WRITING

  
Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect: that is the only way out of the dead end of the Serious Novel which so many ambitious people want to write and no one on earth -- or even on campus -- wants to read.

-- Gore Vidal


The point is that I have determined to be a writer, not a journalist or a scribbler but a writer. This does not as a rule make money; it usually takes it....It is one thing or the other for me, either to settle down to a career of a mediocre journalist or to strive to be something better. The first does not content me and I have decided...to make no compromises...I may or may not spend all my principal. At present there seems to be no alternative to spending a little of it, except dropping my career...or borrowing more money from people who would sell their principal to lend it to me. What I am doing now undoubtedly costs more than it brings in; and it is likely to do so for some time... I am perfectly capable of earning my living, indeed, in a dozen different ways at the present moment. But my intention and desire is for something else and until I have failed at that I wish you would not add to my list of worries.

-- Carl Van Vechten, in a letter to his brother



At the end of Borges's story "The Aleph," the narrator goes to the cellar of a house, where he has the experience of encountering everything in the world. He all at once sees all places from all angles: "I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet....I saw the circulation of my own dark blood." Writer's block derives from the mad ambition to enter that cellar; the fluent writer is content to stay in the close attic of partial expression, to say what is "running through his mind," and to accept that it may not -- cannot -- be wholly true, to risk that it will be misunderstood. I, too, have spent days fruitlessly hanging around the door to that forbidden cellar. I have looked at my revisionist narrative and found it wanting. I have found every other narrative wanting. How can one see all the ants on the planet when one is wearing the blinders of narrative?

-- Janet Malcolm



Then try, like some first human being, to say what you see and experience and love and lose.... Save yourself from general themes and seek those which your own everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and the belief in some sort of beauty -- describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, the objects of your memory.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke


Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex that it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself....The obverse of this freedom, of course, is that your work is so meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except you cares whether you do it well, or ever. You are free to make several thousand close judgment calls a day. Your freedom is a by-product of your days' triviality.... Your manuscript, on which you lavish such care, has no needs or wishes; it knows you not. Nor does anyone need your manuscript; everyone needs shoes more. There are many manuscripts already -- worthy ones, most edifying and moving ones, intelligent and powerful ones. If you believed Paradise Lost to be excellent, would you buy it? Why not shoot yourself, actually, rather than finish one more excellent manuscript on which to gag the world?

-- Annie Dillard