Is it OK to Write?

In an article I first read in "Aeon Magazine" (March 2014) Rhys Southan raises a subject that is hard for me to ignore. He wants to know if writing makes the world a better place. He puts the question more generally: “Is it OK to make art?”

And in the next breath, he answers his question: “If you express your creativity while other people go hungry, you probably don’t make the world a better place.”

How can I possibly answer this question? The obvious answer would leave me up the creek. Down the drain goes the past 20 years of my life.

But really what can I do now at the age I am to improve the world? I taught for many years and I thought I was doing something worthwhile. I did laboratory research all those years whose results I thought might clarify an idea or two and later, field research I thought might in some small measure conserve energy resources.

As I think back on this work, I have to admit none of this research made the world a better place. It is rarely cited in the journals and even it is, it might be read by a half dozen students, at most.

The question, (“Is it OK to make art?”) was posed by Southan as he was about to finish a screenplay he was working on. He decides to travel to a retreat in East Devon with a few other friends who happen to be members of a growing activism movement called Effective Altruism (EA). They tell him its goal is doing as much good as you possible can.

So like Southan, I begin to wonder if anything I’ve written has done any good and by “good” I mean reduce hunger, eradicate disease, improve the world, that sort of thing. Of course it hasn’t. Southan begins to think the same, as he realizes Effective Altruism’s goal threatened to undermine the very purpose of his trip.

“As EAs see it, writing scripts and making movies demands resources that, in the right hands, could have saved lives…From this point of view, the importance of most individual works of art would have to be negligible compared with, say, deworming 1,000 children.”

As I become more and more unsettled in reading this article, I recall something Henry Perowe said about reading great novels in Ian McEwan’s novel, Saturday.

“Henry had read the whole of Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, two acknowledged masterpieces. At the cost of slowing his mental processes and many hours of his valuable time, he committed himself to the shifting intricacies of these sophisticated fairy stories. What did he grasp, after all? That adultery is understandable but wrong, that nineteenth-century women had a hard time of it, that Moscow and the Russian countryside and provincial France were once just so.”

I wonder what Tolstoy or Flaubert would say when asked if their novels made the world a better place or if literature, in general, benefits humanity in any way. Yes, novels may be a pleasure to write and an equal pleasure to read and once in a while enhance the coffer of authors.

Perhaps a few readers were able to make a major change in their life after reading a novel and some may have no doubt learned something or chanced upon a truth that led to a fruitful line of inquiry. But beyond these few individuals, how might literature make the world a better place, as the Effective Altruists ask?

When I was a young man, I learned about an oath that every Athenian male swore to as they graduated from the Ephetic College that was required to become a full citizen of classical Athens. Among other things, mostly military matters, you pledged, “to transmit this city, not only no less, but far greater and more beautiful than it was transmitted to us.”

I’ve never forgotten that oath, believe it applies widely, and now, in the context of this article, feel that at least in terms of all I’ve written, none of it leaves the city or any other part of the world, any better than I found it.

Once in a while a novel will be written that really does make the world a better place for a wide segment of the population. Upon Sinclair’s The Jungle is the one I recall most vividly. I led to a radical change in the meatpacking industry in this country and subsequently to the Meat Inspection and Food and Drug Regulation Acts.

And Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe is credited with promoting the abolitionist cause and all that ensued from that. Upon meeting Stowe, Lincoln is said to have declared: "So this is the little lady who started this great war." (I also think of Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring, which isn’t a novel, but none-the-less played an enormous and continuing role in promoting the environmental movement.”)

And while John Steinbeck’s novel, The Grapes of Wrath, may have wrestled with the life of impoverished families in the Great Depression, nothing much changed in the life of the poor as a result of it. I don’t know of any novelists today who are writing about the plight of the poor.

At the end of his article, Southan admits he, along with everyone else, could do more than they currently are. “For now that will have to be my justification. I’m not ready to give up writing. I’m not ready to take up some high-paid job that I’d hate in order to reduce the world’s suffering. Maybe that will change.”

My immediate response is: I doubt it will. I suspect every writer will continue to write, as they always have, regardless of the compelling goals of Effective Altruism. Novelists don’t write books to change the world. Why they do is another matter.

Writing in Circles

“You write not after you’ve thought things through; you write to think things through.”
Andre Aciman

An essay about the work of Andre Aciman by Teju Cole reminded me that some authors relish writing in circles.

I love being in Paris because when I am there, I dream about being in New York.

Yes, I love Alexandria but only because when I’m there, I can dream about what it is like in Rome.

When I am in Rome, I yearn only for the times I lived in Alexandria. And when I’m in Europe I miss the Egypt where I could dream of Europe

Those are paraphrases of the way Andre Aciman writes from time to time. His pleasure in meandering, almost contradictory sentences is, as Cole suggests, “intense and catching.”

Here is my favorite one, imaginary or otherwise, from a woman Aciman was hoping to see in Paris:

“Since you’re going to Paris, you don’t want to go to Paris. But if you were staying in New York, you’d want to be in Paris. But since you’re not staying, but going, just do me a favor. When you’re in Paris, think of yourself in New York longing for Paris, and everything will be fine.”

Yes, no, I do and I don’t, a way of expressing yourself that conveys the uncertainty and ambiguity of experience. The words circle back to the place you began as soon as you reach the place you were headed.

Once you become aware this writing style, you see it everywhere.

In her short story, “The Lost Order” published in The New Yorker (1/7/13) Rivka Galchen writes:

“I wasn’t happy about it. Although maybe I was happy about it.

“Although I don’t feel like I have a lot time, I feel constantly pressed for time, even though when I had a job I felt like I had plenty of time.”

One more example from a book I am rereading now, Joy Comes in the Morning, by Jonathan Rosen:

“I’d say the opposite is true,” said Lev. “Everything’s figured out.”

[Deborah said] “Yes, you’re right, too. The opposite is correct also.”

“You’re talking like the Talmud,” said Lev.

Why does this type of writing amuse me so much? Surely it is because it is the way I often think. Nothing is ever clear, nothing is without its contradictions and imperfections, certainty is largely unreachable and so I keep coming back to where I began. It’s like swimming laps.

Cole suggests the pleasure of reading Aciman “resides in the pleasure of his company. He knows a lot, and often gets carried away, but he also knows how to doubt himself.”

Rules for Writing

All I can say is that I was looking for a certain density of thought. A living voice. A text that would surprise me and take me through a mental adventure. Phillip Lopate

There was an article in the Times last month (7/26/12) on how to write. I thought, I can always use a few hints. The article was written by Colson Whitehead, a writer who I had been led to believe is highly regarded.

Since he is an expert on these matters, I read the article with considerable care, only to discover he was dispensing the same advice I must have read at least a dozen times before. You know, the usual: write what you know; revise, revise revise; “what isn’t said is as important as what is said;” and so on. And then I came to the last “rule,” as Mr.Whitehead calls them, number 11, in fact, where I was informed, “There are no rules.”

A great burst of laughter could be heard for miles around. Oh, but, Colin, what about those ten other rules you so kindly “shared” with the rest of us?

Anyway, I thought the last so-called rule was a blessing. Because I write poorly, spell like a six year old, and no doubt violate every rule established by grammarians and the authorities at the New Yorker.

I do that intentionally or maybe, naturally or more likely because I don’t know how to write, as I try not to write, but to be heard, by someone as if we were sitting together in a room, having a conversation, only I am doing that or trying to do that on the page. Like now.

On two occasions I did take a writing workshop to overcome my glaring deficiencies. Both were really excuses to spend some time in Europe, although both were taught by an esteemed writer who I was certain would come to my assistance.

One year the workshop was taught, if you can call it that, by Philip Lopate, the well-known essayist and editor of the invaluable Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. And Lopate did pass along a number of good suggestions, not rules.

• Build suspense; establish a tension

• Pose a problem

• Be fully honest

• Create a character, turn yourself into one, observe yourself from a distance, use your quirks and contradictions

• Reflect on your life, don’t simply spell it out. Even if you don’t understand it, it is important for an author to try to come to some understanding of the autobiographical facts that are presented ad nauseum in most memoirs.

• An analytic perspective is equally important.

• To think on the page is to engage the reader.

Lopate’s suggestions were refreshing, different, tips that go well beyond Whitehead’s oft-repeated rules. Practicing them is another matter. I still have a long way to go. Obviously.

Revisiting Writing

To express yourself needs a reason, but expressing yourself is the reason.

That was the first blog post of Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist and often-jailed dissident. He wrote that sentence as he was first learning to type and had little experience of writing.

I am thoroughly in agreement with Weiwei. Writing is all about expressing yourself. When I read something or when an idea comes to mind, the first thing I want to do is write something about it. Writing clarifies and completes the notion in a way that speaking doesn’t. It is also a catalyst for other ideas and making contact with the snippets that are hidden away in the folders of my laptop..

“Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one tamped with your personality.” Robert Darton

I find my voice in writing, not speaking. It is all in the fingers, not the vocal chords. How strange. I don’t know what it is called. But I get into this mood while writing and it stays with me until the end. Usually it is when I write in the third person, present or past tense. This separates the words from myself and, thereby, makes them less personal. It is a kind of ironic, jesting, voice that I sometimes find in the works of Coetzee.

There are times when I am reading a novel or story when I fall into its mood and its words and the way they are put together so that I begin to think and write like the people in the story. I mimic them in both spirit and tone. I think about my life from their perspective and take on their ways of expressing it.

This happened to me while reading Joshua Ferris’s The Unnamed and I did nothing to push it away. The same happened recently in reading some of the stories in Don DeLillo’s recent The Angel Esmeralda.

It is how the characters in a film sometimes affect me. I come out of the theater and I am one of them. It is a strange experience and while it never lasts long after a film, it tends to last quite a bit longer while reading a book, especially a lengthy one.

Is this how we are influenced by the arts? Do their effects linger even when we aren’t aware of them? Perhaps we become the people in the book or the film in ways that are subtle and beyond our comprehension.

Ideas I didn’t know I had within me emerge when I’m writing. They arrive in the writing, not before. The words simply appear on the page. Afterwards, I think, that cannot be me. Hemingway described the experience. "The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it."

For me it all boils down to composing a sensible, worthwhile page or so once in a while. The pleasure is being able to do that. It is like working out; writing gives me a setting to work out my mind.

I used to think that I write primarily for myself, to try to compose something clearly and well thought out, even smart. I thought I didn’t have any readers in mind, as few as there are, but only to meet whatever standard I set for myself.

But now I wonder. Maybe I’m writing to converse, to make contact with another person even though the person is never there or replies. Nicole Krauss wrote, "I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely."

Maybe that’s what I’m doing too, nowhere near as well as Krauss, but still because the world is a pretty lonely place.

Journey to a Tuscan Villa

I’d like to invite you on a tour of an Italian retreat for writers, Santa Maddalena, located in the heart of Tuscany about a half-hour from Florence. It was the home of the writer Gregor Von Rezzori and his wife. When he died, she established the Santa Maddalena Foundation that offers visiting fellowships to four writers each year, as well supporting the Writers Festival described in my last two posts.

You don’t have to fly all night to Italy for this tour that will also include visits with some of well-known writers who have worked there. To see the beauty of this place, hear what it means to these writers, and be introduced to Rezzori’s wife, Baronessa Beatrice Monti della Corte von Rezzori, you need only watch two engaging videos included without additional charge on this no-cost, no-frills journey. How can you resist?

The Santa Maddalena utopia has been described this way: The land, located above a wooded ravine, has been transformed into a series of garden rooms….And an olive grove and pathway that link the house to the tower where many of the writers stay. Flower covered walls and groves of oak and chestnut trees mark the way to this former signal tower from the 15th century. Below, hidden by a screen of bamboo and trees is the pool and terrace.…There also is a vegetable garden with sun-ripen tomatoes in typical Italian style.

Recent fellows have included, Colm Tolbin, Michael Cunningham, Gary Shteyngart, and Zadie Smith (twice). Bruce Chatwin wrote of his visit: “The Tower is the place where I have always worked, clear headedly and well, in winter and in summer, by day or night - And the places you work well are the places you love most.”

Jens Christian Grondahl, a Danish writer, said, “Places reflect the people who have lived in them, and Santa Maddalena resonates and shimmers with the echoes and reflections of lives spent loving beautiful things."

The tour begins here:

And continues here:

Buon Viaggio

Why Write?

Zadie Smith was the featured speaker (Lectio Magistralis) at the Writers Festival (Festival degli Scrittori) I attended in Florence the other day. It was an odd presentation as we were given a pamphlet of her talk upon arriving that I was halfway through as she began reading it, word-by-word.

Meanwhile, the Italian version of her remarks was simultaneously shown on the screen behind the podium. I had expected at least a bit of spontaneity from Zadie Smith during this important lecture. There was none.

The title of her talk was Why Write? (Perche Scrivere?) and what I found most striking about it was the emphasis she placed on social factors in answering the question. She set the background by describing the bleak situation that confronts writers today, arguing that it is almost ridiculous to write a novel any more

There are few readers and it takes years to write one, let alone finding a publisher. If that hurdle is passed, you struggle to preserve its copyright, suffer through all the criticism it receives and the abusive remarks of bloggers. At the same time she suggests this has always been true for the writers of any era.

…Keats suffered the barbs of a few critics but never had to contend with half the internet calling him an asshole; Emily Bronte struggled to find an audience, but she wasn’t competing with a global audiovisual entertainment industry, cinema, television, online gaming, iPods, iPads, and tricked-out phones loaded with a lifetime’s worth of two-minute distractions.

Do writers consider all this misery as they put pen to pad of paper or pound away at the keyboard? I had imagined they rarely did, that they wrote because it was second nature to them or with only themselves in mind.

Why write then? If the act is so attendant with misery? Pope’s answer will be familiar to writers of all times and all ages. Because he couldn’t help it, any more than he could help his hump or his height.

But then she returns to the social factors in considering the question. She says that Pope also wrote to secure the approval of his peers and the opinions of his fellow writers. More so than the opinion of readers, and certainly more so than that of critics, whom he denigrates in the traditional way…

She cites Gregor von Rezzori to illustrate way writers are ever mindful of their readers. “It [the value of writing] has created a reality—and people are touched by it. I have this feeling. Do you? I saw this thing. Can I make you see it? I had this thought. Can you understand it? I am in this elation to death. Are you? I am wondering whether writing is possible. Are you?”

(Rezzori was an Austrian writer who married an Italian woman and together they settled in Tuscany. To honor Rezzori after he died, she established a foundation that supports a retreat for writers at their Tuscan villa, four of whom are offered resident fellowships each year (in 2009 Smith was one of them). As part of Florence Writers Festival, the foundation presents the Gregor von Rezzori Prize for the best work of foreign fiction translated in Italian.)

Smith continued that we write for other reasons too—because we are concerned with the “beauty in words and their right arrangement,” to engage in a dialogue with the wider world, “to counter that overwhelming sense of one’s own pointless,” and finally to see if we can, “that we do still have abilities, ideas and means of communication that are our own…”

But her emphasis on the social context of the writing enterprise did surprise me. It is not an answer I would have given to the question Why Write? and I wonder how many real writers would attach such weight to it. Do Philip Roth or Ian McEwan think for a moment about their readers? Did Virginia Woolf or Jane Austen?

Writers will always write, regardless of the views or number of their readers--like Zadie Smith who still writes, even though she has her critics and must experience all the modern distractions she mentioned that compete with her best efforts.

However, Smith has not published a novel in six years. Her last book was a set of literary essays and recently she has become the monthly book reviewer for Harper’s Magazine. Has she given up on “the act that is so attendant with misery”?

Writing to Connect

I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely. Nicole Krauss

When I write something, I’m not really writing for anyone but myself. I’m not trying to impress, persuade, or communicate with someone. Rather I’m writing to see if I can and can do it reasonably well. At least that is what I thought until I read an essay by Jhumpa Lahiri which was soon thereafter reinforced in a lecture I heard Zadie Smith deliver.

In her essay New Yorker (June 13th-20th) essay Lahari says when she began to write it was to connect with another person. “When I began to make friends, writing was the vehicle. So that in the beginning, writing, like reading, was less a solitary pursuit than an attempt to connect with others. I did not write alone but with another student in my class at school.”

This statement brought me to a halt. I had just written about the preoccupation young people have today connecting via the various digital technologies available to them. I was worried that they no longer knew how to be alone and spend time with themselves. Lahiri’s statement implies that perhaps writers in all their solitude are simply doing the same thing—trying in their way to connect with other people.

This seemed to me a bit of an insight. Perhaps I’m not writing for myself, at least not exclusively. Rather I may be writing just as much for my readers, however few there are, in the manner I can connect with them best. And how much different is that than connecting with someone online or on your cellphone?

It has been said that we search for company in literature. Is that any different than searching for company online? Imagine a person who reads all day in the company of their fictional friends. Is this person doing anything different than a young kid texting all day or sending messages to their e-mail buddies?

Of course, these questions are difficult to answer. But Lahiri’s simple statement in her essay did bring them into focus.

In How to Read and Why Harold Bloom comments that the search for friendship is one of the reasons we read. “Because you can know, intimately only a very few people, and perhaps you never know them at all. After reading The Magic Mountain you know Hans Castorp thoroughly, and he is greatly worth knowing.”

Of course, we read for other reasons too and we surely write for an equal number of reasons. But perhaps one of them is the search for friendship. I may error in thinking that we might be motivated to write in order to communicate with our peers, our friends, and other largely anonymous readers. Perhaps this expands the notion of “connecting” too broadly so that it covers too much of what we do, thereby rendering it untestable.

I have written a fair amount on writing and until recently did not view as a social activity. But I’ve been led to reconsider that view in light of the stream of questions Lahiri’s essay led me to and, by a strange co-incidence, a lecture I heard Zadie Smith give the other day in Florence. To be continued.

A Writing Life

Recently a friend sent me an essay she wrote about the importance writing has meant to her throughout her life. It is a profound and moving testament. The essay, Reflections on the Writing Life, was an address she delivered on the 72nd anniversary of Kristallnacht and dedicated to Hannah Senesh, a Hungarian Jew, who was murdered by the Nazi’s in 1944 at the age of 23. She begins by quoting Senesh:

“I feel I could not possibly live without writing, even if only for myself, in my diary….A thought that is not put on paper is as if it had never been born. I can only truly grasp a thought when I’ve expressed it in writing.”

I often feel that way. It is one of the reasons I write these posts. I have an idea and I start trying to put it to words and I find the idea isn’t really much of an idea after all. Had I not tried to write about it, it might have lingered in my mind as some kind of a gem. Writing clarifies. Writing corrects. Writing discovers.

In her essay my friend compares writing to music. She hears a rhythm of words in her ear that “chime in my head as I write them down.” I know that feeling. I hear a sentence or a phrase that almost demands to be written.

Sometimes it is only a word and I type it and the rest of the paragraph and every now and then a page will follow almost automatically. It is quick and when I’m done, little in the way of editing seems to be required. That is unlike the usual case when each word or so requires a herculean effort.

Similarly, my friend says: “I listen for harmonies, point-counterpoint, cadences and fluency in the word-music I want to make as I weave word –patterns on the page.”

She reviews the course of her writing life, beginning as a child when she wrote poems, impressions, and the letters to the members of her family. “Letters are our charms against the ache of absence and separation, and the fear of loss.”

Although I have never met her or spoken to her, I have had the good fortune, perhaps even the richest of fortunes, to be one of her correspondents.

She wrote in her journal as if it was another person. It became “my listener, my confidant—a second person, a “you,” my old companero.”

Later in life she turned to academic writing as she pursued her career in sociology while at the same time writing short stories and then sometime later a trilogy of novels. In writing she discovered that one has an inner life and in reading and re-reading our writings, “we come to know ourselves more deeply.”

To write and then put it in the hands of a reader in the various ways there are to do that now is to make it permanent. In her essay, my friend expresses this much better. “To read another’s writing is to keep its light in the world.” If a book or letter is never read, it is as if it is hidden away in a box until it discarded and eventually turns to dust.

You will appreciate the spirit of her essay and why I wanted to write about it by reading its conclusion:

“Let us, People of the Book, go on reading and writing, let us continue the conversation between the generations, let us be keepers of the flame, let us keep their lights in this world as we go on kindling our own beside them.”

The essay was written by Audrey Borenstein, co-founder of the Life Writing Connection (with Olivia Dresher), author of One Journal’s Life: A Meditation on Journal-Keeping, Redeeming the Sin, and other works of short fiction, poetry, and criticism, including The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies, and Evanesce.

Write a Sentence

“I feel I could not possibly live without writing, even if only for myself, in my diary…A thought that is not put on paper is as if it had never been born. I can only truly grasp a thought when I’ve expressed it in writing.” Hannah Senesh

Writing takes me away from myself. This happens when I have something to say. I write and time flashes by. Sometimes I look at the clock and cannot believe what time it is. Writing is liberating, a state of mind that is mindless.

"From things that have happened . . . and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason." Hemingway

It’s not so much the tale of her husband’s death (Joyce Carol Oates, New Yorker 12/13/10), but rather the way she has written about it. The full interiorization of her experiences, the rhythm, the short rolling sentences. The frequent use of the first person, present tense. It rings in my ears. I start writing that way.

“Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one tamped with your personality.” Robert Darton

Unexpected ideas and experiences I had forgotten about emerge when writing. Sometimes I become a different person when writing and the words just seem to appear on the page. I think this must be someone else.

“I started to write again. I did it for myself alone, not for anyone else, and that was the difference. It didn’t matter if I found the words, and more than that, I knew it would be impossible to find the right ones. And because I accepted that what I’d once believed was possible was in fact impossible, and because I knew I would never show a word of it to anyone, I wrote a sentence.” Nicole Krauss

I don’t know what voice is. But I get into this mood while writing and it stays with me until the end. Usually it is in the third person, present or past tense. It is a kind of ironic, jesting voice that I sometimes find in the works of Coetzee.

“I don't mean style... I mean voice: something that begins at around the back of the knees and reaches well above the head." Philip Roth

Is it just a playful way of writing, poking fun at myths, styles, ideas, simply by affirming them in a way that makes them seem silly, ridiculous, etc. An example is Coetzee’s novel Youth. One technique he uses a lot is a string of questions, three or four one right after the other. Each question poses a different alternative, usually an opposite with the final one an absurd combination of the earlier ones and it is usually very funny.

“I have written nothing whatsoever for three years and I do not see any immediate likelihood of my writing. The writing of poetry takes time and I never have any time."
T. S. Eliot

Writing is an antidote to insanity.

“It’s hard to tell somebody what you mean to say. And that’s an idea that I’m obsessed with. It’s why I write. It’s why everybody writes. Because it’s hard to say what you want to say.” Jonathan Foer.

I have my best ideas away from my desk.

“How do your books come into being? Where do they start?”
“I have little pieces of writing that sit around collecting dust, or whatever they’re collecting. They are drawn to other bits of narrative like iron filings.” Louise Erdrich

For me the pleasure comes in composing a thoughtful, sensible, clear page or so. In a way, the fun comes in meeting the challenge to put something worthwhile together. And knowing you can do it once in a while.

“A writer’s personality is his manner of being in the world: his writing style is the unavoidable trace of that manner.” Zadie Smith

The muse arrives in the writing, not before.

“We write to taste life twice.” Anais Nin

On Writing Well

A few years ago I enrolled in a workshop on writing memoirs and essays. It taught me a lot about what I should try to be doing when I try to write just about anything, including a memoir or essay. And what I learned really wasn’t much different than what I knew about writing peer-reviewed articles for research journals. The course was described this way:

Personal narrative shares with fiction writing the obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, and deliver a bit of wisdom. But whereas a fictional "I" can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator, in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth. How does the memoir/essayist pull from oneself the truth-speaker who alone can tell the story that needs to be told? Personal memoir becomes literature when it is shaped, shaped by a form. Ask what is the form that surrounds this memoir?

I took a great deal of notes at the workshop. Some deserve to be remembered, as well as communicated, and so I will pass along a few of the ideas I took note of during the two-week session.


A personal memoir should attempt to understand an experience that you have had, to know what it means. The understanding or your attempt to understand it becomes the form.

Try to achieve a wisdom beyond yourself, ask what is the organizing principle of the essay? It need only to apply to yourself; don't worry about it's generality.

For example, the instructor’s essay on letter writing tried to use her own experience to explain why people don't write letters any more.

In reading essays, consider the following questions:

1 Can you see the larger picture?
2 What is understood?
3 What is the essay about?
4 How to make some sense of what has happened to you?

A personal essay needs also to be going somewhere, to be in motion, to answer a question, to solve a problem, to provide some insight, to make some sense of your experience.

A mood piece must have a revelation to be an example of a personal essay. Revelation develops from a cumulative building of incident after incident until clarity or insight is apparent or the revelation emerges.

The writer should be different at the end of the essay than they were at the beginning. They are different because of the revelation. If you write about your migraines, understanding what they are and what brings them on should deepened.

The charge is to inquire more deeply or to try. To work through, in a step-by-step fashion, a self-inspection, to introspect about the situation(s) you are describing.

Page after page of feelings is not a journey. Simply exposing yourself is not literature. You need to be going somewhere and be a different person when you get there than you were when you started, even if you don't fully understand the situation.

The workshop was taught by Vivian Gornick whose work, The Situation and the Story: The Art of the Personal Narrative, expands upon many of workshop themes. If you find a few of the workshop notes at all instructive, I encourage you to read her volume on the difficult art of writing about personal experience.

Why Do I Write II

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human condition.

Graham Greene

It is widely believed that writing about traumatic and emotional events can reduce the distress they give rise to. Indeed, the authors of the passages quoted in my Commonplace Book often mentioned its therapeutic benefits in explaining why they wrote.

In Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions, James Pennebaker marshals an impressive array evidence to show that writing about emotional experiences can have the same positive effects on physical and mental heath as discussing them with a trained therapist.

In an early study, for example, Pennebaker reports that the spouses of individuals who committed suicide reported having fewer health problems when they spoke to others about this traumatic event than those who did not. Indeed spouses who did not talk about their partner’s death experienced higher levels of anxiety, depression and insomnia. According to Pennebaker, suppressing the expression of upsetting events is harmful and over a period of time becomes a serious health risk. In contrast, facing them squarely by talking and writing about them has the opposite effect.

How does writing accomplish this? In trying to answer this question Pennebaker reflects on his own experiences: In writing about upsetting events, for example, I often came to a new understanding of the emotional events themselves. Problems that had seemed overwhelming became more circumscribed and manageable after I saw them on paper. In some way, writing about my haunting experiences helped to resolve them.

A good many writers expressed themselves similarly:

One writes to keep going, to keep oneself from going mad...to live through the next day or two. Harold Bloom

If one was fairly content, why in the name of God would one want to go through the discipline and scariness of sitting down to write 90,000 words...Writing makes you lonely because you have to exile yourself. But deeper than that is an inborn native loneliness, a spiritual void that words, for some reason, help fill. Edna O’Brien

My own reasons for writing, for setting down the story, are to a large extent selfish. With each story--and by story I mean anything I write--I am trying simply to work something out for myself. You, the reader, play a part here: this is a private matter, as I write about the things that disturb me, the things that won't let me alone, the things that are eating slowly into my brain at 3 in the morning, the things that unbalance my world. Roxana Robinson

I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy. Orhan Pamuk

One thing I know for sure is that if I did not write these characters, these stories, I would be much less happy and probably much less normal. Writing allows me to explore situations that are impossible for me to explore in my life. And yet they are very active parts in me. Emotionally I am an extreme person and writing makes it possible for me to go on. David Grossman

I would write to forget, to get rid of sad moments. Once they were written down, they were gone. Jean Rhys

To take issue with these writers, as well as Pennebaker, I believe we are probably deluding ourselves by thinking we can put our emotional problems behind us by simply writing about them. Long ago we learned to be skeptical of the claims of the "insight" theories of psychotherapy. Awareness is not sufficient to cure. Similarly, the evidence on writing therapy suggests considerable caution about accepting its various claims of success.

Well before I ever heard of "writing therapy" I wrote in my journal. I know that I am much more likely to write there when things are not going well. But I also know that no matter how much I write or how much truth there is in what I write, I do not thereby put the problems behind me. I may feel a little better after I compose the passages, but only for the moment.

Yes, eventually the problems disappear. However, I realize that this occurs for reasons that have very little, if anything, to do with the fact that I may have written about them one day.

Why Do I Write? I

I often ask myself why do I spend so much time writing. I used to write articles for peer-reviewed psychological journals. I wrote letters in the days when writing letters was about the only way to communicate with anyone.

Now I spend a fair amount of time each day writing e-mails. I also used to write in my journal and I still do a little of that, although now it’s in a Word document on my computer labeled Flash Notes. And I write on my blog once in a while, as well as an essay or two now and then.

Why do I spend so much time doing this? Few people read my professional publications and even fewer read the books, essays, or the blog that I am writing this piece for. So what’s the point, anyway? What is the purpose of all this writing? Why not play chess, instead?

Writing was one of the most frequent themes of the passages I collected in my Commonplace Book. A while ago I pulled together all the passages on each of the most common themes and when I reviewed those on Writing, I noticed that the individuals who wrote the passages I collected gave three major reasons for why they devoted their life to writing.

Several said they wrote to answer a question they had or to better understand some issue. I know I try to do that too. I have a question or an idea that I’d like to write about but I scarcely know where to begin. So, rather that wait for the muse to do her work, I simply start writing about it and sometimes, to my amazement, I end up with a page or two that begins to clarify matters for me.

One writes not because one knows the answer but because one wants to explore the question. J.M. Coetzee

I write to understand as much as to be understood. Elle Wiesel

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want, and what I fear. Joan Didion

The point of writing is discovery. The writer discovers first for himself by moving words around, bringing out surprising new meanings in them through arranging them in never-before-seen combinations. And if he hits upon the perfect combination, a light goes off, and the world will seem a brighter place to him and his readers. Joseph Epstein

That was why one wrote, wasn’t it? To find out why. Jens Christian Grondahl

Andin his eloquent Nobel Prize Lecture where he gave on my count at least twenty different reasons why he writes, Orhan Pamuk said: Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at everyone.

The second major reason the writers gave was that they simply needed to do so, that it was a natural thing for them to do, they didn’t really have much choice in the matter. It is as if these writers write almost reflexively, in the same way they need to breathe.

At times, this basic need is quite familiar to me. I don’t write to make a living or to make known some particular insight or point of view. Rather I write because there’s no other way to express myself and I very much want to do that.

So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself, I’ve learned some things. Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled “file and forget,” and I can neither file nor forget. Nor will certain ideas forget me; they keep filing away at my lethargy, my complacency. Why should I be the one to dream this nightmare? Why should I be dedicated and set aside--yes if not to tell at least a few people about it? There seems to be no escape. Ralph Ellison

The inexhaustible urge toward self-expression makes it nearly a sure thing that there will always be writers around as long as there is us. David Remnick

In his Nobel remarks, Pamuk also cited this reason. It was the first one he gave in answering the question about why he wrote: I write because I have an innate need to write.

Becomming a Writer

“Even on those occasions when he had no active hand in something I wrote, the choices I made, the way I approached a subject, the order in which I told what I knew, the attitude I adopted were determined by his example and his influence.”

Alec Wilkinson, My Mentor: A Young Man’s Friendship with William Maxwell.

I am currently reading, Mentors, Muses and Monsters edited by Elizabeth Benedict, a rather fascinating collection of thirty essays by writers about the people who changed their life, i.e. led them to become writers. Yet Benedict notes in her Introduction that it isn’t always a particular writer who can turn a person to a writing life.

It can also be a specific book as Michael Cunningham says in describing the life-long influence of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. It might also be a group of writers or a periodical, or indeed, an institution that can have this kind of impact on an individual. For example Jane Smiley points to her first year at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Benedict also indicates that none of the thirty writers told “the archetypal story of artist and muse: the great man inspired in his great work by a moan destined to play second fiddle, or no fiddle at all.”

As I think back upon my own experience, not that I can lay claim to being a writer, that is a real writer, one whose works are read by others, I can’t think of any single person or book let me to find pleasure in living a writing life. Some books or teachers have been more influential than others and have led to a line of inquiry that guided my work for a while or motivated me to read other books they wrote.

In the early days I was greatly influenced by the kind of magazine The New Yorker was during the period when it was publishing two or three short and not-so-short short stories in each issue, as well as long, analytical essays, profiles and film reviews. And I know that Hemingway’s early novels and short stories made a lasting impression on me.

But it was probably a collection of books assigned in a course I took as an undergraduate the exerted the great influence on my life. In the days when I was a freshman at Stanford every student took a full-year course in the history of Western Civilization and then if they wanted to, could follow it with another in the Humanities devoted to literature and the arts. Those courses and the books I read for them introduced me to the world of humanistic studies and I've never recovered from the experience or found an alternative that comes close.

Again, it wasn’t any particular teacher in the course, although there were several, some as scholarly and charismatic as teachers can be sometimes, nor was it any single book or author, but rather it was the total impact of the course itself and the collection of readings that I was introduced to that made all the difference in my life.

However, the majority of the writers in Benedict’s volume wrote about the individuals who inspired them in one way or another to become writers. For example, Jonathan Safran Foer claims, “that had he not gone to Yehuda Amichai’s reading as a high school student visiting Israel, he might never have become a writer.”

Surely one of the most glowing accounts Benedict recounts in her Introduction is that of Cheryl Strayed. “I love Alice Munro, I took to saying, the way I did about any number of people I didn’t know whose writing I admired, meaning, of course, that I loved her books…But I loved her too, in a way that felt slightly ridiculous, even to me."

On Writing

The June 2008 issue of The Believer has reprinted a lecture on writing that Zadie Smith gave to students in the Columbia University Writing Program earlier in the year. At the outset she distinguishes between writing a story and writing about the process or “craft” involved in writing the story itself.

When someone asks me to write a story I feel they’re giving me a comprehensible block of stone and my job is to carve out whatever shape I thinks within it.

But a lecture on craft…at once something fraudulent creeps into the enterprise…I don’t believe in craft in the abstract.

When writers talk about writing, my ears perk up. Not so much because they will teach me how to write. No one can do that. But rather because I often pick up on very general tactics on what to do after the writing is finished or in a draft form. If there is one rule that is easy to learn and often mentioned, yet so very difficult to apply, it is rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.

Smith concurs: I reworked those first twenty five pages [of Beauty] for almost two years.

She also encourages the writer to listen to find a rhythm that seems to fit the mood of the piece that is being written. One way to do this is to listen to the rhythms of other writers who for one reason or another have written in the desired “tempo.”

My writing desk is covered in open novels. I read lines to swim in a certain sensibility, to strike a particular note, to encourage rigor when I’m too sentimental, to bring verbal ease when I’m syntactically uptight.

I did not make note of the ten short sections of her essay that describe the various stages of novel writing, at least her novels, but I did record the following additional passages in her witty and very amusing essay.


The only time I feel I’m writing honestly about craft…is when I have a specific piece of fiction in my sights….

Craft is too grand and foreign a word to describe what gets done most days in your pajamas.

Reading about craft is like listening to yourself breathe. Wring about craft prompts a self-consciousness so acute one forgets how to exhale altogether.

[There are] two breeds of novelist: The Macro Planner and The Micro Manager….A Macro Planner makes notes, organizes material, configures a plot and creates a structure—all before he writes the title page.

Personally, I’m a Micro Manager. I start at the first sentence of a novel and I finish at the last…I haven’t the slightest idea what the ending will be until I get to it…

…writing is more than elegant sentences. The only rule is quality.

…reading great literature creates a sense of oppression. For how can you pipe out your little mouse song when Kafka’s Josephine the mouse singer pipes so much more loudly and beautifully than you ever could?

The term “role model” is so odious, but the truth is it’s a very strong writer indeed who gets by without a model kept somewhere in mind. So I think of Keats.

When you finish your novel, if money is not a desperate priority, if you do not need to sell it at once or be published that very second—put it in a drawer. For as long as you can manage.

The secret to editing work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.

I find it very hard to read my books after they’re published. I’ve never read White Teeth. Five years ago I tried; I got about ten sentences in before I was overwhelmed with nausea.