The Writing LifeRichard Ostrofsky(February, 2006)

“When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you discovered the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year. . . The writing has changed, in your hands, and in a twinkling, from an expression of your notions to an epistemological tool.” So begins Annie Dillard’s little book, The Writing Life. I have heard this thought before, and even said it myself on occasion, but Dillard puts it excellently; and she takes it as the entry point to a fine discussion of the strange passion that keeps otherwise sane people slaving away at the writer’s craft for the time it takes – two to ten years on average, Dillard says – to write a serious book. (And that’s with a word processor, one might add. Imagine the sheer toil of writing War and Peace with a pen.)

E.M. Forster once said: “How do I know what I think until I see what I say.” A few years ago, a man I was working with remarked to me that “Writing is thinking.” From the more distant past I remember one of my professors saying that whenever he wanted to learn something, he wrote a book about it. At the time I thought he was bragging, but am certain now that he was really dropping a clue to his students about the facts of intellectual life.

For although one ordinarily thinks of writing as the communication of an idea, or an argument, or a story, by one who knows it to others who don’t, the most significant writing is done to learn something that one does not know, or has only a dim idea of, until the material is collected and organized and set down on paper. The fact is that the writer is always his own most attentive reader, and never really knows what he is talking about until he surrenders the piece to the printer and his public. If then – since much writing gets finished only in the sense that its author has no more time or patience to spend on it.

Throughout her book, Dillard talks about the frustration and the tedium of writing. And then she says, “No one would say that a day spent writing is

a good day. But a life spent writing is a good life.” An ability to embrace this paradox is probably the central qualification for a would-be writer. No one enjoys the actual process of writing, which is largely a matter of staring at the screen for hours or days or weeks on end, waiting for the piece to get off the ground and begin to write itself. What writers do enjoy is the sense of satisfaction when something good comes out – much like a hen who has laid her egg, and now has it before her to contemplate and sit upon. We also get addicted to the suspense of writing, since an author knows less than his reader what is going to happen next – whether his f***ing book will ever get finished, much less published. And finally, we crave the insight or knowledge that the writing process brings us – probably because we confuse knowledge with power, as other people confuse money in the bank with power, or subordinates reporting to them, or guns on their hips for that matter. What is power really, when you come right down to it?

Power is agency: the capability to think of something, intend and plan it, and make it so. And the remarkable fact is that writing is never an act of conscious agency, in the way that making a sandwich, or cleaning out the cat’s litter box would be. Writing feels much more like waiting upon some external power – a muse or a god or a devil – than like having any power yourself. Really, of course, it is a waiting upon one’s own mind, which has only superficial access to its own workings. We are strangers to ourselves, in this way, so that the patterns forming in the circuits of our brains are always experienced as gifts or intrusions from an external agent. Part of what we enjoy – there is no question about it – is the thrill of feeling oneself in the grip of this experientially alien power when the words really do begin to flow.

In the process of writing, as with any art, we come to recognize and own portions of ourselves that we had not known before. In this way, writing can be a form of meditation, a spiritual practice if you will. And it is for this reason that Dillard can call a life spent writing a good life, although a day spent writing is hard work or tedium or both. What can one do with life anyway, but look around and within, make what one can of what one finds there, and offer what one can of it to others?