Whiny Writers

Why are we writers such a whiny lot? And it's often the best writers who complain the most. E.B. White kvetched endlessly about having to write his weekly Talk of the Town piece for The New Yorker. He moved to a farm in Maine, where he hoped to be able to write more easily, only to discover that he would much rather farm than write. He lamented that, as he went about slopping the pig or gathering the eggs, he couldn’t “watch the show just for the fun of it,” but had to be constantly thinking how to write about it (see Scott Elledge, E.B. White).

Whenever Flaubert wasn’t writing, he was complaining about it to his friend, George Sand: “You don’t know what it’s like […] to spend an entire day with your head in your hand in order to find the right word[…] I spend my life gnawing at my heart and my brain.”

And here is the great Colette, at her peak, telling an interviewer, “I don’t like to write. Not only do I not like to write, but I especially like not writing […] I am so happy, so happy when I’m not writing, that it’s clear to me that I shouldn’t write…” Asked what she’d like to do instead, she answers: “Anything! Anything except writing! Carpentry, gardening, polishing the furniture …”

Colette in her eighties. Her right pinky was permanently bent from decades of writing.

Like Flaubert, she labored endlessly over every word. The appendices of the Pléiade edition of her works show that for every line of finished text there are often half a dozen lines of false starts, reversals, and erasures. So fond was she of not writing that at the height of her career she opened a cosmetology salon. Fortunately, it was a failure and she was forced to return to writing.

Me, I don’t like not writing, but I love having written. Even if I’m just writing about something cute that the cat has done, after I’ve poured my daily ration of words onto the screen I feel cleansed somehow, purged, at ease. It’s the way I imagine skilled meditators (of whom I am not one) must feel after their daily sitting.

There are times, of course, when I don’t like writing. These occur mostly when I haven’t written for a while. Then I find myself stumbling over prepositions, enmeshed in clauses, entrapped by tenses. The main thing I lose when I have been away from writing is the discipline of the first draft, which for me consists of shaking out whatever is in my head onto the screen, as if I were dumping out a waste basket.

At this point, if I allow myself the slightest backward glance over the piece, I always turn into a pillar of salt. The backward glances are the second stage. But by then I have something to work on. The page is no longer a trackless desert over which I must wander alone. There’s stuff—mostly stupid stuff, but stuff--already there. Now all I have to do is fix it, mostly by the enthusiastic use of the delete key.

When I was a sculptor I would start with a block of Indiana limestone and then make a head, or a cat, or a human figure by slowly chiseling off what didn’t belong. As a writer, I first have to produce the stone itself, by quarrying words out of my brain and hurling them onto the screen. Then I chip away until the mess starts to make sense, and becomes something that someone might want to read.

The Day I Buried My Youth

One of the puzzles about growing older is how much to give in versus how much to resist it.  By temperament and upbringing, I am in the camp of the resisters, but am considering a switch.

My mother, who was chronically young into her nineties,  used to say that it was foolish to try to look twenty years younger than you were--the thing to aim for was to look better than everybody else your age. This seems reasonable to me, so I work at it.  I believe in my bones that if I do everything right--if I eat, exercise, meditate and get enough exposure to sunlight--I will, if not avoid aging altogether, then at least do it in the slowest, most dignified possible way.

My age-defying efforts are on the low-tech end of the scale.  I don't dye my hair or inject foreign substances into my anatomy.  But between the walking and the yoga and the vitamins and the meditation--not to mention the growing and cooking of anti-oxidant-rich foods--this staving off of senescence is taking its toll.

I was lying on the sofa after another weary day of fending off the inevitable when I remembered something George Sand (the prolific 19th century French novelist who, like George Eliot, was a woman) wrote when she was sixty-two:  "The day I buried my youth I immediately felt twenty years younger."

And, judging by her letters and diaries, burying her youth worked.  Not only did she write novel after novel and run a large property, she traveled constantly and cultivated friendships with the literary luminaries of her time.  By far the brightest of these was her best buddy, Flaubert. She would visit him for a week at a time and the two would sit up talking about literature until four in the morning.  Despite all my vitamins and yoga, the thought of staying up until dawn talking about literature--with Flaubert no less--makes me feel deeply fatigued.  So maybe George S. was right.

But how does one bury one's youth?   In my childhood, the line of demarcation between young and old was pretty well defined:  old ladies of fifty and over wore black, cut their hair short and said the rosary a lot.  They did not lift weights in gyms or do downward dogs or go on gluten-free diets.

Today women of a certain age gel their hair into short spikes or grow it down to their hips, start on their third or fourth careers, and their prayers consist of reciting mantras while sitting in half lotus pose.  Is this a good thing, or is it bad?  Certainly our generation looks to be in better shape than our grandmothers', but some of us are nervous, exhausted wrecks.  Might there not have been some comfort in knowing exactly how to be old? 

In the twenty-first century, it's hard to figure out just what burying one's youth might entail.  But I intend to keep trying and see if, like it did George S., it makes me feel twenty years younger.