or male writers or other defensive jerks who told us women could not really write because they couldn’t be truck drivers or Marines and therefore didn’t understand the seamier side of life, which included sex with women. We were told we wrote like housewives, or else we were treated like honorary men, as if to be a good writer was to suppress the female.
Such pronouncements used to be made as if they were the simple truth. Now they’re questioned. Some things have changed for the better, but not all. There’s a lack of self-confidence that gets instilled very early in many young girls, before writing is even seen as a possibility. You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer, an almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river. The horse throws you and you get back on the horse. I learned to swim by being dropped into the water. You need to know you can sink, and survive it. Girls should be allowed to play in the mud. They should be released from the obligations of perfection. Some of your writing, at least, should be as evanescent as play.
A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The waste-basket has evolved for a reason. Think of it as the altar of the Muse Oblivion, to whom you sacrifice your botched first drafts, the tokens of your human imperfection. She is the tenth Muse, the one without whom none of the others can function. The gift she offers you is the freedom of the second chance. Or as many chances as you’ll take.
In the mid-1980s I began a sporadic journal. Today I went back through it, looking for something I could dig out and fob off as pertinent instead of writing this piece about writing. But it was useless. There was nothing in it about the actual composition of anything I’ve written over the past six years. Instead there are exhortations to myself — to get up earlier, to walk more, to resist lures and distractions. Drink more water, I find. Go to bed earlier. There were lists of how many pages I’d written per day, how many I’d retyped, how many yet to go. Other than that, there was nothing but descriptions of rooms, accounts of what we’d cooked and/or eaten and with whom, letters written and received, notable sayings of children, birds and animals seen, the weather. What came up in the garden. Illnesses, my own and those of others. Deaths, births. Nothing about writing.
January 1, 1984. Blakeny, England. As of today, I have about 130 pp. of the novel done and it’s just beginning to take shape & reach the point at which I feel that it exists and can be finished and may be worth it. I work in the bedroom of the big house, and here, in the sitting room, with the wood fire in the fireplace and the coke fire in the dilapidated Roeburn in the kitchen. As usual I’m too cold, which is better than being too hot — today is grey, warm for the time of year, damp. If I got up earlier maybe I would work more, but I might just spend more time procrastinating — as now.
And so on.
You learn to write by reading and writing, writing and reading. As a craft it’s acquired through the apprentice system, but you choose your own teachers. Sometimes they’re alive, sometimes dead.
As a vocation, it involves the laying on of hands. You receive your vocation and in your turn you must pass it on. Perhaps you will do this only through your work, perhaps in other ways. Either way, you’re part of a community, the community of writers, the community of storytellers that stretches back through time to the beginning of human society.
As for the particular human society to which you yourself belong — sometimes you’ll feel you’re speaking for it, sometimes — when it’s taken an unjust form — against it, or for that other community, the community of the oppressed, the exploited, the voiceless. Either way, the pressures on you will be intense; in other countries, perhaps fatal. But even here — speak “for women,” or for any other group that is feeling the boot, and there will be many at hand, both for and against, to tell you to shut up, or to say what they want you to say, or to say it a different way. Or to save them. The billboard awaits you, but if you succumb to its temptations you’ll end up two-dimensional.
Tell what is yours to tell. Let others tell what is theirs.
Why are we so addicted to causality? Why do you write? (Treatise by child psychologist, mapping your formative traumas. Conversely: palm-reading, astrology, and genetic studies, pointing to the stars, fate, heredity.) Why do you write? (That is, why not do something useful instead?) If you were a doctor, you could tell some acceptable moral tale about how you put Band-Aids on your cats as a child, how you’ve always longed to cure suffering. No one can argue with that: But writing? What is it for?
Some possible answers: Why does the sun shine? In the face of the absurdity of modern society, why do anything else? Because I’m a writer. Because I want to discover the patterns in the chaos of time. Because I must. Because someone has to bear witness. Why do you read? (This last is tricky: maybe they don’t.) Because I wish to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. Because I wish to make an axe to break the frozen sea within. (These have been used, but they’re good.)
If at a loss, perfect the shrug. Or say: It’s better than working in a bank. Or say: For fun. If you say this, you won’t be believed, or else you’ll be dismissed as trivial. Either way, you’ll have avoided the question.
Not long ago, in the course of clearing some of the excess paper out of my workroom, I opened a filing cabinet drawer I hadn’t looked into for years. In it was a bundle of loose sheets, folded, creased, and grubby, tied up with leftover string. It consisted of things I’d written in the late 1950s, in high school and the early years of university. There were scrawled, inky poems, about snow, despair, and the Hungarian Revolution. There were short stories dealing with girls who’d had to get married, and dispirited, mousy-haired high-school English teachers — to end up as either was at that time my vision of Hell — typed finger-by-finger on an ancient machine that made all the letters half-red.
There I am, then, back in grade twelve, going through the writers’ magazines after I’d finished my French Composition homework, typing out my lugubrious poems and my grit-filled stories. (I was big on grit. I had an eye for lawn litter and dog turds on sidewalks. In these stories it was usually snowing damply, or raining; at the very least there was slush. If it was summer, the heat and humidity were always wiltingly high and my characters had sweat marks under their arms; if it was spring, wet clay stuck to their feet. Though some would say all this was just normal Toronto weather.)
In the top right-hand corners of some of these, my hopeful seventeen-year-old self had typed, “First North American Rights Only.” I was not sure what “First North American Rights” were; I put it in because the writing magazines said you should. I was at that time an aficionado of writing magazines, having no one else to turn to for professional advice.
If I were an archaeologist, digging through the layers of old paper that mark the eras in my life as a writer, I’d have found, at the lowest or Stone Age level — say around ages five to seven — a few poems and stories, unremarkable precursors of all my frenetic later scribbling. (Many children write at that age, just as many children draw. The strange thing is that so few of them go on to become writers or painters.) After that there’s a great blank. For eight years, I simply didn’t write. Then, suddenly, and with no missing links in between, there’s a wad of manuscripts. One week I wasn’t a writer, the next I was.
Who did I think I was, to be able to get away with this? What did I think I was doing? How did I get that way? To these questions I still have no answers.
There’s the blank page, and the thing that obsesses you. There’s the story that wants to take you over and there’s your resistance to it. There’s your longing to get out of this, this servitude, to play hooky, to do anything else: wash the laundry, see a movie. There are words and their inertias, their biases, their insufficiencies, their glories. There are the risks you take and your loss of nerve, and the help that comes when you’re least expecting it. There’s the laborious revision, the scrawled-over, crumpled-up pages that drift across the floor like spilled litter. There’s the one sentence you know you will save.
Next day there’s the blank page. You give yourself up to it like a sleepwalker. Something goes on that you can’t remember afterwards. You look at what you’ve done. It’s hopeless.
You begin again. It never gets any easier.