Writers on Writing

Yesterday’s comments reminded me how many litbloggers are writers beyond the blogosphere too. For all of you obliged to come in from a sunny garden or to cut short an enjoyable conversation in order to sit before an iridescent computer screen (and I’m thinking here particularly of bloglily, writing her fantastic thriller, and Kate, who has published another short story recently), here are a few words from the New Zealand poet and writer, Lauris Edmond in a speech she delivered on the award of an Honorary Doctorate:

‘In honouring me you honour all the other women – and some men – who, like me, have not tried to distinguish between the importance of their children, their households, their close relationships, the jumble of their lives, and the books, poems or stories that had to be written – or indeed, the essays that had to be in on time. Extramural study invites you to do this by bringing scholarly investigation to your kitchen table or a porch where you sit while a baby sleeps. The writing life, as I conceive it, does the same thing. Once I say to myself that life is one thing, art another, I believe I do irreparable damage to both. I have learnt not to try. The consequences are that my working life is cluttered, sometimes confused, marred by postponements and prevarications. I never think I have the life/art balance right, and I don’t suppose I ever will. But this, I have come to think, is the only choice I have. It is within this muddled and amorphous framework – indeed at the heart of it – that I must look for the still centre from which writing comes. Katherine Mansfield, in a wonderful letter as yet unpublished, calls it drawing upon ‘one’s real familiar life – to find the treasure in that.’

The life/art balance? What’s that? Edmond speaks true, to my mind, when she describes their hopeless entanglement that is also the genesis of creativity. I envy people who have managed to compartmentalise; for myself I have never achieved it. Writing to me is pushing the towering piles of paper, the inexplicable objects, the detritus of my son’s school uniform and the cats off the kitchen table in order to clear a space for my laptop. There I sit, a spider in the centre of my web, an eye out for neighbours tramping up the garden path in search of a cup of tea, or the steady stream of schoolboys to the front door who have adopted our house as the ‘rendezvous point’ for their many dubious activities. You might wonder why we put ourselves through all this. George Orwell has some suggestions to make on this score, and is far less compassionate towards writers than Lauris Edmond. Slightly edited, here are his four ‘great motives for writing’:

‘ (1) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend that this is not a motive, and a strong one. […]

(2) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. […]

(3) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for use of posterity.

(4) Political purpose – using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is free from political bias. The opinion that one should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.’

For my own part, reasons 2 and 4 are my most conscious motivators. I’m sure I’m in love with the sound of my own voice as much as the next person, but I was brought up to believe it very rude to ‘push myself forward’ so that particular motive is very disguised in me (although doubtless present.) These two quotations come from the anthology I mentioned yesterday, and represent the passages of it that I most enjoyed. I was surprised, though, to find that not one of the 55 authors quoted mentioned how physical the business of writing is. Perhaps it’s only me, but I cannot approach a keyboard without feeling the familiar quickening of my pulse at the prospect of tackling the day’s quota. Once started, I oscillate between uncontrollable fidgeting and a kind of hypnotic trance. If the work goes well, I feel nothing, no hunger, no thirst, no sense of myself whatsoever. Except for the moment when that first paragraph is finally wrenched out, I might suddenly notice that I’m boiling hot; windows are opened, pullovers removed. I think through the movement of my fingers; they seem to know much better than my mind how something needs to be said, but they stumble often over the keys in their haste to catch a thought before it fades. Their day is a perpetual series of sprints with long pauses in between. And when it’s over and I start to return to myself, so sensation comes back; stiff legs that I have wrapped round and round each other without noticing, stiff shoulders, from holding my hands in hopeful readiness, stiff back, dull head, and a profound lassitude. Must it really be done all over again tomorrow? But obsession has generally taken over at this point, and it would be more than I could do to walk away from it.