It is not natural to write. We are created to run and hunt and swim and make love but not to sit hunched with a piece of paper and some ink scribbling hieroglyphs. And when we do it, it is an act of rebellion against God himself, who did not design us to do that.
-Carlos Fuentes
One year I joined a group of 20 other writers for a weekend gathering. A nerdy bunch, we sat around and discussed such matters as the books we’d recently read, the particulars of our daily schedules, and the eccentric behavior we revert to in order to surmount the dreaded writer’s block. Fascinating stuff. A few nonwriting spouses had come along, and toward the end of the gathering one of them (Thanne Wangerin, wife of National Book Award-winner Walter Wangerin, Jr.) made this comment: “For the first time in my life I realize that Walt’s not the only crazy one!”
Thanne chose her words well: not “Walt’s not crazy,” but rather he’s “not the only crazy one.” Ever since that weekend I have made a study of the craziness of writers, a project simplified by my being a writer. I look in the mirror; I listen to my wife describe my life to other people; I talk to other writers. I also read books about writing, shelves full of books, the existence of which is a telling fact in itself: writers seem irresistibly drawn to writing about the act of writing, as if in tacit acknowledgment that they must somehow defend and explain their aberrant behavior.
All my research points to a common diagnosis. Like Carlos Fuentes, I believe writing to be an unnatural act (how, pray tell, does Fuentes make his living?), possibly a psychotic act, one that should perhaps be made illegal in certain Southern states. Hence in this age of victimization, in which hitherto unrecognized categories of the oppressed daily compete to raise our consciousness, I wish to direct your sympathies to writers, an overlooked minority who are paid (not very well) to exhibit their psychoses in public.
Do I use the word psychotic merely for dramatic effect? Au contraire. I have chosen that word for its clinical accuracy. A psychotic cannot separate a false reality from true reality; this “impaired contact with reality” may express itself in delusion or hallucination or some other altered state experienced only by the psychotic person-in short, a precise description of the very heart of the writing act! We writers make our living by creating a false reality. We alone inhabit that solitary universe, exploring and domesticating it until the time comes for a publisher to entice other people to join us-by which time we’re merrily constructing another false reality.
Most of the time the solitary universe is far more interesting than the mundane reality we live in. Often we get so caught up in the false reality that we lose track of which reality is real, or even which one we want to be real. I remember working on a short story early one morning. For three hours I strained to develop three-dimensional characters and purge all cliches from their dialogue. A raw beginner at fiction, I was getting a terrific headache from the effort. Naturally I used the excuse to stop writing and walk across the street to a coffee shop. (The combination of caffeine and not-writing, I have learned, works wonders for headaches.) Imagine my surprise when I discovered that all the people in the coffee shop were two-dimensional characters who talked in cliches! None of them seemed nearly as interesting to me as the people who populated my story. Forfeiting a free coffee refill, I fled back to the security of the false reality awaiting me (and only me) in my basement office.
It should surprise no one that the life of the writer-such as it is-is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world. This explains why so many books describe the author’s childhood. A writer’s childhood may well have been the occasion of his only firsthand experience. Writers read literary biography, and surround themselves with other writers, deliberately to enforce in themselves the ludicrous notion that a reasonable option for occupying yourself on the planet until your life span plays itself out is sitting in a small room for the duration, in the company of pieces of paper.
-Annie Dillard
Annie Dillard knows the dirty little secret about writers. She understands that those of us who write about life have very little energy left over actually to live. Most of us, in fact, aren’t very well equipped to live-we prefer sitting in small rooms in the company of pieces of paper. Writing is “a way of escape,” says Brian Moore: “It’s a way of not thinking about what I haven’t done with my life.”
From the letters I receive, and from stray comments I pick up at parties and book-signings, I gather that people have a glamorized image of a writer’s life. These people have never sat and watched a writer staring at a thesaurus for 15 minutes in search of one word. Philip Roth, in Zuckerman Bound, gave a perfect description of my daily routine. “I turn sen-tences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.” You got it, Roth.
Oh, there are exceptions, of course-Hemingway fighting the bulls and George Plimpton fighting the Detroit Lions-but in general, very little happens to a writer. Now do you understand why we put so much emphasis on artificial reality? Our actual reality is insufferably dull. A Federal Express delivery is far and away the most dramatic event in my day.
The psychosis involved in writing, in fact, spins off from this collision of realities. Any freshman-level writing course will teach you that good writing must incorporate two elements. First, it includes materiality. “Use image-bearing words!” cries the professor to her slumberous students. “Make the reader see, smell, taste, touch, hear. Don’t tell me the moon was shining; show me the glint of moonlight on crystal!”
Second, good writing includes a narrative thread, usually woven in with time cues. Once upon a time the classic myths begin; In the beginning opens the Bible. These time cues build in suspense and pull the reader along. Because we want to find out what happens next, we turn the page.
The very act of writing, however, jumbles both these elements. We work in dull offices, void of materiality. Windowless concrete-block cells work best; anything more might distract. From this deprived reality we weave the rainbow of our artificial reality. But our madness doesn’t stop there. Living ina time warp, we concoct narrative sequences. A dialogue that actors recite in ten minutes onstage may take a playwright ten days to polish. Paradoxically, then, we fabricate the semblance of time and materiality while disconnected from them both. Alas, writing is perilously counterintuitive.
When a person writes about religious faith, new complications arise. The two realities strive mightily against each other, for writing requires an obsessive self-centeredness that utterly confutes the sublime self-surrender a pilgrim seeks. The act of writing interfe res with pure mysticism just as in physics the act of observing interferes with subatomic activity. Ever try writing a prayer to God without wondering how it will sound to potential readers? Augustine of Hippo wrote a personal journal, addressed to God, that became a manual for the church for a thousand years. I can’t help wondering how often he let future readers influence the editing process.
We writers who inhabit our solitary universes, like monks in caves, cannot avoid sneaking a thought or two about the visitors outside. What will they see when we invite them in? And do we decorate our caves with them in mind?
Dr. Johnson needed a purring cat, orange peel and plenty of tea. … Zola pulled the blinds at midday-wrote best in artificial light. … Proust constructed a soundproof room. … Schiller kept apples rotting in his desk. … Descartes worked in bed; Immanuel Kant was quite disturbed when some trees grew up and hid the tower which he used as a mental focus while writing Critique of Pure Reason, so the authorities cut down the trees.
-T. Sharper Knowlson
Writers cope with psychosis by becoming eccentrics. We develop odd, unnatural habits to help ourselves deal with this odd, unnatural act of writing. Many writers smoke, drink coffee all day, or become alcoholics; perhaps in an attempt to reconnect to the world of materiality, our hands instinctively want to grasp some object. “I drank coffee in titrated doses,” writes Annie Dillard about her writing routine. “It was a tricky business, requiring the finely tuned judgment of a skilled anesthesiologist. There was a tiny range within which coffee was effective, short of which it was useless, and beyond which, fatal.”
Every writer refines time-wasting techniques in order to delay the writing process. The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein reveals one of her favorites: “I turn the typewriter on and immediately realize I must get up and change bathrobes. The one I’m wearing is far too itchy. … Obviously I have to spend 30 minutes looking for my moley Dartmouth sweatshirt, the really comfortable one, the only one I can write in.”
When I lived in Chicago I would set out on a “short stroll just around the block” that would turn into a two-hour urban adventure. I would write in coffee shops suffused with the sounds of conversation and the smells and sights of humanity in hopes this would help me reconnect to the real world. This rarely worked, because of all the distractions. I would return to my basement office and light a fire in the fireplace.
I had paid an exorbitant amount of money to install this fireplace in my basement. It produced a nice smell and gave something for my body to do every half-hour when the logs needed poking.
Now that I live in Colorado, I study weather patterns on the mountains, jump up to identify every new bird on the birdfeeder, change the water in the birdbath, and take two-hour “short strolls” on the hills behind our home-anything to avoid writing. (I have just interrupted this paragraph to watch two innings of a meaningless Atlanta Braves baseball game).
Flannery O’Connor used to say that she spent three hours a day working and the rest of the day getting over it. We desperately seek ways to bring together our real and artificial worlds, but in the end we must simply give up the effort, withdraw from the external world, and climb inside the hermetically sealed spaceship that is our article, poem, novel, or essay. We live on its artificial oxygen until we can tolerate it no longer, then we emerge gasping and choking to find that the real world has gone on without us.
After a week of intense writing, I feel a need for “social re-entry”: on Friday I go out to dinner with my wife and another couple and find that I have lost the knack of sliding casually in and out of conversation. Every time I open my mouth I seem to be interrupting. I sit dumb, dazed, staring at all the people who know what to do and say in this strange world out here-a world where people speak on their own without my having to write their dialogue. (Usually by Sunday I have recovered, just in time to return to my artificial reality.)
Brain scans reveal that aloneness is central to the creative impulse; sensory deprivation fosters the synaptic loops in the inner brain that lead to creativity. And yet out of that aloneness grows the psychosis. Writers present themselves as ornery characters who don’t like to be disturbed, but most writers I know work with one ear cocked toward the phone and go through the mail within an hour of its arrival. Our hearts desire to connect to people out there even as our heads remind us that the more we do so the less we write: in the cure lies the disease.
The movie Shadowlands showed C.S. Lewis tutoring a wild young student whose father had told him, “We read to know we’re not alone.” From my writer’s perspective I edit that to “We write in desperate hope that we’re not alone.”
(Continued in next article)
Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine
September/October 1996, Page 3
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