Writing: a Sickness or the Cure?
The short story writer V.S. Pritchett wandered up to his top floor writing room every morning of the year, including Sundays, to put in his hours of writing. Was this appropriate professional discipline, or that life offered few other temptations, or an addiction?
Is writing the sickness or the cure? “Don’t think about it,” the novelist James Purdy advised me, kindly.
For me, writing is a safe space in which to go wild. And it’s a way to stabilize a life that’s committed to outgoing activity. In my years as a university professor I rose early each morning and wrote for three hours from five o’clock, believing that nobody could require me to answer an email before eight. Other work would then bag me till ten that night, but it was OK, I had given my quality time to my own creative vision.
(For writers balancing jobs and raising young families, I’ve recommended that they have family members rally round to free a slice of a weekend day in which they must write. It can be enough to move your work forward in such a way. For students on writing programs, watching flat mates in the sciences go off to their lab work, I’ve suggested fixing writing hours in their diary because we have to give that sort of honour to our discipline.)
As part of writing, I use narrative so as to understand how the world works. For fiction, this is an act of empathy, inhabiting lives other than your own. For memoir it’s a similar process, revisiting your own life but with understanding rather than judgment. And for nonfiction, it’s examining a culture or time period other than your own through stories collected from inside those cultures.
I’m in a non-writing state at the moment, between books. Give me windows to stare through and beaches to stroll, please.
It takes a while for a new book to assert itself, say ‘Me Next!’ insistently enough that other possible projects back off. One seems to be doing that – social history, exploring the 1950s. Boxes of files have been accumulating for seventeen years, filled with research culled from various archives. Several times I’ve attempted to shape this into a proposal for a book and it hasn’t cohered. This time I suspect it will.
What’s the difference now? I can give the project the time it needs. I’m freed from university shackles, where “academic rigour” tends to poo-poo narrative as showmanship. In truth, narrative is the end stage of deeper understanding
Going quiet enough to listen, I’m hearing the quiet murmuring of a story waiting to be told.
What else am I listening to?
Birdsong.
I need to download European birdsong to my Merlin app. By the seafront at Lowestoft yesterday it caught the thrill peeps of a dunnock, but was deaf to a chaffinch singing its heart out. It’s primed for the song sparrows, the Nuttal’s woodpecker, the house finches that were regulars on our birdfeeder in Santa Monica.
‘How lovely to hear the blackbird again,’ James said. A few years back we counted twenty-three bird species on a single walk around our London neighbourhood.
We’ve just begun a six-month spell in Europe, and these birds perhaps have a lesson for me – because of late I’ve been feeling a little too tired to write. The lesson comes via Yehudi Menuhin. He was teaching violin to David Hope, who once lamented that he was too tired to practise. “Is a bird too tired to sing?” Menuhin asked him.