But, let's face it, writing is hard. In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott writes about "shitty first drafts"--an excerpt I force nearly every one of my composition classes to read. In one paragraph, she lays out this anecdote: "One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says to himself nicely, 'It's not like you don't have a choice, because you do -- you can either type, or kill yourself.'" And that's what it feels like sometimes. Not all the time, but sometimes.
Every semester I get a new flock of students who, unless they have had me in previous semesters, are burdened by a ridiculous notion that good writing comes from some inner wellspring fantasy land where mythical creatures romp with angels through an English garden. It couldn't be further from the truth. Writing is like a wrestling match proceeding at funeral procession pace, it's both time consuming and arduous. When you write, you have a conversation with a data set just like a mathematician or an archaeologist or a physicist or a biologist and, just like in all these fields, the data set is large and cumbersome. In short, the data set is the world itself. The world and all its people, customs, cultures, continents, and events. The truth is that good writing comes from an honest, genuine look at the data, at the world. And a good writer is a writer who isn't afraid of sitting down and grabbing facets of the world and either coaxing or banging them into some shape that reveals some tidbit or truth greater than the original parts combined.
Another secret that lies at the center of Anne Lamott's "Shitty First Drafts" is that it is difficult for practically everyone. At the risk of copyright infringement, Lamott also gifts us this tidbit:
I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)I've had some students who really object to that passage. Just so we're clear, Lamott is not playing God, she is merely playing the role of writer-comic, trying to make us laugh because, on a surface level, we have a tendency to judge based on religion and because, on a deeper level, it shows to what lengths a mind will go to either avoid or reason with the act of writing. But it sucks, for almost everyone.
An unknown writer quoted in the Rock Valley College Writing Center once said "I don't love writing. I love having written." I like that quote because it hints at the sense of pride one gets for having written. The writing itself is often torture, but the end result is somewhat herculean, even if the writing never goes farther than, say, a tiny blog nestled deep in the inner sanctums of the internets. It's herculean because writing is at the heart of creating meaning. Because we write, we have opened the door to changing, in sometimes small, sometimes big ways, the very world through whose data we have been either frolicking or tripping.
There's one other aspect of writing that can really get a person down--people only show up to celebrate after it's done. No one walked up to J.K. Rowling in the middle of her work on book one, draft one of the Harry Potter series and said, "You know, you are doing really great, I mean, really great. You're probably going to change the way a generation approaches reading." Sure, Rowling might have had encouragement. But there were no hard facts to quench the thirst for an answer to the question Is what I am doing here going to matter to anyone? And, to be honest, good writing isn't always rewarded. Not everyone ends up wealthier than the Queen. Most people don't even get read. Herman Melville died in relative obscurity before someone came along and declared Moby Dick a masterpiece. Same thing happened to Kate Chopin who was quickly glossed over for contemporary canonization even after a modest success with The Awakening. Writing is often lonely. If you permit me just one more example, as I write this, I've appropriated the living room floor of an otherwise empty apartment where I am splayed out, propped up on a meager couch pillow. Writing isn't glamorous and it certainly isn't a social act.
But there is a secret that helps me when I'm stuck in the idea phase for writing--where my brain plays ping pong with ideas, every once in a while spitting out some tender seed that might grow if planted in the right climatic conditions. Even as friends are far away, I write with them around me. Yesterday, when I got the wild hair to jot a few notes about a potential idea, I grabbed the notebook given to me by a good friend when we graduated from Illinois College in 2008. I've recorded several things in it before--bad poetry, reflections on life, a few quotes. When I'm not using the notebook, it lives on a shelf above my desk amongst other notebooks that have special meaning (other gifts from friends, notebooks that have sentimental value, Moleskine notebooks that simultaneously bring the clout of Hemingway and western civilization). I pull the notebooks down based on some unknown calculation that outputs x as a function of my mood where x equals the type of inspiration I will need at any given time. Yesterday, in the middle of a long weekend when I would have much rather been celebrating the end of summer with family or friends, the calculation determined I needed the support of a dear, dear friend.
Zen master Natalie Goldberg says of writing "Have compassion for yourself when you write. There's no failure--just a big field to wander in." Good advice. But I would also add, sometimes, if you imagine it enough, you can take a friend with you in to the field. Thanks to friends who give me notebooks, I often do.
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