Posted on by Asia Lenae

Susan Sontag on the Bliss of Having Written & the Inextricable Connection Between Reading & Writing

What’s the secret to being a good writer?  Aspiring wordsmiths often think the answer is shrouded in mystery.  New Yorker staff writers and Pulitzer-prize winning novelists— they think— might possess this arcane knowledge but they keep it locked away like a buried treasure in a cave.  To access it, you have to know the magic words open sesame.  

But being a good writer is actually quite simple: you have to read.  

“Read a thousand books and your words will flow like a river,” Virginia Woolf wrote as she contemplated the inseparable connection between reading and writing.  Ray Bradbury urged aspiring artists to devour as much material as possible: “If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful.  I have never had a dry spell in my life mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting” (Mr. Bradbury must be on to something…he wrote more than 30 books and nearly 600 short stories).  Stephen King put it more simply, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.”

Towering intellect and titan of criticism Susan Sontag would have to agree.  In her distinctively discerning essay “Directions: Write, Read, Rewrite, Repeat Steps 2 and 3 as Needed,” one of many thought-provoking pieces in the New York Times Writers on Writing, Sontag makes the convincing argument that you can’t write unless you read.  We usually think of the writing process as a series of predictable steps we learned in 3rd grade: brainstorm, outline, draft, revise, edit.  However, this formula neglects a fundamental stage: reading.  Reading is integral to revising: we must first become master readers before we can assess what’s working and what’s not working in our own writing.  As Sontag writes with characteristic acuity: 

“…to write is to practice, with particular intensity and attentiveness, the art of reading.  You write in order to read what you’ve written and see if it’s OK and, since of course it never is, to rewrite it— once, twice, as many times as it takes to get it to be something you can bear to reread…Hard to imagine writing without rereading.”  

Every week in my writing workshop class, we have to critique our classmates.  At first, I resented the exercise: helping others revise their work kept me from my own writing (after all, I only have so many hours in a day).  But now I realize that assessing others sharpens my critical faculties.  If I can comprehend why another person’s story isn’t working (their central message is unclear, their characters are cardboard cutouts instead of three-dimensional people, their writing is clunky), I can apply those lessons to my own writing.  In the same way, when one of my classmate’s stories is working, it inspires me.  Nothing rekindles my creative fire quite like encountering an evocative bit of imagery or a sharp turn-of-phrase.  

Ultimately, reading ignites writing.  Reading a good book can electrify us with an ecstatic lightening bolt of inspiration and send our fingers flying.  But if we read too much, we might compare our not-yet-developed first drafts to the masterpieces of literary giants and find ourselves wanting.  No writer is safe from the torture chamber of comparison.  Though Virginia Woolf was certainly a genius in her own right, she found herself overcome by crippling writer’s block any time she read Marcel Proust.  “Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out a sentence,” she wrote in 1922.

In an incisive passage, Sontag captures this complex relationship between reading and writing:

“Reading usually precedes writing.  And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading.  Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.  And long after you’ve become a writer, reading books others write— and rereading the beloved books of the past— constitutes an irresistible distraction from writing.  Distraction.  Consolation.  Torment.  And, yes, inspiration.”

“I hate writing, I love having written,” lady of wisecracks Dorothy Parker famously quipped.  You’d be hard pressed to find a writer who didn’t agree with this sentiment.  The act of writing is often agony and anguish.  There’s nothing more formidable than facing the blank page’s daunting nothingness.

But if writing is torment, revision is bliss.  The first stages of writing are like the first stages of gardening.  There’s a lot of difficult decisions, not to mention drudgery: you have to choose the proper plot of land and the kinds of flowers you want to grow, you have to till the soil.  But once your seeds are planted and begin to bloom, most of your work is maintenance: you water, you pull weeds, you prune.

Once you have a first draft, you’ve arranged your thoughts into some sort of logical order.  You’ve accomplished the most difficult task: assembling your ideas into a coherent form so they can be transported into someone else’s consciousness.

“Having written” is the less laborious, more fun part of the writing process.  Once you’ve overcome the paralysis of beginning and gotten something, anything, down on the page, you can commit yourself to the more pleasurable work of revising.  Revising is weeding out unnecessary repetition and awkward phrasing, cutting away overgrown bushes of syntax so your reader can more readily understand your thinking.  Revising is replacing recycled ideas and commonplace cliches with fresh turns-of-phrase.  It’s replacing close-but-not-quite-right-words with more precise words that exactly convey your meaning.  Refining your work is endlessly satisfying.  As Sontag writes, 

“…though this, the rewriting— and the rereading— sound like effort, they are actually the most pleasurable parts of writing.  Sometimes the only pleasurable parts.  Setting out to write, if you have the idea of ‘literature’ in your head, is formidable, intimidating.  A plunge in an icy lake.  Then comes the warm part: when you already have something to work with, upgrade.

[…]

Let’s say, it’s a mess.  But you have a chance to fix it.  You try to be clearer.  Or deeper.  Or more eloquent.  Or more eccentric.  You try to be true to the world.  You want the book to be more spacious, more authoritative…As the statue is entombed in the block of marble, the novel is inside your head.  You try to liberate it.  You try to get this wretched stuff on the page closer to what you think your book should be— what you know, in your spasms of elation, it can be.”

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 1 Comment

Gish Jen on the False Dichotomy Between Life & Work

“Want to get a coffee?” my sister asked after I had just settled in at my desk.  It’s inevitable: the moment I finally get into the flow of writing, something interrupts.  An offer to get a coffee, a phone call, an invitation out.  

“Should I go?” I wondered to myself.  I wanted to focus on my work.  After 45 torturous minutes of writing and rewriting sentences, I had finally found a rhythm.  But did I really want to pass up an opportunity to get a cold brew with my sister?

If you’re a writer, you understand this unbearable tug-of-war between life and work.  On one hand, you want to RSVP a resounding “no” to every invitation out.  You’d much rather work on your novel than go to a pool party or out for brunch.  In many ways, you resent life itself: the million and one daily occurrences that intrude upon your work.  You despise the demanding ring of the telephone, the incessant irritating ding-ding-ding sound of mail in your inbox.  You harbor borderline irrational resentment for any errand that forces you out of your house.  For the writer, Dante’s nine circles of hell is taking your car to the mechanic or waiting on hold to talk to a representative at AT&T about your phone bill.

On mornings like this one, I entertain fantasies of abandoning my real life and retreating to a secluded cabin in Big Sur.  Among the quiet hush of redwoods, far from the commotion of city life, from the distractions of technology, from the infuriating interruptions of other people, I could finally get down to work.

But other times, I resent having to choose between life and work.  Every minute I spend in my fictional world is a minute I’m not spending in the real one.  If I choose to spend my afternoon rearranging words on a page, I’m not exchanging intimacies with my husband or seeing my brother for his birthday.

In her essay “Inventing Life Steals Time, Living Life Begs It Back,” one of many insightful pieces in Writers on Writing, Gish Jen explores this seemingly irreconcilable conflict between life and work.  Despite her success as a writer, Jen almost quits.  “Is writing worth it?” she wonders. Is it worth it to live on the page but not in real life?  Mired in existential crisis, she writes, 

“Last year I almost quit writing.  I almost quit even though I was working well, even though I remained fascinated by the process of writing— the endless surprise of the sentences, and the satisfaction of thoughts taking form.  I had a new book I wanted to write, the book I am now writing, which I knew to be a good project.  I knew, what’s more, that I was not written out, something for which I have perhaps morbidly always watched: I have long vowed not to keep on past the point where I ought best to stop.  

I was not there yet.  Still, I almost quit because I felt the writing life was not life, because I felt I was writing instead of living.”

Ultimately, writers are caught between worlds: the real one they inhabit and the imaginary one they construct.  As Jen observes,

“There is never enough time for writing; it is a parallel universe where the days, inconveniently, are also twenty-four hours long.  Every moment spent in one’s real life is a moment missed in one’s writing life, and vice versa.”

For the writer, writing and not writing are equally excruciating forms of torture.  When you’re writing, you’re wondering whether it’s any good, you’re comparing yourself to other writers.  Your day consists of trying to wrangle your wild, untamed thoughts into a comprehensible order.  You might labor over a single sentence for more than an hour.

But not writing is just as much torture.  Not writing is wishing you could be writing, it’s being physically present but mentally elsewhere.  You might be at a dinner date with your boyfriend, but you’re actually in your short story, wondering how to propel the plot further.

Jen intimately understands the agony of the writer’s life.  In a passage of emphatic anaphora, she writes,  

“To write is to understand why Keats writes of living ‘under an everlasting restraint, never relieved except when I am composing.’  It is to recognize Kafka’s longing to be locked in the innermost room of a basement, with food anonymously left for him.  It is to know why Alice Munro describes the face of the artist as unfriendly; and it is to envy Philip Roth, who, rumor has it, has sequestered himself in a cabin in the Berkshires.  He is writing, writing, people say, writing without distractions, only writing.  To which the news part of us asks: Is that a life?  Can you really call that a life?”

To write is to enter a Faustian bargain of sorts.  We might not sell our souls to be writers, but we exchange invaluable moments with our loved ones for more time at our keyboards:

“Writing competes with…life and shortens its run.  I struggle not to hurry my time with my children; I endeavor to lose myself with them even as I squeeze every last minute out of the rest of the day.  I calculate; I weigh; I optimize.  That I may lose myself again in my work, I map out the day, the route, the menu.  I duck, I duck.  I hoard the hours and despair in traffic jams.  Worse, I keep an eye on my involvements.  I give myself freely to others, but only so freely.  I wonder if writing is worth this last price in particular.”

Is writing worth the sacrifice?  For Jen, the answer is “no.”  Writing— she feels— has become a jealous, too possessive lover.  Determined to live again, Jen puts down her pen and spends her newfound freedom gardening and making up for lost time with loved ones.  

But after awhile, Jen misses her old paramour.  Writing had been a way of ordering the shattered fragments of her life into a coherent whole. Without writing, life didn’t feel worth living anymore:

“Yet I found life without work strangely lifeless.  I wish I could claim that I went back to work because I had an exceptional contribution to make to the world, or because I found the words to dress down Old Man Death; but in fact I went back because life without prose was prosaic.  It seemed as though someone had disinvented music— such silence.  I felt as though I had lost one of my senses.”

Jen had been living in a false dichotomy of either/or: either she lived or she wrote. But, she soon realized, she could live and write. Encountering an island of ice on a walk, she discovers an apt metaphor for the relationship between her work and her life:

“I walked past a reservoir in the spring and saw an ice island.  This was gray-black and submerged enough that it could have been the reflection of a cloud, except that it was covered with birds.  The birds were ankle deep in the cold water; pointing in all directions, they seemed, despite their concerted stares, to be scattered.  The island was something I’d seen and admired every year, but when I looked at it this time, I saw that it was transitory yet permanent, that its islandness depended on the water, which would destroy it and create it again.

The water and ice were antagonistic, but not only antagonistic.  The water was of the ice, after all, and the ice of the water; the water gave rise to the ice.  Their relationship was what James Alan McPherson might have called one of antagonistic cooperation.”

Ultimately, life and art aren’t armies in constant battle. They aren’t enemies— in fact, they can be great allies to each other: the mundane matter of life offers material for our art; making art makes life, at least, makes it worthwhile.

Posted on by Asia Lenae

Joan Didion on How Detours Bring Us Closer to Our Destiny

Most of us have clear ideas about how our dreams should unfold.  If we want to be movie stars, for example, we imagine our breakthrough moment will be an Academy Award or a critically-acclaimed starring role.  We dream our big break will manifest in a very specific way: a major director will notice us while we’re waiting tables; after a single audition, we’ll land our ideal part.  We imagine we’ll be “discovered” in some romantic fashion like Lana Turner, casually sipping a coke at a malt shop.  Our initiation into Tinseltown will be the legendary stuff of Hollywood lore.

But sometimes our “big break,” doesn’t seem big at all.  This, we think, wasn’t how it was supposed to go!  We were supposed to be “serious” actors— not amateurs in a 30 second McDonald’s commercial!

If we’re about to pass up an opportunity because it isn’t as glitzy or glamorous as our fantasies, because we think it’s a roundabout detour on what should be a straight and narrow path to our destiny, essayist and journalist Joan Didion would say one thing: don’t.

Didion understood that dreams don’t always come true the way we hoped.  After graduating from U.C. Berkeley in 1956, she moved to New York City to become a writer.  Her first gig was writing merchandising copy for Vogue.  Though Vogue is certainly a prestigious publication, Didion didn’t exactly imagine her “dream job” would involve writing compact 1-line captions for patent leather pumps.  Another writer might have dismissed this type of “writing” as frivolous.  But Didion saw fashion writing as a way to perfect her craft and polish her prose.  In her landmark 1978 essay “Telling Stories,” one of many characteristically clear-eyed pieces from Let Me Tell You What I Mean, Didion realizes that her time at Vogue played a formative role in shaping the writer she’d become:

“It is easy to make light of this kind of ‘writing,’ and I mention it specifically because I do not make light of it at all: it was at Vogue that I learned a kind of ease with words, a way of regarding words not as mirrors of my own inadequacy but as tools, toy weapons to be deployed strategically on a page.  In a caption of, say, eight lines, each line to run no more or less than twenty-seven characters, not only every word but every letter counted.  At Vogue one learned fast, or did not stay, how to play games with words, how to put a couple of unwieldy dependent clauses through the typewriter and roll them out transformed into one simple sentence composed of precisely thirty-nine characters.  We were connoisseurs of synonyms.  We were collectors of verbs.  (I recall “to ravish” as a highly favored verb for a number of issues and I also recall it, for a number of issues more, as the source of a highly favored noun: “ravishments,” as in “tables cluttered with porcelain tulips, Faberge eggs, and other ravishments.”)  We learned as reflex the grammatical tricks we had learned only as marginal corrections in school (“there were two oranges and an apple” read better than “there were an apple and two oranges,” passive verbs slowed down sentences, “it” needed a reference within the scan of an eye), learned to scan the OED, learned to write and rewrite and rewrite again.  “Run it through again, sweetie, it’s not quite there.”  “Give me a shock verb two lines in.”  “Prune it out, clean it up, make the point.”  Less was more, smooth was better, and absolute precision essential to the monthly grand illusion.  Going to work for Vogue was, in the 1950s, not unlike training with the Rockettes.”

It was at Vogue that Didion developed her distinctive style and terse, tough-minded prose.  Lesson?  We never know how the seeds of our dreams will blossom and grow.  For more from this stellar sentence stylist, read Ms. Didion on writing as a process of discovery and the pains & perils of self-doubt.

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 2 Comments

Joan Didion on Self-Doubt

Oscar Wilde once said, “The artist’s life is a long, lovely suicide.”  Though Wilde could be dramatic, the idea that writing is agonizing is certainly not an overstatement.  Writing is torment.  Writing is laboring all day on a single page only to toss it in the trash.  For every day of creative bliss, there are countless days when you want to quit.

To go to the blank page is to meet your demons.  When we write, we must battle that barbarous inner voice who whispers “you’re not good enough” at every turn.  Still, we write songs and sonnets because we possess a primal urge.  Writing is a way of saying “I was here.”

All writers struggle with self-doubt, whether they’re toiling away in anonymity or are widely renowned.  It’s hard to imagine someone as influential and iconic as Joan Didion questioning her own talent.  But much like Virginia Woolf— who felt inconceivably inferior compared to her idol Marcel Proust (“Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out a sentence,” she wrote to a friend in 1922)— Didion believed she was hopelessly dull compared to her infinitely more interesting peers.In “Telling Stories,” one of many incisively-observed essays from Let Me Tell You What I Mean, Didion offers a glimpse into the writer’s fragile psyche.  In the fall of 1954, Didion, who at the time was a junior at U.C. Berkeley, earned a coveted spot in writer and literary critic Mark Schorer’s English 106A.   “An initiation into the grave world of real writers,” English 106A was a writer’s workshop that required students to write five short stories.

As an inexperienced nineteen-year-old, Didion swiftly sunk into the quicksand of insecurity.  “Who am I to write?” she wondered, “Do I even have anything meaningful to say?”

Her classmates had met famous people and travelled to far-flung places.  Her own life felt uneventful by comparison.  She had never been in love or known real difficulty.  She had never had an affair in Cuba or danced all night in Harlem or sipped wine in Tuscany.  Her short life was circumscribed within the 100 square miles of her native Sacramento.  Certainly, she believed, there was nothing in her unremarkable life that could be transmuted into a short story or novel:

“I remember each other member of this class as older and wiser than I had hope of ever being…not only older and wiser but more experienced, more independent, more interesting, more possessed of an exotic past: marriages and the breaking up of marriages, money and the lack of it, sex and politics and the Adriatic seen at dawn; the stuff not only of grown-up life itself but more poignantly to me at the time, the very stuff which might be transubstantiated into five short stories.  I recall a Trotskyist, then in his forties.  I recall a young woman who lived, with a barefoot man and a large white dog, in an attic lit only by candles.  I recall classroom discussions which ranged over meetings with Paul and Jane Bowles, incidents involving Djuna Barnes, years spent in Paris, in Beverley Hills, the Yucatan, on the Lower East Side of New York and on Repulse Bay and even on morphine.  I had spent seventeen of my nineteen years in Sacramento, and the other two in the Tri Delt house on Warring Street in Berkeley.  I had never read Paul or Jane Bowles, let alone met them, and when, some fifteen years later at a friend’s house in Santa Monica Canyon, I did meet Paul Bowles, I was immediately rendered as dumb and awestruck as I had been when I was nineteen and taking English 106A.”  

As a fellow English major at U.C. Berkeley, I can relate to Ms. Didion’s plight.  I—too— had to navigate the notoriously labyrinthine halls of Dwinelle as a shy, self-conscious girl in my early twenties.  As a transfer student from junior college who barely graduated high school and never dreamed of going to a prestigious four-year university, I had to constantly battle the debilitating sense that everyone in my class was somehow more qualified than me.  In the stately lecture halls of the Wheeler building, I felt unforgivably less than my bookish classmates who wore oxfords and chinos and had impressive internships at magazines.  Like Didion, I never spoke for fear my words would reveal my stupidity.  As Didion writes, 

“In short I had no past and, every Monday-Wednesday-Friday at noon in Dwinelle Hall, it seemed increasingly clear to me I had no future.  I ransacked my closet for clothes in which I might appear invisible to the class, and came up with only a dirty raincoat.  I sat in this raincoat and listened to other people’s stories read aloud and I despaired of ever knowing what they knew.  I attended every meeting of this class and never spoke once.  I managed to write only three of the five required stories.  I received— only, I think now, because Mr. Schorer, a man of infinite kindness to and acuity about his students, divined intuitively that my failing performance was a function of adolescent paralysis, of a yearning to be good and a fright that I never would be, of terror that any sentence I committed to paper would expose me as not good enough— a course grade of B.”

Paralyzed by fear, Didion didn’t write another story for ten years.  For a decade, she lost the battle against her merciless inner censor.  The irony, of course, is that— despite her insistence that she wasn’t interesting/intellectual/experienced enough— she would go on to become one of the most vital voices of her generation.  

Lesson?  Even great writers suffer writer’s block and fear rejection.  For more from Didion, read about her ideas on art as expression & discovery, her time at Vogue, and her famous sense of fashion.

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 2 Comments

Anna Quindlen on Why We Should Write

“Why write?”  I’m tormented by this question nearly every day.  Why bring yourself to your desk, day after day, and try to tame the monsters of your thoughts and pin them to the page?  Why suffer the seemingly unbearable periods of self-hatred and self-doubt if no one cares what we have to say?

In our results-oriented culture, we demand things “pay off.”  Writing a novel is only worthwhile if it becomes a bestseller.  Making a movie is only valuable if it makes us millions of dollars.  Composing a poem is only useful if it gets us somewhere.

The point of creating— we think— is to be seen and heard.  We perform for an audience.  We tap dance for applause.  We write so someone can read our words.

In many ways, we’re motivated by extrinsic rewards.  We write for awards and acclaim, for fame and fortune, for the coveted status of literary icon.  No matter how seemingly superficial, many of us secretly dream of rave reviews in the New York Times, our authorial black-and-white photograph on the back of a book cover.

What do we desire more than anything?

To be respected and esteemed.

If we turn 30 and still have never been published, we may be tempted to give up on our dreams.  We may stay awake late at night chastising ourselves for not choosing a more conventional career.  “Maybe,” we wonder during these midnight terrors, “we should’ve just made our parents proud and become doctors.”

At this moment when we’re most discouraged, we must remember why we write in the first place.  In her clarion call to write, Write for Your Life, populist of the page Anna Quindlen suggests there are far more pressing reasons to put pen to page.  We should write— not for stardom or celebrity— but because the act of writing gives life form and shape.  So much of life is fleeting, transitory.  Unless made solid, our experiences are like grains of sand spilling through a sieve.  Many years from now when we reflect upon our lives, our most cherished memories will be hazy and indistinct.  Writing is a net, a way to catch memory before it flutters away.  

Writing is a means to immortality.  Life is brief, as momentary as the flap of a butterfly’s wing.  Words on a page, however, are long-lasting.  If we have a passing thought, it darts across our consciousness only to forever fade.  But if we record our thoughts— our musings and meditations, our judgements and observations, our daydreams and reveries— they will endure long after we have passed away. 

Recounting a rather mundane moment when she helped a blind woman cross the street, Quindlen writes,

“…and for a few minutes it was nothing but an interior anecdote, passing eventually, as these things do, into memory.

But written down, it lives.  It’s there, it’s real.  That’s the important thing.  That’s why we write things down, to give them life.  Sometimes people ask whether a particularly difficult or challenging situation is made cathartic through writing.  I’m not sure writing about things always makes us feel better, but perhaps it sometimes does make loss, tragedies, disappointments more actual.  It can turn them into somethings with a clear shape and form, and therefore make it possible to see them more deeply and clearly, and more usefully turn confusion and pain into understanding and perhaps reconciliation.  On paper our greatest challenges become A Real Thing, in a world in which so much seems ephemeral and transitory.”

What’s wonderful about books is they connect us with the finest minds from many years ago.  With the turn of a page, a lonesome 21st century reader can find a friend in Tolstoy or Kafka, Hemingway or Fitzgerald.  

In the same way, what we write can speak across continents and centuries to future generations of people.  Though it might seem horribly self-indulgent to write about our own experiences (after all, who cares if our mother died or we just broke up with our boyfriend of 10 years?), we are never just writing for ourselves: what we write inevitably helps others.  Art is an act of service, not an expression of ego.  Writing is a form of connection, a bridge that stretches across the vast distances of time and space and brings together seemingly dissimilar people.   Too often in life, we feel solitary in our struggles.  When we write truthfully about our experiences, we remind our readers that they are not alone.  

Take Anne Frank.  When she wrote in her diary, she probably felt like another teenage girl: obsessing about boys, complaining about her problematic relationship with her mother.  There were probably many mornings when she wondered “why write at all?”  Little did she know that her diary would come to represent the horrors of the Holocaust and resonate with millions around the globe.  Lesson?  We have no idea how our words will impact the world.  As Quindlen notes, 

“That is a kind of afterlife all our own stories, inconsequential and important as well, can assume when we record them.  To write the present is to believe in the future.  One of the poignant things about Anne Frank’s diary is that the very composition suggests that someday she will live to tell it all, and in some sense I suppose she does, on the page, in the attic, surviving day by day, never dreaming that by doing so she will help some of us survive, too.  She’s not really writing the story of the Holocaust, although that’s what she illuminates.  She’s telling the story of one small and unremarkable life that has come to stand for millions of others, and so became remarkable.”

Posted on by Asia Lenae

Anna Quindlen on Writing as a Means of Figuring Out Who You Are & Remembering Who You Once Were

Why write?  Joan Didion believed we should write to discover what we’re thinking, what we’re looking at and what it means, what we want and what we fear.  Brenda Ueland thought we should put pen to page “because the best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it and what is the purpose of existence Here or Yonder but to discover truth and beauty and express it; i.e. share it with others?”  Susan Sontag asserted we should write to create the self while Anais Nin thought we should write to discover our own voice and overcome the picky perfectionism of our inner censor.

When we write, especially in a diary, we realize we’re the authors of our own lives: we can take control of our narratives, we can rewrite our storylines.  Writing is a compass and a map that illuminates where we want to go.  Writing is a candle in a dark night and a life raft during a turbulent storm of the soul.  Writing is a source of companionship and connection, even if the only person we’re talking to is ourselves.

In her love letter to personal writing Write for Your Life, Anna Quindlen urges us to write because writing can help us figure out who we are.  The act of formulating our thoughts on a page, arranging our incoherent ideas into semantic structures of comprehensible meaning somehow makes the chaos of life more orderly.  When we order words on a page, we order ourselves.  Writing brings us clarity about who we are and what we want.  

Take Anne Frank’s famous diary.  At the time of writing, Frank was living through one of the most horrifying conflicts in human history, hiding in a small attic from the Nazis.  Her diary, whom she affectionately called Kitty, was her closest confidante.  In her war-wrecked world, musing over things in her diary was a rare source of comfort.  As Quindlen writes, 

“What sometimes gets lost, in the many decades since her father first published Anne Frank’s diary, in the millions of copies it has sold in dozens of languages, is that when she first began, Anne Frank wasn’t writing a book.  She was talking to herself.  And she was talking to herself in a way that any of us can do too.  She was finding solace in writing her life, her thoughts and feelings, day after day.  Words to live by.

Anne Frank was living through an extraordinary experience, an extraordinary time, an extraordinary horror, and to ground herself she was committing everything to paper, much of it not particularly profound.  The curtains at the windows, the cupboard to hide the door.  She writes about how everyone thinks she is badly behaved, about how much she hates algebra and geometry.  Eventually she ran out of space in the birthday diary and continued in exercise books and accounting ledgers from the office below.  In some ways she sounds like a typical teenager: a mother who doesn’t understand her, a boy she wants to be alone with.  In others, surely not: the toilet that cannot be flushed for the entire day, the enforced silence to forestall the unexpected footsteps on the stairs, the sound of those footsteps evoking terror because of what the family Frank has heard is happening in the world outside the attic.  

But Anne’s diary is also instructive about how writing, for anyone, for everyone, for you and for me, can normalize the abnormal and feed the spirit, whether during exceptional moments of history or just ordinary moments of everyday life…For young people like Anne, it’s a way of understanding yourself, hearing your own voice, puzzling out your identity.”

One of the greatest joys of keeping a diary is sifting through it many years later.  The tattered pages transport us to an entirely different epoch, an entirely different era: when we left home for college, when we thought metal heads with Jesus hair were cute.  A diary is both a time capsule and a scrapbook.  Rereading our diary, we become historians attempting to understand another time, another civilization, another culture.  Or, as Joan Didion once said, writing is a way to keep us on nodding terms with the people we once were.

With characteristic eloquence, Quindlen writes, 

“For those far along in the span of their lifetimes, writing offers an opportunity to look back, a message in a bottle that says, This was life.  This was how it was, this was who I was.”

In this way, writing is a means to escape our mortal coil and live forever.  When we write, we’re usually writing for ourselves: to vent, to process events, to record.  But our writing can also console our loved ones when we inevitably pass on.  In Write for Your Life, Quindlen describes the experiences of the National Writing Project’s executive director Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, whose mother spent her later years writing poems.  After her mother’s death, nothing comforted Elyse more than reading her mother’s words.  Though her mother had departed this physical realm, her spirit persisted in her poems.  Her verse could speak across the vast reaches of time and space, in this life and the hereafter.  “Writing,” Quindlen notes, “is the gift of your presence forever.”  

Meditating on the relationship between writing and memory, Quindlen uses an illustrative metaphor:

“When you write, you connect with yourself, past, present and future.  I remember myself, the little girl who wrote poems, the college applicant who said without guile or humility that her goal in life was to be a writer.  Writing can make memory concrete, and memory is such a hard thing to hold on to, like a Jell-O mold, all wiggly but with solid bits embedded clearly.”

In many ways, writing is a work of magic: it exteriorizes the interior, renders the invisible thought a visible word.  Floating and half-conscious, thoughts whirl by once and disappear; words are forever.  By capturing our fluttering thoughts and committing them to paper, we better remember.  As Quindlen so beautifully observes, 

“The point is writing is a net, catching memory and pinning it to a board like people sometimes do with butterflies like the ones we hatched.  Writing is a hedge against forgetting, forgetting forever.”

 

 

Posted on by Asia Lenae

May Sarton on Silence, Solitude & the Significance of Doing Nothing

Most of us don’t have the capacity to be alone.  Some of us seek a romantic partner to fill the void of our incomplete soul; others of us distract ourselves with endless social obligations and busy schedules; still others of us are so desperate to escape our own company that we’ll settle for the most frivolous forms of socializing, be it superficial friendships or meaningless small talk at a bar.  But no one and nothing can spare us from the frightening fact that— fundamentally— we are alone.

Despite our terror of loneliness, solitude is vital to leading a rich, contented life.  Henry David Thoreau, who famously sequestered himself on Walden Pond, found solitude restorative and rejuvenating: “I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time.  To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating.”  Pablo Picasso believed that “without great solitude, no serious work is possible” while Marcus Aurelius asserted “nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul.” Perhaps no other writer has plumbed the soul-stretching depths of solitude with more candor and courage than May Sarton.  In 1972, Sarton, a poet with no husband and no children, lived in self-imposed isolation in a sleepy New England village.  Her soul-searching Journal of a Solitude offers an illuminating glimpse into her observant mind and generous spirit.

Like most writers, Sarton struggled to maintain a balance between her exterior and interior life.  Without the drama and excitement of outward living— corresponding with friends, going on book tours, hosting dinners and attending occasionally glamorous, often uninteresting cocktail parties— her existence would be dull and not worth exploring.  But without time to reflect, life would disintegrate into incoherence and incomprehensibility.

For Sarton, solitude was salvation and sustenance.  In her diary, she could process the chaos of  everyday existence.  To be artists, we must— like Sarton— find a balance between life and writing, between action and introspection, between the demands of the day-to-day and the demands of the spirit:

“I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my real life again at last.  That is what is strange— that friends, even passionate love, are not real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. 

Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid.  Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and ‘the house and I resume old conversations.'”

What does it mean to be “productive”?  In our hurried hustle culture, productivity is getting things done; it’s getting results; it’s producing a concrete product.  The curse of capitalism is we become workers on an assembly line— our worth measured in terms of input and output.  Reduced to economics, our value is calculated in dollars and cents, our status determined by how much we contribute to the deranged hamster wheel of production and consumption.

However, in writing and in art, productivity doesn’t always look productive.  Sometimes productivity is playing and puttering; sometimes it’s pointless daydreams and blissful reveries; sometimes it’s sitting at your desk all day and not writing a single sentence you like.  When we feel as though we’ve squandered our day, we must remember that idleness is indispensable to creativity.  As inspiring, incandescent spirit Brenda Ueland once wrote, “The imagination needs moodling,— long, inefficient, happy idling.”  

Often times, we’re accomplishing a great deal when we appear to be “doing nothing.”  When we’re doing the New York Times crossword puzzle, our minds are actually pondering the puzzle of how to conclude our symphony; when we’re luxuriating in a bubble bath, solutions to once unsolvable problems bubble up unbidden from our subconscious.  Indeed, we usually get our best ideas— not when we’re at our desks, completely and utterly absorbed in a project— but when we’re doing something seemingly unrelated: going on a midsummer stroll, folding fresh laundry (One is reminded of Mozart, who said it was during promenades in the park that his ideas flowed most “abundantly”).

In a delightfully defiant passage, Sarton imagines what is (and isn’t) a waste of our time and challenges capitalistic notions of productivity:

“It is never a waste of time to be outdoors, and never a waste of time to lie down and rest even for a couple of hours.  It is then that images float up and then I plan my work.  But it is a waste of time to see people who have only a social surface to show….Time wasted is poison.”

What makes life worth living?  In a November 11th entry, Sarton suggests living a contented life depends on having a higher goal, a mission, a purpose:

“We are whole or have intimations of what it means to be whole when the entire being— spirit, mind, nerves, flesh, the body itself— are concentrated toward a single end.”  

Sadly, many people— particularly women— don’t have enough open, obligation-free hours to “concentrate on a single end.”  They’re too busy juggling careers, changing diapers, carpooling their children to soccer practice.  Most women’s days revolve around the needs of their husband and children.  Rarely do they have time to pursue their own passions.  The result?  They feel aimless, adrift.  Without a lighthouse to guide them back to the shores of the self, many women float without a purpose or direction.  Much like Virginia Woolf, another accomplished diarist and feminist, Sarton laments:

“It is harder for women, perhaps to be ‘one-pointed,’ much harder for them to clear space around whatever it is they want to do beyond household chores and family life.  Their lives are fragmented…this is the cry I get in so many letters— the cry not so much for ‘a room of one’s own’ as time of one’s own.”

If you’re feeling disconnected from yourself, heed Sarton’s advice and carve out time of your own.  In the noise of everyday life, you might lose sight of who you are but in the silence of solitude, you’ll once again hear the whisperings of your own soul.  

Posted on by Asia Lenae

May Sarton on Why We Write & Why We Shouldn’t Worry About Worldly Definitions of Success

Why write?  In her legendary December 1976 essay “Why I Write,” the late great Joan Didion confessed, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.  What I want and what I fear.”  Writer, teacher and all around wonderful human being Brenda Ueland gave an even more poetic answer: “Because there’s nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money.  Because the best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it.  And what is the purpose of existence Here or Yonder but to discover truth and beauty and express it; i.e. share it with others?”

Few writers have pondered this perennial question more profoundly than poet, novelist, and dedicated diarist May Sarton.  In her timeless Journal of Solitude, Sarton records and reflects on her life during a single year at her quiet home in the idyllic woods of New Hampshire.  Written with a poet’s ear for rhythm and a philosopher’s insight, Journal of Solitude explores such themes as depression, despair, solitude, writing and the writing life.  

According to Sarton, many aspiring writers write for the wrong reasons.  Rather than focus on perfecting their craft, they worry about getting published.  They hunger for fame, fortune, success.  Their eyes glitter with grandiose visions of holding their New York Times best-selling book in their hands.  As Sarton writes in a September 17, 1972 entry, too many writers are obsessed with “making it” and buy into the myth of the overnight success:

“But it is troubling how many people expect applause, recognition, when they have not even begun to learn an art or craft.  Instant success is the order of the day; ‘I want it now!’  I wonder whether this is not part of our corruption by machines.  Machines do things very quickly and outside the natural rhythm of life, and we are indignant if a car doesn’t start at the first try.”

Human beings are impatient when we want something.  Rather than plant a seed and watch it grow, we dig it up every ten seconds.  “Why hasn’t my flower blossomed yet?” we whine exasperatedly.  But a plant can only grow if we pot it in rich soil, water it every so often, tend the weeds, and wait patiently.  

The same goes for writing.  We can’t hurry the process, we can’t demand that we produce “x” useable pages like factory workers on an assembly line.  A work is born in its own time.  Our lives unfold in divine time— not according to the ego’s rigid, unrealistic deadlines.  Sometimes it will take ten years to realize our artistic dreams, sometimes half a century.  But as Rainer Maria Rilke once told a young poet, “In this there is no measuring with time, a year doesn’t matter, and ten years are nothing.”

Though she knows “making it” isn’t the most important thing, Sarton still wants success.  Her masterpiece of introspection unflinchingly charts the challenging terrain of the artist’s life: the peaks of a perfectly-formed sentence, the valleys of rejection letters and ripped pages.  Despite her undeniable talent, Sarton doubts herself, finds herself debilitated by writer’s block and gets frustrated at her dismissal by critics.  Like any artist, Sarton dreams of one thing: recognition. 

After receiving a scathing review in the Sunday Times, Sarton descends into a pit of depression.  Indignant and dejected, she confesses to her diary:

“The darkness again.  An annihilating review in the Sunday Times.  I must have had a premonition, as I felt terribly low in my mind all weekend.  Now it is the old struggle to survive, the feeling that I have created twenty-four ‘children’ and every one has been strangled by lack of serious critical attention.  This review is simply stupid.”

Despite her disappointment, Sarton finds comfort in remembering why she writes.  It’s not for acclaim or applause, it’s not to earn the admiration of millions or the rubber stamp of approval from the New York Times.  Though she reveres solitude as a vital seedbed for her creativity, Sarton ultimately creates to cross the vast seas of seclusion and connect with other souls.  By expressing her small, singular life, Ms. Sarton hopes to capture something universal— in other words, help her readers feel less alone.

In a revelatory moment of self-awareness, Sarton realizes she’s become too preoccupied with worldly notions of success:

“I have become convinced since that horrible review (unimportant in itself) that it is a message,  however deviously presented, to tell me that I have been over-concerned with the materialistic aspects of bringing out this novel, the dangerous hope that it become a bestseller, or that, for once, I might get a leg up from the critics, the establishment, and not have once more to see the work itself stand alone and make its way, heart by heart, as it is diverted by a few people with all the excitement of a person who finds a wildflower in the woods that he has discovered on his own.  From my isolation to the isolation of someone somewhere who will find my work there exists a true communion.  I have not lacked it in these last years, and it is a blessing.  It is free of ‘ambition’ and it ‘makes the world go away,’ as the popular song says.  This is what I can hope for and I must hope for nothing more or less.”

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 1 Comment

Brenda Ueland Answers the Immortal Question: Why Write?

“Why do you write?”  In “Why I Write,” a tribute to George Orwell’s iconic 1946 essay of the same name, legendary journalist Joan Didion confessed with characteristic candor, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”  When writer, journalist, and book critic Meredith Maran posed this perennial question to twenty of our era’s most acclaimed authors, including Jodi Picoult, Susan Orlean, Ann Patchett, Michael Lewis, and James Frey, she was astonished at the assortment of answers.  Kathryn Harrison, whose incestuous memoir The Kiss shocked audiences around the world, said she loved writing because on the page she “could be most completely” herself and yet “totally relieved” of herself, a sentiment reminiscent of the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow and the Taoist idea of “wu wei.”  Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jennifer Egan replied she wrote because writing was a magical mode of teleportation in which she could live countless other lives: “When I’m writing, especially if it’s going well, I’m living in two different dimensions: this life I’m living now…and this completely other world I’m inhabiting that no one else knows about.”

Sometimes when I’m in a melancholy mood, this question becomes more existential: “What’s the point?  Why write at all?” I wonder defeated as yet another year goes by without my publishing the Great American Novel.  Which begs the question: why write if you never see your name in print?  if you never win a Man Booker or climb the New York Times best-seller list?  

Most writers dream of being praised by critics and enshrined in the literary canon, their books taught in English classrooms everywhere.  Though we didn’t get into writing for fame and fortune exactly, most of us want to be heard.  Writing without a reader seems as pointless as a magnificent orchestra playing for an empty room.

It is during these demoralizing moments that we must remember the real reasons we write.  In her stirring 1938 classic If You Want to Write, journalist, editor, writing teacher, and generous spirit Brenda Ueland reminds us writing is a higher calling: we write to express love, to offer solace, to cherish transitory moments, to heighten our senses, to gain a richer, deeper understanding of ourselves and our lives— not for worldly glory or impressive bylines.  With her trademark exuberance, she writes:

“And why should you do all these things?  Why should we all use our creative power and write or paint or play music, or whatever it tells us to do?

Because there’s nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money.  Because the best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it.  And what is the purpose of existence Here or Yonder but to discover truth and beauty and express it; i.e. share it with others?”

So as we ring in 2022 with ceremonial champagne and confetti, resolve to express your creativity, regardless of whether doing so brings you renown or celebrity.

Posted on by Asia Lenae

The Importance of “I”: Brenda Ueland on the Particular as a Pathway to the Universal

“I.”  The ninth letter of the alphabet.  Though it’s just a single letter— composed, as Sylvia Plath once observed, of “three reassuring strokes”— “I” encompasses the entirety of the human ego.  “I” represents the lens through which we see the world, the sum total of all we’ve seen and thought and felt.  By definition, no two “I’s” are exactly alike (after all, have there ever been two identical individuals in the history of the world?).  Thus, Brenda Ueland reassured us, “if you speak from yourself, you cannot help being original.”

Yet most of us resist speaking sincerely from ourselves because we believe that everything we have to say is stupid, uninteresting, and unoriginal.  This distaste for “I” begins in our early years in grade school.  “Never use ‘I’!” our English teachers scribbled disapprovingly in our notebooks.  Because we were forbidden from using the 1st person, we came to believe “I” was too unscholarly, too unserious, too informal.  Essays should be about the causes of WWII, the symbolism of Fitzgerald’s green light, the theme of marriage in the Victorian novel— not the catastrophes of our dating life or the loss of our father.

Sadly, most of us think our stories aren’t worth telling unless they’re larger than life, out-of-the-ordinary.  No one, we convince ourselves, wants to hear what we have to say— we’re “boring”!  After all, who wants to read about an everyman mechanic from New Jersey when they could read an adventure tale about a big game hunter on safari or an epic romance about a fallen Southern belle?  Compared to novels and movies on the silver screen, our commonplace lives feel unforgivably yawns-worthy.

But to be writers, we must honor— rather than discount— our own experiences.  Day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, great writers describe the quality of their consciousness.  Rather than disregard their particular lives, they’re always alert to the potential for art in their experiences: an overheard bit of conversation at a cafe might provide material for a novel’s central conflict, a squabble with a lover might supply dialogue for a movie script.

But the question remains: why write from “I”?  who cares about our particular experiences?

In her 1938 classic If You Want to Write, Brenda Ueland argues we should write from “I” because the particular is the only pathway to the universal.  Take Sylvia Plath as an example.  As one of the founding poets of the confessional movement, Plath pioneered the idea of writing from “I.”  By writing truthfully about her experiences as a woman, especially in “The Applicant,” her scathing satire of marriage, and The Bell Jar, her harrowing account of mental illness, Plath was able to resonate with a generation of Feminine Mystique-era feminists.  Like Plath, a Beaver-to-Cleaver era housewife who suffered at the hands of her sexist society, 1960s women began to feel dissatisfied with their roles as wives and mothers.  The prescient poet detected these seismic shifts in the culture.  It is only because Plath dared to express the particular that she was able to glimpse the condition of women everywhere.

So when you write, cherish your one-of-a-kind life and remember the wise words of Ms. Ueland: “The more you wish to describe a Universal, the more minutely and truthfully you must describe a Particular.”