Since moving to Dunedin three years ago I have been earnestly trying to live a writer’s life, sometimes succeeding, sometimes not.
As
Ann Lamott says in her witty, self-deprecating, cynical and God-fearing tome,
‘Bird by Bird, “A writer’s life is really is a work in progress that you don’t really ever get it right, but the sublime moments when you do, sustain you.”
But there are no short-cuts. Trying to write for a set period everyday, as stressed by
Natalie Goldberg in ‘
Writing Down The Bones’ helps with discipline, just as going on ‘artist’s dates’ as advocated by
Julia Cameron in
‘The Artists Way’, helps with inspiration.
But really it’s all about trying to find your own blind way as a disciple in an anarchic discipline. There is no ‘set formula’ when it comes to being a successful writer. The best one can hope for is a sustaining philosophy when it comes to ‘facing the page alone.’
For many great novelists this first means being a great and constant reader: “Writers learn their craft, above all, from the work of other writers… They do not learn it from classrooms, or workshops, or manuals – they learn it from immersing themselves in books,” advises
Marie Arana, a former book editor in her introduction to
THE WRITING LIFE, a collection from the Washington Post Book World, a sentiment echoed by many of her subjects.
Yet, personally, I have found that being an avid reader is not necessarily a remedial passion when it comes to my own project. For example, I deeply admire the craft of Northern American writers
Joe Coomer and
Richard Russo who, much like
Annie Proulx, evoke landscape as character. That of small town America in Russo’s case (
Mohawk, Empire Falls, The Risk Pool) and coastal Maine in Coomer’s (
A Pocketful of Names and
Beachcombing for a Shipwrecked God).Reading these richly-detailed and compelling novels has not really helped me develop my own ‘voice’ which is a snappier, dialogue-based style. I simply don’t have the patience for building up the narrative layers the way they do, although I have taken some confidence in the fact that Joe Coomer’s novels portray strong female lead characters (yet he’s a man) because manuscript is based on two male protagonists and I often wonder how ‘qualified’ I am to be writing about and through them.
Also, reading the seamless craft of astonishingly good writers can lead us wannabes straight down the path of crippling procrastination.
Perhaps I should heed
Wendy Wasserstein’s prosaic advice when it comes to actually getting a manuscript finished: “Go to a far, secluded place; live in pyjamas.” And to be fair, I have moved to Dunedin where I knew almost no one, and where flannel pyjamas in winter are mandatory!
Procrastination is just one fear I have about writing. In fact the list is so long that the best I can hope to do is mitigate such fears down to workable levels. For example, doing a ‘Writing for Publication’ course this year is a significant step in trying to create a sustainable writing environment for myself (with tangible outcomes). And my fears around other people opinions of (or reactions to) my work – have been largely overcome when an extremely personal poem of mine was published in an anthology last year.
Sometimes my fears are just incredibly basic but external: like fears around being too cold or too broke. Because, let’s face it as zeitgeist novelist
Erica Jong whose zippy (some would say ‘zipless’) style is more akin to my own quite rightly says, “There are plenty of easier ways to make money. Almost anything is less labour-intensive and better paid than writing, almost anything is safer. Reveal yourself on the page repeatedly, and you are likely to be rewarded with exile, prison or neglect. Ask Dante, or Oscar Wilde, or Emily Dickinson.”
Crikey! And yet it is precisely this melancholy (or masochism!) that drives me on in search of the ‘truth’ in my own writing. Despite frequently suffering at the hands of journalists who interchange the less likable traits of his characters with himself, novelist
Michael Chabon (
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys) still urges all writers to strive for complete honesty in their work, regardless of consequences. “Telling the truth, when the truth matters most, is almost always a frightening prospect,” he says. “But if one doesn’t take this risk. If the writer submits his work to an internal censor long before anyone else can get their hands on it. The result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth.”
Writing is an emotional business and the gaping chasm between my story’s vividness in one’s mind (imagination) and ‘in-animation’ on the page is wider on some days than others. Which is why remembering the many challenges faced by well-known novelists helps me persevere.
Their wisdom and experience also help me ‘dial down’ the inner voices of family members and my own, closely-linked, inner critic both of whom, often ask me, whiningly, and repeatedly, as I struggle at the keyboard: ‘Just Who Do You Think You Are?’
Yet, ironically, the consummate appeal of writing for me, its tidal pull if you will, is by-and-large my way of trying to answer that very question: One never really fully knows who one is, but being immersed in the business of writing, serves me well as possibly the only way of finding out!
Even if, as
E.L. Doctorow, the author of such classics as
‘Ragtime’, and
‘Billy Bathgate’ warns, “The work itself is hard and slow…you live enslaved in the book’s language, its diction, its universe of imagery, and there is no way out—except through the last sentence.”
© Beverly Martens
March 2009
