I was one of those kids who took the early praises of their English teachers to heart. Which made it easy, later, when I was working for a publishing house, and had a car, regular health insurance, and a kitchen that I could actually clean, to take the advice of a senior editor. When I came to her for career advice and told her I wanted to write, she said, “Well, write, then. There’s no use going staying in publishing if you’re always going to wonder what would have happened if you’d tried being a writer.” We had lunch, and she paid. Toward the end she leaned in close and said, “Don’t make the mistake I made. If you want to write, do it now.”
I’ve tried to pinpoint the moment at which I decided I wanted to be a writer, and not a painter, or a musician, or an architect (or a librarian, or a postal worker, or a chef) and never have discovered it. But at some point, I know, whatever I imagined the word “writer” meant, it was more appealing than any other word I knew. And sometimes I think I am a writer by default, in that it was the only thing no one could ever take away from me, because writing is something you can do on the sly. Someone once said that if you think you can live without writing you’d be better off trying not to. And when I imagine not writing it’s an enormous relief for a minute. But after I think about it a while I realize if someone told me I could never write again, that nothing would ever come of it, and even if it were outlawed, I’d still sneak off and keep doing it. You can always write on the sly, and it’s difficult for someone to make a quick summation of a body of writing the way they can about a painting or a piece of music. If you’re a bad carpenter or a bad pianist, it shows right off. With writing it’s harder to tell.
However I got to this point, however I became this way, because, finally, it’s something I’ve become, I want everything that comes out of my pen, ideally, to be perfect, or almost perfect, the first time. My biggest problem is getting bits of perfection to form along a single train of thought. I know how to provoke perfect writing – I know, more or less, after some experimentation, what it takes, and under which circumstances it arrives. It takes a certain amount of stability – I know the amount of sleep I need, and how much coffee and how much exposure to new ideas, how much exercise. All this I can control, in the best of times. But there is a part of what makes good writing that I can’t control. One almost needs a belief in, if not a higher power, then a faith in the serendipity of circumstance.
And this is what frustrates people about writers. People who want to be in control of their lives can’t live like this – we have to. We depend on the uncertain element of life to create. Perhaps no one is really, honestly, completely in control of his life, but we have to face it most days. Which is why so many of us are dependent on substances that are uncontrollable. And why so many of us are dreamers, for dreams, too, are things that won’t be controlled. Part of being a writer is having this desire for control over what we know is uncontrollable: the world spins in a void pressed on by the gravity of unimaginable volumes of mass, and we are stuck here on it. But on the blank screen we can become, with practice, the masters of a parallel world that we move ourselves. It’s like playing house. It’s easy to see how being a writer has something to do with a desire for control. A good writer also admits how little control she has over what comes out of her.
The beauty of any good art form is the careful tension between control and the uncontrollable. Writing means not giving in completely to the uncontrollable, but somehow playing with it. (Remember Hemingway’s infatuation with bullfights?) To write one must be an observer and to observe one keeps a spectator’s distance. But how to channel what is sometimes chaos? How to keep a finger in the flow and not be overcome by it? One dallies with the uncontrolled, one lures it out teasingly, then one then returns to one’s desk. One takes it in bits. Writing, good writing, is when the writer manages, by whatever means available, to at once establish contact with the infinite and to give it to an audience in measured form: that is, to somehow make a small part of the infinite understandable. The writer plays with fire, but doesn’t let it singe his pages.
One keeps a finger in the socket but maintains a pressure light enough that one’s other hand stays steady at the notepad or the keyboard. The electric shock of inspiration is a necessary thing, but if you can’t pull yourself away from it when it’s time to write down the experience (or if you don’t have the luxury of someone level-headed nearby to pull you away) then it’s an epiphany lost. We as writers have a difficult, double responsibility: to see and to feel and to taste, hear and smell, to sense, all on one hand, and to communicate on the other. It is moonlighting. It is burning the candle at both ends. The seeing and feeling and hearing and sensing is something that is learned young. Finding a connection to the beat of the universe is luck, and communicating is something that gets easier with practice.