Posts Tagged ‘May Sarton’
The myths of our lives
I have said elsewhere that we have to make myths of our lives, the point being that if we do, then every grief or inexplicable seizure by weather, woe, or work can—if we discipline ourselves and think hard enough—be turned into account, be made to yield further insight into what it is to be alive, to be a human being, what the hazards are of a fairly usual, everyday kind. We go up to Heaven and down to Hell a dozen times a day—at least I do. And the discipline of work provides an exercise bar, so that the wild, irrational motions of the soul become formal and creative. It literally keeps one from falling on one’s face.
That is one way to keep alive in self-made solitary confinement. I have found it useful also these past days to say to myself, “What if I were not alone? What if I had ten children to get off to school every morning and a massive wash to do before they got home? What if two of them were in bed with flu, cross and at a loose end?” That is enough to send me back to solitude as if it were—as it truly is—a fabulous gift from the gods.
The head has a body
As Blaise Pascal notes, a man is a thinking reed, the most fragile creature in all of nature, and an author is something even stranger: a reed that spends much of its time writing about the actions of other, imaginary reeds. We tend to think of writers as intellectual beings, but an author’s eyes and brain are inextricably tethered to the body, which often has a surprising degree of influence on the work itself. Writing is an intensely physical activity, like playing chess, and I burn a lot of calories in the process: my weight often drops during a first draft, then goes up again in the rewrite, which is when the manuscript itself tends to slim down. (Stephen King says that you should cut ten percent from any first draft, and I sometimes wonder if the missing material just ends up assimilated into the writer’s gut.) These days, the physical effects are even more striking. With a baby in the house, I’ve been getting up earlier than usual, and my writing process is more intermittent but very intense—when Beatrix goes down for a nap, I don’t know if I’ll have twenty minutes or two hours, so I tend to write with one eye constantly on the clock. As a result, I haven’t been this thin since college.
It’s been known for a long time, of course, that brain work is a very real thing. The brain consumes about twenty percent of the body’s energy at any given time, and that’s independent of any actual thinking: it’s more or less the same whether you’re writing War and Peace, killing time on Reddit, or, as is the case for most writers, alternating between the two. But writing isn’t just about the brain alone. Most of the sympathetic nervous system gets into the action as well, since you’re either sweating over a plot problem, caught up in your character’s struggles, or beating yourself up over an intractable page. (This doesn’t even account for the larger stresses of a writer’s uncertain existence, the endless worries over sales, reviews, and editorial notes that serve as a kind of perpetual drumbeat to the melody of the writing life.) It’s something like sitting down for a game of chess that lasts for forty years, and it takes a toll on the body as much as the mind. As the writer May Sarton has memorably observed: “Writing a novel is like taking an examination on which your whole future depends.” And we all know how exhausting an exam can be.
There are more immediate physical issues as well. I’ve spoken at length about my own back problems, which arose soon after I wrote eight hundred pages of an epic manuscript while seated on a couch in my old apartment. They’ve never gone away entirely, but these days, they’ve settled into a chronic but manageable undertone, and I’d imagine that there are few authors who don’t suffer to some extent from back trouble. Keeping the body in line is one of the unstated but crucial aspects of the writer’s routine: it’s why alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine abuse is so endemic among novelists, and why a good diet is so important. Weight gain, interestingly, doesn’t seem to be quite as serious an issue, at least among authors of prose fiction. Based on no scientific evidence whatsoever, I’d guess that novelists tend to lose weight while television writers tend to gain it, which only reflects the difference between a career for which the term “starving artist” was more or less coined and one in which you at least get a free lunch every day. And our heaviest writers, like George R.R. Martin, are often ones who started in one world and crossed over into the other.
In short, when writers describe themselves as athletes, it isn’t entirely a fantasy. In his unforgettable essay “The Last Draft of The Deer Park,” Norman Mailer writes:
When it was a matter of strength I had as much as the next man. In those days I would spend time reminding myself that I had been a bit of an athlete (house football at Harvard, years of skiing), that I had not quit in combat, and once when a gang broke up a party in my loft, I had taken two cracks in the head with a hammer and had still been able to fight…
Yet Mailer, too, suffered from fatigue, and he found himself depending equally on marijuana and Benzedrine for one bad period. (Benzedrine seems to have fallen out of fashion, but it was the drug of choice for writers from Jack Kerouac to Ayn Rand.) Having the kind of career in which you can publish a novel a year for four decades is as much an endurance test of the body as of the spirit, and drugs and alcohol have the same debilitating effect over the long term as they would for any profession in which physical strength is required. The solution, boringly enough, is to treat the body as you would any other tool, and to keep it fueled with diet and exercise as much as you nourish your brain with books and ideas. Because while imagination alone can make a novelist, it’s the body and mind, working in tandem, that make novels.
What is writing like?
Writing is like a contact sport, like football. Why do kids play football? They can get hurt on any play, can’t they? Yet they can’t wait until Saturday comes around so they can play on the high-school team, or the college team, and get smashed around. Writing is like that. You can get hurt, but you enjoy it.
Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It’s not all inspirational.
Writing a novel is like living next door to a family that has just moved in. At first you just see the people coming and going, in and out of their house. After a while their habits become more familiar, and then one day you go in for coffee.
Writing a novel is like walking from Vladivostok to Madrid on your knees.
—Attributed to William Styron
Writing a novel is like living in a house. You rummage around in the cellar and the attic, and you can afford to screw up a couple of rooms because there are always others that will be better.
Writing a novel is like taking an examination on which your whole future depends.
Writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate open to the left or the right the readers will most certainly go into it.
Writing is like wrestling crocodiles. The better you do it, the easier it looks.
Writing is like being a boxer. If you don’t want to get knocked down, you shouldn’t be in the game.
Writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.
Writing is like diarrhea: it pipes off the things that are in a ferment.
Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for the love of it, then you do it for a few friends, and finally you do it for money.
Alec Nevala-Lee 