Why and how and what do we write? This question could (and probably should) be reordered and its verb could equally be changed to paint, sculpt, act, dance … Human beings do these strange things to make their mark, a little stand against the indifferent and inexorable passage of time, and have been doing so, it seems, ever since they could, as has been revealed in distant caves: stencilled hands in Argentina and pictures of pig hunting in Sulawesi. This brings to mind for some reason a discreet headline I spotted years ago in a once reputable newspaper: ‘Carvings twice as old as thought.’ Were they being done instinctively, or was the sub-editor mischievous or sloppy? But the original question was about writing. Does graffiti count? Seen by some as an ugly nuisance, by others as valid self-expression, it can be inane – Kilroy woz ere – or emotionally significant to the inscriber – Jack cartoon heart with an arrow through it Jill – and innocent enough as it competes with similar 2,000-year-old declarations on ancient monuments; the lovers are marking a moment in their own story (or stories if the imagined one takes a new direction). Maybe all writing is about story: the shopping list a snapshot of my diet and tastes at one time; the letter a revelation (or concealment) of how I feel about what’s going on in my life and in the wider world; even the essay exposes thoughts or beliefs that may change the next day. Or maybe it’s even more fundamental than that: the power and promise of the word, the uttering of a certain form of words in the incantations of religion and magic, the straining of a word in select company towards the ineffable. In the beginning was the Word.
But most people are not overly concerned about leaving marks; in any case we are already stored in varying quantities of bits and bytes (and will be until the cloud blows away) and in the minds and possibly hearts of those who have known us until they, too, fade. And yet writing goes on; apparently there’s no stopping it. Some write because they have to let out something that is inside, even if nobody ever reads it, some to prove to themselves that they can do it, others a bit of both.
So far all this has been hypothetical, indemonstrable and general; now it’s time to get personal. I once came up with the notion that the only act that makes sense is the creative act. Now this may seem unnecessarily portentous – or simply pretentious – but it is true for me. I’ve been writing all my life. Well, that’s not quite true; for the first two or three years I probably would have had difficulty grasping a pencil; a little after that the problem would have been remembering which side of the stick the circle had to go for a b or a d. At eleven my first story, a 20-line (it might have been 10 or 15, but in childhood everything is bigger) masterpiece of suspense, was printed (I hesitate to use the word published, since that implies a readership beyond fond parents and grandparents) in the school magazine; at seventeen I inflicted (with the connivance of my English teacher, who incidentally and luckily had already introduced me to William Golding, but more of that later) a short, unutterably bad, philosophical ‘poem’ on the same thankfully limited world. And there it stopped until, having shaken off the immediate worst of know-it-all adolescence and blundered blithely into the bewildering world of adulthood, I felt the return of an undeniable need.
This was assuaged in part by the production of a few stories (all unpublished), various bits of doggerel which even their creator dismissed (even though they’re probably still lurking resentfully in a box somewhere), and a first novel which failed even as a Bildungsroman, being quite static, its protagonist arriving predictably and uneventfully back at square one. This marathon of two-fingered typing was mercifully – and mercilessly in the case of one publishing house – rejected. I don’t know how long it took me to realize that the how – and to some extent – the what of writing would not pop up before me in eureka moments, nor drip like inspiring chrism into my head. There were two missing ingredients: reading and experience. I needed to read a lot to see what others had done and how they had done it, what resonated with me, intrigued me, left me gaping in admiration and wondering if I could ever pull off such a magic trick. I also had to acquire experience, commonplace or extraordinary, as a human being. The reading would come as it did: reviews, following my tastes and instincts, recommendations, serendipity, obsessions, and none of them in any particular order. Experience would come in its own good (or bad) time. Maybe they should go hand in hand. And they have: different experiences, different reading, some repeated, but never quite the same again. I have fallen in love more times than I have read Lord of the Flies (I promised Golding would reappear), and I have always found something new in both sorts of fresh encounter.
But the first time is special, a unique phenomenon that can never quite be repeated; the first reading awakened something in me that I couldn’t name or describe but knew had been there all the time. The book and its island gripped from the start, as had those other islands of coral and treasure and – much later and in a different way – concrete, but the language was quite new: words, all familiar and simple enough, seemed to be working harder, asking the reader to consider them afresh, more radically. There was a new way of seeing: was it the child’s, a Martian’s, or something inflicted by the island itself? Or was it rather the author saying ‘This is the contract: I’ve done my bit, now you do yours’? And so I did, but I wasn’t looking for new things for novelty’s sake, in fact I wasn’t consciously looking for anything. I was just keeping an open mind, and eye, and ear. If something did it (that is, gave me that moment of revelation), then it was a wonderful day. If not, then move on. If in doubt, I gave a writer another chance (or more than one, though rarely). I did this with Iris Murdoch and eventually we got there together with The Sea, The Sea, but I’m not sure I could be bothered now.
Thus I discovered (in roughly mortal order only) Sterne, Bulgakov, Joyce, Malcolm Lowry, James Hanley, J.G. Ballard and Beryl Bainbridge. Theirs were very different voices – their own, and other people’s – and very different genres and styles – and the only things they had in common were that they could manipulate language more or less as precisely as they wanted (nobody’s perfect) and that they believed in [here I’m possibly being naive] what they were doing and could do no other [here I’m probably right].
So where did all this beneficial reading (and there was far, far more – and wider ranging, and in different languages – than has been suggested) lead me? To heroes (a loose term for those discovered and admired) and to the inspiration they have given me, rather than to a desire to emulate. Emulation is dangerously close to imitation, which in turn is a hair’s breadth away from pastiche, no doubt a useful skill in some circumstances, but … If one could manage to absorb the best features of different pieces of remarkable writing and somehow reproduce them, the result would be simply a mishmash, or at best a hybrid with fragile DNA (but then one could argue that the only truly new comes from another planet). No, it was inspiration (or enthusiasm or self-confidence) I got from my reading, inspiration to throw out adverbs, make verbs work harder, eliminate punctuation when the meaning was already clear, experiment, let go …
When I first considered writing about writing my immediate thought was that for me it would be a waste of time, because I only really like committing/creating fiction; writing about stuff, about myself, about my unremarkable ideas, plodding along well-worn pathways, would be as boring for me as it would probably be for the poor unsuspecting reader. And yet it hasn’t been a waste of time; it has clarified my thoughts, and made me realize that even our imaginings, when used in our fictions, have some elements of what we know already, but others may not.
A piece of writing (the French would call it a texte, indiscriminatively) may lead us to surmise, it may suggest, surprise or even baffle. The other stuff (the real McCoy) will leave us agape at the writer’s leaps, the sparking of the synapses. Maybe in the end it’s the how that really counts.
Hi Stephen
There is something fundamentally wrong with the relationship between art and money. I like seeing writers and musicians and the rest make a living at it, but getting hyper rich and weird bothers me. It is as though they sold their souls to Hell. I’ve always worked and I cannot see creating as a job of any sort. I pity people who think that is all it is. Harlan Ellison claimed that. I like Harlan but despite what he thought, he was not always right.
I just cannot see a well written thing being the same thing as a sack of donuts for sale. This is not cover up or rationalizations of a failure. I’ve never tried to make money at it. It has never occurred to me to do that because A.) Too many people are trying to do that; B.) Nearly all the stuff that publishers sell is as valid as a sack of donuts. Now, some very good writers, such as our Diane, have made a success, but I am certain she has had to work at a pay rate below the minimum when all the hours are totaled up. I admire that.
What is supposed to be, will be.
I also admire your essay. Writers write, the dollars are meaningless in that light–simple as that.
Leila
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