THE WRITING LIFE

FEAR AND TREMBLING ON THE ROAD TO MAKE-BELIEVE

By Ann Hoffmann Harris

Yesterday, all day, I wanted to cry. On that sort of day, there is often nothing to be done but go to bed early and hope the mood dissipates overnight. During my college days, having just read Maupassant, I referred to the bringers of these inexplicable dark days as my horlas, a horla being an invisible but skulkingly present tormentor of men. These black moods, here one day, gone the next, do seem to be the work of malevolent creatures with minds and wills of their own, who pay their calls uninvited and without reason. One simply awakens and senses the horla postured like a gargoyle on the headboard, squinting and drooling and sucking hope. Thankfully, my horlas slip back out as quickly as they slip in, unless it's late summer here in Texas, when they simply move in for the heat's duration.

My mood yesterday was not entirely without basis; I was adrift in my writing. There are two essays I've been struggling with for too long; my journal, which I mean to tend with Thoreauvian faithfulness but instead tend poorly if at all; and the sketchy outline and first pages of a novel that has long beckoned me away from the shackles of fact toward the vaporous promise of a fiction-writer's freedom. The prospect of that make-believe freedom probably summoned yesterday’s horla.

Often, after I lay down my book at night, flip on the alarm, and shut off the light, I turn my thoughts to plotting my story, to conjuring lives and events far removed from the too-familiar landscape of my own life, but no matter how long I toss and turn, revving my brain's imaginative engine, sleep comes before my plot does. I used to fear I had little imagination, but now I think the universe of fictional possibilities
overwhelms my nonfictional mind. How am I ever to light on one specific sequence of events?

Some of the writing guides suggest as aids to plotting that one browse newspaper stories or old classics, draw on autobiographical material, fictionalize a historical event, and so forth. These are sound suggestions, but I ought to be able to harness any imagination I do possess to invent an original story. Appropriating other people’s ideas or real-life events has always struck me as cheating, although I'm slowly coming to recognize that it is not. Most great artists have been borrowers and gleaners. Goethe defined genius as “the faculty of seizing and turning to account everything that strikes us,” and he said that he would not have got far himself “if this art of appropriation were considered as derogatory to genius.”

So I'm reconciling myself to borrowing and gleaning, but I must also exercise this puny imagination of mine until it grows big and strong. I sometimes think, and I hesitate to suggest anything unsalutary about reading, that I have read too much all my life and thereby stunted my own creativity. Instead of lying around in that barn loft or sunny attic window seat dreaming, thinking, inventing, I always had a book in my hand. I was always engrossed in someone else’s story, never creating my own. My husband sometimes sits silently in a chair, not watching television nor reading a book. I usually ask if he's all right. What he is invariably doing is thinking, thinking about something specific. I might have been better off myself laying down my book on occasion and just thinking, allowing my imagination to wander on a whim or to run its purposeful paces. Most of the time I read worthy books, but there is a difference between absorbing and creating—between taking ideas in and bringing them forth.

On the subject of reading, which he spent an enormous amount of time doing, Emerson claimed to value
expedience above all. His words on the topic rankled when I first read them, but I recognized the truth there, although I wouldn't want to carry it too far: “Learn to tell from the beginnings of the chapters and from glimpses of the sentences whether you need to read them entirely through. So turn page after page, keeping the writer's thoughts before you, but not tarrying with him, until he has brought you the thing you are in search of. But recollect, you only read to start your own team.” His biographer Robert D. Richardson adds: “The last point is crucial. Reading was not an end in itself for Emerson. He read like a hawk sliding on the wind over a marsh, alert for what he could use. He read to nourish and to stimulate his own thought, and he carried this so far as to recommend that one stop reading if one found himself becoming engrossed.” In a letter, Emerson wrote, “Reading long at one time anything, no matter how it fascinates, destroys thought.”

A part of me hates and rejects those words, but another part recognizes in them my own problem with creativity. And to make matters worse, I somehow acquired the ludicrous notion that it’s better to finish a book, to plug on to the bitter end, even if I’m not enjoying or learning from it. I have always kept lists of the books I read year to year, and I suppose it bothered me to waste the chance to add another title to my list. Pathetic. I've never even compared lists with anyone whose list I wished to beat. I am trying to heal myself of this neurosis.

I expected the generation of fictional ideas to be easier than it is, as though a simple turn of the key in the ignition would set my imagination humming, and conversations and characters and plot twists and turns would quickly hop on board. Perhaps I should dedicate vital daylight hours to the task of sketching out my story rather than that twilight time between drowsiness and sleep. Perhaps I should work harder at it, sit upright at my desk, thinking, then thinking some more.

In Anne Lamott's book Bird by Bird, she quotes E. L. Doctorow as saying, “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” I loved that image when I read it, but at the same time it made me uneasy. Perhaps I misinterpret Doctorow. Essays I have begun under conditions of limited visibility have taken too many undisciplined detours, requiring hours of painful editing and leaving me confused or utterly lost. I may eventually finish them, but the process of writing and polishing that way is most inefficient even by my own lax standards. By contrast, my husband spends as much time thinking his stories through as he spends writing them. He researches and outlines, producing a succession of index cards that highlight each major scene. Only then does he begin the task of writing, which not only flows quickly and smoothly, but provides pleasurable sessions at the computer, a feeling of achievement when the day’s writing is done, and a sure sense of where to pick up tomorrow. He has achieved dominion over his work, and I envy that. I would prefer the role of careful craftsman to that of unfocused flailer.

It’s time for me to nail down my own methods. I’ve become fascinated by a time and place in history, and by the individuals who made that setting so rich. I’d like to place an original story against this backdrop. To do so I’ll have to borrow and glean and bring forth. Today I came home from the library with a stack of reference books. The challenge for me, Mr. Emerson, lies in selecting the books and the sections within that will provide the material I need, and not overwhelming myself with a commitment to too many
pages. Tomorrow I’ll cull my materials, and we’ll see if I can make a go of it, if I too can read like a hawk gliding over the marsh alert for only those tidbits I can use. A hawk whose flight path is strewn with unread pages.

It hardly needs to be said that basic to these fears about methods and my imagination, about having read my way into a creative coma, lies the biggest obstacle to accomplishment: self-doubt, that continuous, nagging negation of the truth that suggests one is not gifted or talented enough to create even a minor work of art. A former technical writer, I spent too many years writing conversion appendices, payroll-processing charts, and digestible chunks of content-specific help-text. It’s as though I’ve walked too long in the wrong-sized orthopedic shoes and now wish to star in the ballet. I recognize the source of these nasty fears and doubts: that lying nonentity Buddhists call the monkey mind, another gutter-dwelling horla who inhabits one’s head and delights in snuffing out hope, in dashing all lively effort against the rocks. But sometimes this monkey gets to me.

At times I feel I’ve gained some modicum of wisdom, some degree of dominion in my forty-five years, but at other times I’m an inarticulate know-nothing doomed to a wistful mediocrity. Do all writers wrestle this demon? I feel so poorly educated despite years of private school, a college degree, and a lifetime of reading. My education was so inchoate though, formless dribs and drabs of this dish and that from the university’s liberal-arts smorgasbord, enough to have made me a decent Trivial Pursuit player but not enough to have given me the powers of psychological analysis, historical perspective, and sound, synthesizing judgment a truly educated person would possess. This sense of inadequacy is compounded by my knowing so little about anything real, from the soil and its elements to the workings of the simplest machines.

A product of these detached modern times, I am an accumulation of abstractions and emotions. The
brilliant, classically educated individuals featured in these library books only confirm my worst fears. I console myself with the knowledge that I am not, in fact, simple; I can take my time writing this book, educate myself along the way, rewrite like mad, and, above all, have faith in that divine intervention I can never anticipate or explain. It’s time to put to rout the erroneous idea that whatever I sit down at the
keyboard to create should exist first as a coherent whole within my head, as though the creation should precede the effort of creating so that the effort itself becomes a mere hiccup or, more analogously, only the final painful push to deliver that fully-formed, lyrically-worded baby.

I imagine these crazy but persuasive feelings of uncertainty and doubt keep many from ever beginning to write. It’s a shame because the greatest artistic discovery of all—a discovery we repeatedly forget—is that the writing itself generates the ideas, creates its own inspiration, leads in ways we could never map out in advance, providing words and phrases unknown to us moments before. Reading, researching, and imagining one’s route are certainly essentials to varying degrees, but it is in the act of writing itself that the magic begins. As a more practiced dweller in this magical realm, one with more experience lighting up the dark, Mr. Doctorow may very well be right. When it comes right down to it, the writing life is all about tuning out the monkey clamor and clinging tight to knowledge gained during all the best moments. We prepare the best we can for the wordy trips we plan to take. Then we slide behind the wheel and head off into a dark night, streaming bright words and starry sentences we never packed. And how the horlas hate those high-beam lights. 

 

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