Why Write?
“God can get tiny, if we’re not careful.” That’s how Gregory Boyle begins his book Tattoos on the Heart. First lines are a big deal. First lines get readers to read second lines, and second lines get readers to read third lines. And third lines give you a shot, if you’re a writer, to lasso someone’s heart. Or if not their heart, at least maybe their curiosity.
Greg Boyle had me at hello.
In William Zinsser’s writing Bible, On Writing Well--the book all writing teachers teach by, the book on every writer’s shelf--he tells us all kinds of important truths that writers need to know. Things like “most adverbs are unnecessary” and “prune out little qualifiers” and “the most important sentence in any article is the first one.” These are really, really good ideas. But they’re only sort of true. For instance, the first sentence of On Writing Well reads, “About ten years ago, a school in Connecticut held “a day devoted to the arts,” and I was asked if I could come and talk about writing as a vocation.” Zinsser’s book has sold more than a million-and-a-half copies and it’s still going strong. Every writer should set their compass by it. But you see why I began this piece with Boyle.
Writing doesn’t respond well to must haves and should nevers. It’s eerily similar to beautiful basketball in that way. Rules give order. They provide framework. They give magic a pasture to romp and play in. But they’re not immovable fences with “do not cross” signs on their posts. They’re more like strong suggestions that you bump into on your way to finding treasures.
And treasure is what everyone is after, though it’s very rarely hidden where you might think. You won’t find it looking toward the clouds, that’s for sure. Meteor showers of inspiration are a myth. If you’re after real stuff, you have to dig it up. With a spade and then your fingernails and, if necessary, your teeth. Writing is a grueling grind. A beautiful, put your butt in the chair every day kind of grind that sometimes gives you roses for your effort and sometimes a giant pile of trash. Stephen King says this about the process:
“There’s a muse. {Traditionally, muses were women, but mine’s a guy. I guess we’ll just have to live with that.}, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you. Do you think this is fair? I think it’s fair. He may not be much to look at, that muse-guy, and he may not be much of a conversationalist (what I get out of mine is mostly surly grunts, unless he’s on duty), but he’s got the inspiration. It’s right that you should do all the work and burn all the midnight oil, because the guy with the cigar and the little wings has got a big bag of magic. There’s stuff in there that can change your life.”
In other words, if it’s something you want to get good at, you better be ok with spells of running in place. By yourself. In the dark. With a musty stench in the air. And you better pray for patience because sometimes even when you find him, that little “muse-guy in your basement”, you have to stick your elbow in his ribs to wake him up.
So why go to all the trouble?
When someone asks Anne Lamott why she writes, she quotes the poet John Ashbery by answering, “because I want to.” And then she adds in an ode to Flannery O’Conner, also “because I’m good at it.” I believe her on both counts. But I side up more with Joan Didion on this one—I write because I want to figure out what I think. And I’m almost always surprised when I start out one direction and end up somewhere different than where I expected to go.
That’s the tootsie pop effect. What you find when you finally get to the middle is a prize that won’t let you not come back. Like that long, clean drive with a nice little fade at the end that makes you show up tomorrow for another eighteen. Or that one forehand you can still feel in your arm as you carry your racket to the car. When you access the vein and the words just work, time completely disappears. It’s how I imagine my granddaughter feels when her dad tosses her up in the air. “Again!” she squeals, “again!” It’s a lot and a little like childbirth— the high you get is so fantastic you forget how hard it was to get it out.
I always wanted to be a writer. Being an author was an afterthought. Though the two words are typically used interchangeably, they aren’t necessarily the same. You can be one without being the other. People do it all the time. As of today, I am an author. But I want to stay a writer. I love the “ever onward almost”, as Sarah Lewis says, this game of duck duck goose with the mastery of words. A book is nice. It has weight, you can feel it. And maybe it even matters if it makes people think or feel. But the process is the prize.
P.S. 12 Truths I learned from Life and Writing - Anne Lamott