Write, Right?
For the last month and a half, I’ve written two pieces a week — on some matters irrelevant and some matters more pressing. If you believe, as I do, that anything worth writing has already been written (a bad place to be as a writer, but I do feel it), this is hard.
I have especially found Twitter activity unsustainable: a vast chunk of wisdom is refraining from saying something, yet Twitter promotes the opposite, and subsequently wisdom is thrown out of there like a hussy. Even if you cannot think of anything to say, Twitter gives you the luxury of ditto-ing someone else’s logorrhea as a retweet and this feels good: eighty percent of the pleasure of original thought, twenty percent of the work. Sometimes I worry that “thoughtful” writing is not much better, though. It seems like similar foolishness, but drawn out and disguised: it is frequently better to say nothing in a world where too much is said, and saying the excess well does not excuse it for being excessive. So much of what we read and watch is masturbatory in its non-productivity and reiteration. A recitation of economic movements, a rehashing of events, a regurgitation of pleasure. The words of the Teacher scourge me each time I consider adding to the morass: “Vanity of vanities!”
But as Lent began and I gave up a few things, I decided to commit to a few things, too, and this was one of them, to see if frequent writing was something that was good for anyone, or at least me. Now that Lent is over, I can resume two of my favorite habits: drinking and thinking about writing. Sometimes, at the same time.
Would that I could say I emerge from this experiment more firm in the conviction that writing is something essential, that I find joy in it. I can’t say I do. I find joy in having written. But the reality is I envy those folks who say the doing of something makes them happy: coding makes me happy, surfing makes me happy, running a vineyard makes me happy. What bliss it would be, to turn happiness on like a spigot. I wonder if they are lying, but then they go and they put far more time into the activity than I care to do for writing, and the proof is in the putting. I cannot even write enthusiastically about writing; I am writing this under the duress of a deadline.
If I were tasked with encouraging young writers, I would rather point to a blank piece of paper and a full pen and shrug silently, to see if they feel up to the challenge. If they get pleasure from inflicting their opinions on others — a common disease — then perhaps they might be.
But maybe they possess a rarer and less easily–itched urge. I think they will sit down anyway, and write out a few sentences, then (displeased) toss it aside. They will try again in a few days, and toss that aside, too. They will continue to do it, perhaps through their life, until they find the one real joy of writing, so pure that it does not require a single other human being to share it with you. They will put down a sentence, or paragraph, or chapter, or book, which pins to the earth an emotion they themselves have felt, and just as they felt it. It will feel like pulling gold from the ether, and it is a soft glow that does not dull or grow with age, but is as it was. "The glow of one warm thought is to me worth more than money,” Thomas Jefferson once wrote a young man, and I think in fashioning that sentence he himself sat back, sipped the good Madera and felt he had birthed something as worthwhile as some his other edifices.
And so I can see why writers are sometimes so foolish as to write for pay. It is not the money, but the forced wrestling with themselves — that they might win from time to time a single, lambent idea.
The Letter Writer, Rita Banerji (Creative Commons, Attribution 2.0 Generic)
