The day is grey and wet and the sky stretches out over the harbour like it has been cast down upon the world. In time I will be walking in the mountains and there I will feel the earth and soft heather beneath my feet, and my lungs will heave with the cold air that only mountain air can be. I have spent the afternoon reading stories from the back issues of The Paris Review and during lunch I read a story from TC Boyle on how a man fakes his own daughter’s death just to skip work. It is a story of self-deception and ignoring the absurdity of living in the everyday.
These are good stories and are difficult to write though they may look easy to those who have never tried to sit down and write a story. It is one of the most frightening things you can do, and each time I anticipate it with a dread that belongs more to hospital waiting rooms and late night ringing of the telephone. It should not be this way, as writers it should be integral to their nature, the thing they know they can do better above all things, for in truth they are not much good at anything else. To play the piano well it is required first and foremost that the student overcomes inertia and sits at the damned thing. The student who resists generally resists the object of the inertia, and henceforth goes through life happy to never think of it again. The one who sits at the piano stool of his own volition is the one who has music in his veins, the one who shall write the sonatas and arias and great concertos that make people sit bolted to their seats, believing that God surely intervenes in the selection of greatness. Why is this not so for writers and the noble craft of writing? Why do so many writers frequently ignore the existential truth that one should be true to oneself and refrain from self distraction? Is it possible that so many are in love with the idea of the thing rather than the thing itself? Many live in a kind of perpetual and doleful twin existence - fleeing from being sat at a desk or staring at a blank screen or sharpening pencils or whatever, while at the same time harbouring vivid fantasies of themselves as a writer, signing copies as queues snake out of bookshop doors and on to the street or delivering keynote speeches at literary prize ceremonies. That sort of nonsense. A writer writes or he stares at blank screens, even if he feels he is writing badly or staring for too long in a sort of mental freeze. He (or she) is aware of a visceral truth in what they are doing, and that the hours spent in badly-lit rooms writing terrible, juvenile prose on a page will one day transform into something of merit, about which someone someday will think, “this is a thing which has truth in it for me.” The great writers, which are no more human than you or I, have the ability to overcome the inertia that threatens to choke the creative process into a floundering listlessness. It exists for those writers too and it grinds on them like it grinds on the mere mortal. Procrastination is perhaps the single greatest evil in the life of a would-be writer. Some are better than others at ignoring it.
The writer should not need writing groups or writing workshops or Masters in Fine Arts to somehow deliver their inner, burgeoning genius to the world. The dual purpose of these devices are primarily to make money and provide moderately successful writers, in the guise of tutors, with something meaningful to do with their lives. If one needs these things then he is doomed from the beginning because the words are being extracted like reluctant teeth. The writer should refrain from self-help manuals and websites and forums and other such distractions, as ultimately they all say the same thing: that you don’t in fact need these things. The circular irony grates. One should also not take wisdom from pithy quotes attributed to famous and exuberantly successful writers like Hemingway or King or Shakespeare. These people have had enormous success in their careers, and though perhaps once they knew what it was like to be on the outside looking in, suffering imposters, their judgement has been clouded by fame and they vomit advice like a doctor dispenses medical prescriptions for hypochondriacs.
I shall now unashamedly jump aboard the ironic bandwagon and, as I am not in a position to advise anyone on how to be a writer – despite my above words - I shall quote you this nugget from John Steinbeck:
“The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.”
Hold fast to the existential truth. Do not distract yourself, nor delude yourself. If it is not to be, put your pen down. If it is, then take it up and try again.
