on writing

Leonid Pasternak, Throes of Creation

Writing is very, very difficult. Not necessarily the actual act of it, the stringing together of words and worlds: that comes pretty easily to me. It’s everything that comes before that’s the hard part.

Mostly I dread the feeling of needing to write. If I don’t do it for stretches at a time (a day, a couple of days, a week, a month) I feel myself gradually becoming my own worst enemy. I imagine that I understand what schizophrenia feels like. I imagine that my brain will overheat and turn into a soupy mess, or else the unrelieved excess of electricity will churn itself out through my ears and erupt out of my skull like a watermelon dropped from a great height, like that Russian chess player whose brain exploded during a particularly intense match.

Sometimes I try to dodge the impulse. I ignore it, I tamp it down. I work, or read, or browse, or walk, or clean, or cook through it. I invent errands to which I suddenly must attend. I pretend the feeling isn’t there. I pretend I don’t want to write. I pretend I’m not a writer.

Since I was small, I’ve felt this consistent need to create things, and I’ve felt that need as suddenly and urgently as an unscratched itch or an unalleviated headache. So during my childhood and adolescence I baked a lot of cookies. And I made a lot of bracelets and pillows and collages. Or I’d cut up a shirt into artful strips, cut slits into the shoulders, stick safety-pins into the whole mess and call it punk. Or I’d rip through an entire novel in one lonely and draining and exhilarating Saturday, replacing my own unwritten and surely terrible words with the better ones of these published writers. And I’d finish the book or the pillow and say: that’s it, then. That’s my need to create, satisfied. Good on you, Caroline: you’ve taken care of yourself.

But it wasn’t until I gave up on sleeping and opened up my laptop and dared to face the abyss of the looming blank white screen – or I gave up on homework to prop myself against my bed frame, prop my journal against my bare white legs, force my pen against the creamy white page – it wasn’t until I’d decided to stop crying or whining or baking another fucking pie and face my fear of failure (or is it a fear of success?), my fear of what lay buried inside my gut, the drama of my repressed desires and the theater of my suppressed memories – that I’d felt really, truly satisfied. It wasn’t until I’d released the relentless voice inside my head onto the victimized page that I no longer felt (quite so) crazy.

But why should writing be so painful? And why is it that many (or all?) writers feel this same sense of agony about their very livelihoods? We all know that we write to live, that we live to write. So why should we have to suffer through it?

I’m currently reading (or ripping my way through) Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, which, by the way, can account for the neurotic tone of this particular piece of writing. It also accounts for why, after three studied hours of silently and obediently reading someone else’s voice that I felt overcome – truly, nauseatingly devoured – by this need to release my own “New York voice on the couch,” as John Updike calls Jong’s urban-feminist vernacular.

There’s one particular scene in the book in which Erica Jong-as-Isadora Wing expresses the scariness of writing. Or, the scariness of being a person who needs to write. Or, the scariness of facing up to the fact of being a person who needs to write. Isadora, who is currently accompanying her analyst-husband to a convention of analysts in Vienna, feels seriously fucked up about falling in love with a man (also an analyst) who is not her husband. In the thick of her mighty interior battle, Isadora runs into one of her former analysts, Dr. Happe, to whom she, in a moment of desperation and total self-hatred, spills her conundrum. And Dr. Happe replies to the overanxious, conflicted, twice-married-before-reaching-thirty Isadora:

“‘You’re not a secretary; you’re a poet. What makes you think your life is going to be uncomplicated? What makes you think you can avoid all conflict? What makes you think you can avoid pain? Or passion? There’s something to be said for passion. Can’t you ever allow yourself and forgive yourself?’”

How brilliant, how searing, how helpful, is this fictional Dr. Happe? You are not a secretary; you are a poet. And, as such, your life will be plagued with complications and conflict, either real or imaginary. And the only way to live, with some modicum of dignity and harmony, is to allow yourself to experience that pain, that passion, that uncontrollable need to create and create and create. The only way to do this thing of being a writer – or of being any kind of artist – or of being any awakened human being, a being containing worlds within yourself which lie just beyond your own understanding – is to forgive yourself of that very condition of being complicated. To not let that desire eat you up until there’s nothing left of the dignified person you once were, until you are reduced to a thumping gut of need, need, need. There is a way to do this thing of being an independent entity without imposing a fear-and-avoidance-fueled embargo on that entity.

The way to do it, according to the sage Dr. Happe, is to forgive, and to allow. It’s to face up to the beast and to see that, closer up, the beast just wants to be cuddled. That the beast can be tamed. That the beast is a part of yourself, and there is nothing to fear about yourself.

Isadora’s redemptive encounter with Dr. Happe reminds me of a similarly pivotal encounter of my own. Earlier this summer, I participated in a workshop at Kripalu called “Writing Through the Chakras,” led by the brilliant and elegant Dani Shapiro.

After the first evening session, I somehow managed to eke out the courage to introduce myself to Dani. And I, shadowed in the light of the writer’s golden aura, somehow managed to tell her that I had realized, after agonizing over what I should do with my life, that I think I really, actually, need to be a writer. And I somehow managed to express to her that this was the harder thing to do right now.

And after patiently and lovingly listening to me re-enact my interior drama, Dani replied: “It is the harder thing to do. But it’s the only thing to do.”