On Writing.

A while back, at one of the other ABA (may the celestial light of the heavens be forever upon it) blogs (Nigela’s, I think, but not sure), someone was kicking around the idea of what it means to be a writer, and offering some successful writers’ quotes on the topic. I was thinking a bit about this myself recently, and decided to post a highly belated response.

So what does it mean to be a writer?

To be a writer is to be a searcher, seeking the small in hidden and overlooked places, the shining grains of sand trapped between the floor tiles. It is to extrapolate the grand from the minute, appreciate and describe the wonder of the grand, and be able to see each quality in the other.

To write is to be yoked, enslaved, to your imagination, leaving it nagging you for attention, distracting you from more immediate affairs, to be partly here and partly somewhere distant. It is an unquenchable need to explain the inexplicable and encapsulate the boundless. It is an incurable sickness, an obsession, a disorder begging for order but frequently attaining only release—creating vacancies for the next bout with intellectual anarchy and chaos, seeking the calm between the storms at sea.

Being a writer involves indulging and subsequently denying the unslaked and unslakeable thirst of the ego: it entails being as selfish as an only child, yet as giving as life. It involves feeling, indeed immersing oneself, in the pettiness of everyday existence then ultimately transcending and denying it; it is the Hindu god Shiva, the creator and the destroyer. It is a craft and a construction of saws and hammers, that measures and binds, builds and fastens, yet also rends and shatters.

Writing is a fortress unassailable, locked and fixed, ironclad and frozen; it is also an invitation, aglow and inviting, into the open door of the author’s mind. Writing is a unique art, active and passive at once, that can be fully realized in the doing, but also in the observing: it is as inseparably tied to reading as night is to day.

Writing burdens and unburdens the author; it weighs like a bundle of sticks on a pack mule, yet feeds like repast to the famished. It begs and offers alms, based on its author's and reader's interwoven demands.

The actual practice of writing is much like shooting free throws or lobbing darts: the way to accuracy follows on the heels of the error-laden wreckage of incompetence and defeat. Great writing requires the patience of a saint, the discipline of an athlete, the boldness of a smuggler, and the shy, retiring, terror of a recluse. Small wonder, then, that few are up to the task.

To write well is to see the world in terms of the secret places in your heart, your loves, your dreams, your fears and desires, to be a passionate advocate for your values and concerns—and to also see the world in the very next moment as if you never existed at all, as objective and detached as a stone watching clouds pass overhead.

Writing involves painful honesty and clever deceit, the courage to reveal one’s innermost self and the challenge of selling him; it is the recklessness of abandon and the calculated balance of form, like a tightrope walker falling off of and advancing forward on a rope at the same time. It is a bundle of paradoxes and contradictions as essential to each other as partners on a trapeze or comrades in arms. It is the sparing austerity of Hemmingway and extravagance of Dickens. Writing hides the truth among lies and lies to tell greater truths, bending and shaping reality by bending and shaping the mind describing it, like a malevolent force that tempts and conquers by offering the conclusion that it can be itself conquered.

Writing is a club and a scalpel, rudely bashing and bludgeoning and then cutting lines as straight and fine as a surgeon’s, cutting so that she can heal. It is also a paramour’s caress, a friend’s humor, an avuncular kindness, sage words of advice interspersed with harsh words of rebuke. It is a labor of the heart’s love and a vent for the spleen, a place of profound justice, a place of whim and caprice. It is a force alternately logical as mathematics and then suddenly, cruelly random and arbitrary as the will.

The printed word, beyond anything, is an unreachable illusion of perfection, a desire to catch and cage a fantasy version of yourself that will ever remain one day beyond your grasp, “so close, and still so far out of reach,” as the prophet Tom Petty once wrote. Writing involves angst-ridden, constant revision of sentences and paragraphs that rewrite themselves into something unintelligible the moment you aren’t looking; it is a hungry dog waiting for you to drop the food scrap of an idea so that it can run off with it and never return, a blind alley down which one chases ghosts.

Being a writer is humbling, and often humiliating. It is throwing everything that you have at your subject and sometimes failing hopelessly for lack of skill. It is looking at things you wrote only weeks and months earlier as if they are telegrams from a different dimension, the constant need to blush and think aloud, “I actually put that in print? But it is also the satisfaction of getting it right, the moments when you do not blush, and think the same sentence with a very different emphasis: “I actually put that in print.

To write is to produce words and ideas sometimes topical and transitory, fleeting and ephemeral, and to sometimes manufacture constructs as permanent and rigid and enduring as a mountain; at its rare best, writing does both.

To write well is to have a gift that demands recompense, a possession that owns its owner. It is using the mind to traverse the soul, the very human tendency, as the brilliant John Gardner put it, to “map out roads through Hell with their crackpot theories.” It is an endeavor ultimately as fruitless as trying to understand water by breathing it, as richly rewarding as a dream in which we can breathe under water.

And that’s what I think about writing. How about you?