It's OK Not to Write

It's probably a bad sign, but instead of writing, I keep reading about writing. I have many rationalizations: I'm immersed in life, distracted by challenges, accumulating experiences, brewing ideas. Meanwhile, the people I know who are successful writers (which sounds like an oxymoron) are diligently writing. A few are enviably gifted souls who seem to have muses hovering faithfully near: poems come to them in the night, creative ideas appear out of nowhere, inspiration takes the form of story. But mostly they're just writing, and rewriting, and working a lot harder than I do. I've turned into a slacker, I'm afraid. Here on my desk I have a pile of papers I once referred to as the book I was working on.

For more than a year I was engaged in it passionately, even painfully at times. It was going to be about what it means to live here in this Gaviota place: a pastiche (which sounds better than hodgepodge) of memoir pieces, anecdotes, stories of people I've known or interviewed. It was going to be called Transition Zone, a title I still like.

A kind-hearted friend agreed to read it. He is primarily a poet but has also published novels and essays. The recipient of many awards and great acclaim, he has lived a remarkable life, and he's garnered a great deal of wisdom that he gently and generously shares but always with modesty, his own flaws and vulnerability in evidence too. He's a busy man...yes, writing and rewriting and working way harder than I do...and it was an honor and a compliment when he volunteered to take the time to comment on my draft. He spent a lot of time with it, too, meticulously adding his thoughts and suggestions in beautiful penmanship throughout, often very encouraging (except for the one piece he urged me to file in the trash and not to worry because we all write a few of those) and returning the stack of pages to me encircled within a rubber band. His basic instructions: keep writing! He estimated that I was more than halfway done. But not done.

In the meantime, I'd lost interest. The whole thing, when I revisited it, seemed embarrassingly amateurish and confused about its own identity. Was this personal memoir? Some attempt at journalism? Anthropology, perhaps? It had characteristics of each, but lacked the depth to be any of them. It seemed thin and insubstantial. It needed to go deeper, explore some real ideas.

And yet, many of my trusted friend's suggestions involved not adding, but eliminating words. Find the story, say it well, but say it spare --less is more, that sort of thing. It brought to mind this passage from a letter Mark Twain wrote to an aspiring writer named D.W. Bowser back in 1880: "...don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them - then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice."

I saw clearly that I have an adjective habit, something I've long suspected, and I began to pluck those frowsy crowded flowers from my garden with surprising abandon. I had been reading a lot of poetry, a form characterized by its sparsity and lightness...the right words in the right order, nothing more. And the more poetry I read--if it was good poetry and not esoteric--the more my own prose seemed dense and cluttered. I may have been fond of the phrases I'd crafted, but I could see that too many of them were adjective-heavy descriptions and reiterations. They needed to go so the light could shine through. But I am not a poet, and while this exercise in lightening up certainly heightened my respect for those who can write poetry, it was a little like botching up a haircut, where you keep trimming to even it out and it's getting shorter and shorter and before you know it, it isn't a style so much as a mess. I was practically nicking the scalp. I discarded words, crossed out passages, and hoped not to lose the meaning in the process.

But what was the meaning? Ah, there's the rub! What was I trying to say? What was essential? What was the essence? And what did I want to do with this thing if I finished? If I pursued publication someday, what would be the pitch, the platform, the angle, the hook, the packaging, the market, the genre? But wasn't it even sort of crass and premature to be pondering publication? Wouldn't a true writer focus purely on the process?

So now on my there sat desk a streamlined pile of pages, the tentative framework for a shed that might not even stand and whose purpose was unclear. The fervor with which I had initially taken this on had somehow dissipated. Rather than being sparked by inspiration, I was paralyzed by a concern about whether the writing was any good. Don't get me wrong: it wasn't my friend's fault. He was absolutely right about everything. The problem was that I honestly hadn't worked hard enough yet, and maybe I was too lazy to do so.

In the meantime, I'd been reading other books...memoir by the likes of Annie Dillard, for example...foolishly comparing myself to geniuses, and judging myself mediocre. What's the point of doing something if it's already been done so much better by others?My friend offered up additional advice in the form of these lines from the poem Berryman, by W.S. Merwin:

I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't
you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write

(Well, I thought, maybe that's easy for Merwin to say. Certainly the man is sure by now.)

But it seems to be an axiom. Here's another variation of this advice from Rilke in his Letters to A Young Poet::

“You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you - no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple ‘I must,’ then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your while life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse."

So I started asking myself, not if my writing is good, but, "Must I write?"

I believe I must. Sort of. Not that I am arranging everything to accommodate this impulse, but life certainly feels deficient and out-of-kilter if regular writing is not a part of it. On the other hand, there are these periods, these lulls (like now) when I need to set it down and walk away unfettered by the compulsion. Some of these times are barren stretches when I honestly have nothing at all to say, when I'm just weary and depressed, or when it is taking all my energy and focus just to navigate through a crisis at hand.

But there are also times when I am a blissful idiot who simply wants to enjoy the day. During the depressed or overwhelmed times, I'm constantly disappointed in myself for not writing, maybe because I believe there might be some redemption or discovery in it--and that sense of disappointment only adds to my depression and sense of inadequacy. But during the blissful idiot times, I forgive myself. I tell myself it's perfectly okay not to write. Heck, most people don't. Who even cares? It's not as though I am depriving the world of some breakthrough insight or breathtaking work of genius. I should just have a nice day. It's all ephemeral anyway.

And that, perhaps, is the biggest reason to write: To defy the ephemeral nature of things. To hold still a moment in time and place. To document the wonder and the mystery. To keep the people we have loved alive on a page. To transcend a life span and touch another soul somewhere in time. To record and try to work through the anxieties and miseries of a privileged citizen of 21st century earth whose luxurious problems might nonetheless contain some universal humanness. To sing or weep aloud. To connect to you, whoever you are. To prove my own existence to myself.

More questions arise: What form should this writing take? What will I "do" with it? What am I capable of creating? Can I sustain an effort? Are all arts this way, in that the more you know the less secure you feel? Am I a writer when I am not writing? Am I a writer at all?

Now I was in danger of over-thinking it.

Another quote came to mind, this one from Pico Iyer:"The less conscious one is of being 'a writer,' the better the writing. And though reading is the best school of writing, school is the worst place for reading. Writing should ... be as spontaneous and urgent as a letter to a lover, or a message to a friend who has just lost a parent ... and writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger."

That's when it dawned on me. My most spontaneous writing, the writing that most resembles an intimate letter to a stranger, is very often this blog. I don't keep track of numbers (I'm quite certain my clout is nonexistent), I'm not using this to sell books (I guess because I haven't finished any lately), and with few exceptions (my loyal core) I have no idea who reads this. I've had the Zacate Canyon website up for more than a decade, and when I folded it into this blog, Still Amazed, in 2007, I wrote, "So this is a place to share stories, memories, and thoughts on writing, teaching, and life, a place to discover the little sparks that somehow connect us."

I think I've been true to that intent. I've been told that blogging is a waste of time, (spoken in the same tone one would use to dispense with Facebook, as if they are even remotely the same) but I think it is, to use Iyer's phrase, the "oddest of anomalies"...each post a message in a bottle or an image projected to the sky...and whether read or seen by anyone, at the time of dispatch, urgent and essential.

Saturday's poem? It has to be this one, by Ron Padgett, the same poet who wrote the one about hugging that I posted last week:

Advice to Young Writers

One of the things I've repeated to writing
students is that they should write when they don't
feel like writing, just sit down and start,
and when it doesn't go very well, to press on then,
to get to that one thing you'd otherwise
never find. What I forgot to mention was
that this is just a writing technique, that
you could also be out mowing the lawn, where,
if you bring your mind to it, you'll also eventually
come to something unexpected ("The robin he
hunts and pecks"), or watching the "Farm News"
on which a large man is referring to the "Greater
Massachussetts area." It's alright, students, not
to write. Do whatever you want. As long as you find
that unexpected something, or even if you don't.