advice/writing
Patricia Highsmith,
Ursula K. Le Guin,
Mary Karr,
Anne Lamott,
David Foster Wallace,
Martin Amis,
Vijay Prashad,
Annie Dillard,
Syd Field
tips
Having nothing to write isn’t writer’s block. It’s just the dormant phase of the work. I used to write all through this phase, and it looked like productivity. It wasn’t.
The concept of writer’s block depends on the assumption that whatever you’re producing, it’s not enough.
I need to insulate myself from even the idea of productivity in order to get anything of value done. But even the idea of getting it done is evidence of the pollution of the act.
The work I’ve done in translation, or writing essays, for example, is just labor. You get in and you do it, though the getting in can be prolonged agony. With poems, if I have a deadline—like I told my editor, Dan Halpern, that I’m going to get a book ready, so I know he needs a finished manuscript by a certain time—then I can get down to work in a forced march and say, Okay, I’m going to spend x number of hours a day and wrestle with these things and muscle through all my hesitations and get the poems into shape. There’s a part of me that wants to let problems go for a while, let a piece of writing simmer and percolate, in the hope that my unconscious will take care of it. That the solution will come. And I think that’s useful up to a point, but I also think you come back to the basic thing about writing. You’ve got to exercise your will and get work done. You’ve got to show the muse you’re willing to show up, whether anything is happening or not. But in another way I’ve been such a bad model, as far as work ethic, because of my ox-like tendencies. A lot of that labor went into prose and translation. Sometimes I would be in the middle of writing an essay on Ernesto Cardenal or on what’s going on in Chinese poetry, but I’d be thinking, Why don’t I just shut up and try to write a poem?
GURGANUS
Remember, it was the Summer of Love, and here I was, nineteen, sexually able but with my head shaved and at sea for weeks on end. The best of what I’d done so far and might do just ahead could only be described one blank page at a time. Drawing and writing soon started feeling interchangeable. I could now draw mug shots of my characters, I could write my still lifes. In sketchbooks, I paid studious homage to minds and skills far, far beyond my own. It felt like a religious practice but one freed of tithing to any single God.
INTERVIEWER
You needed to make things.
GURGANUS
I made something every day. Early on, I sensed that—in every art—the ultimate shared subject is human consciousness itself. The more comic-tragic notes you can wrest onto a single active page, the better. I would later suggest to my students that they put something funny on every page and something beautiful on every other. My naive obsession was to shape something so true, energized, and hilarious, it would necessarily outlive me. The goal was not becoming known, it was becoming useful.
INTERVIEWER
You were conscious of a literary immortality even then?
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GURGANUS
Plot confuses beginning storytellers by sounding so extruded, mechanical. Simply put, plot is what your characters most want and whatever they will do to get it. I am always attracted to characters having a hard time. Fiction can be summarized as “and then something went terribly, terribly wrong.” The more specific the hero’s trouble, the more unconventional his wish or obsession, the greater chance the story has of saying something new and helpful. Empathy is a writer’s pilot’s license. Without it, you are grounded. You aren’t creating characters. You’re judging them.
INTERVIEWER
Let’s talk for a second about that sexual candor in your work. How have you arrived at such intrepid portrayals?
GURGANUS
Long research, sleepless nights. I want to offer my characters some sexual risk taking, a reflection of the way I once lived my life. I’ve learned so much about others, in and out of bed. Tennessee Williams swore he’d never created a character to whom he was not sexually attracted. I always urged my students to let their characters have erotic existences on the page. We put the poor things through such tortures, why not let them score a few Fridays and Saturdays per annum? What a protagonist eats and wears and how he decorates his rooms and treats his parents—yeah, all that’s important. But what she wants sexually and what she’ll risk to get some of it on a given weekend—that’s a fast, amazing way to show her true hidden identity. I’m pleased to see young novelists now risking far more sexual honesty. What subject is more mystical and entertaining? Most sexual exchanges are far more awkward, and therefore more endearing, than what you find online. Ordinary folks’ groping attempts I usually find far sexier than a couple of tanned models going at it in Malibu. A writer, a real writer, must be fully committed to those people somehow created on his pages. He cannot stand apart from them, cannot cartoon or disdain them. They are not quite villains, they are hardly saints. They are all citizens different from each other, each with a peculiar mission, varying sets of merits and flaws. They are partial talents striving toward something, but what? For sure, it’s a fascinating exercise, creating others and then trying to be responsible both for and to them.
I like to be up by six thirty. I guess I do this as proof to my father—dead for decades—that writing is really manly labor. He himself was an early riser. Like him I prefer those hours when dew is everywhere and birds are first auditioning their day’s likely song. I’m sure that if God created Eden he did it all with a single dawn. Early-hour innocence promotes ambitious, unrealistic hopes. You’ve just been dreaming. You have strong coffee and a piece of fruit. You reread what you got down yesterday. It’s important to leave yourself a handhold on the cliff you are inventing. Most days involve rewriting, boiling out the cornstarch, essentializing a gesture, paring down dialogue that’s grown too wordy or explicit. On schedule you go through familiar rituals that’ve at least produced satisfying results. Most days such work can go on till two or three. Then you get to do your banking or shopping or gardening. You again become a citizen of the sloppy capitalist realm after shoring up the secret world you’ve been home inventing in black and white.
When writing first drafts, the only music audible should be your own language and pulse—the metronomic drumbeat of your personal digestive percussion section. But, later, when I’m typing in handwritten changes, what sometimes speeds my fingers and cheers me is listening to solo keyboard work—played by Oscar Peterson or Glenn Gould, Monk, or Gershwin’s piano rolls. Reading the work aloud is another trade secret that can’t be stressed too often. Every sentence must make logical sense while offering its appropriate ghost song. Even someone reading your work silently should be always registering its music. I prefer chamber works. I love four instruments in conversation, arguing before briefly agreeing. That’s closer to the spirit of my work. Bach, Mozart, and Brahms are some of my friends I daily hear and learn the most from.
It’s a devil’s bargain, being a writer. You’re committed to exposing yourself and your family to the outside world, for money. My work had been known, before Intimacy, as being quite charming, fun—people really turned against me. It got really hot, very nasty. But I have quite thick skin in some ways. And at a certain point, it’s between you and your conscience. You go as close to the line as your conscience will permit in terms of producing material that pleases you. You’re working at the edge of risk, if you’re lucky. The writing can so easily go dead—you want to feel some excitement when you’re in the room, some throbbing in the gristle. You want to hit the wave.
As for the relationship of my fictional characters to me, their author, I suppose it would depend on which characters you mean. Each has a slightly different relationship, I believe—I hope. I assume you mostly mean the protagonists, who sometimes have the burden of having a couple of things in common with me and sometimes don’t. I’m never writing autobiography—I would be bored, the reader would be bored, the writing would be nowhere. One has to imagine, one has to create (exaggerate, lie, fabricate from whole cloth and patch together from remnants), or the thing will not come alive as art. Of course, what one is interested in writing about often comes from what one has remarked in one’s immediate world or what one has experienced oneself or perhaps what one’s friends have experienced. But one takes these observations, feelings, memories, anecdotes—whatever—and goes on an imaginative journey with them. What one hopes to do in that journey is to imagine deeply and well and thereby somehow both gather and mine the best stuff of the world. A story is a kind of biopsy of human life. A story is both local, specific, small, and deep, in a kind of penetrating, layered, and revealing way. [...]
ALEKSANDAR HEMON: I used to write a lot for magazines and radio in Sarajevo, which taught me that writing is evanescent: magazines are thrown away, and radio moments exist briefly and then they perish. That experience gave me a different take on rejection, inasmuch as it prevented me from taking myself too seriously, which obviously makes rejection less painful. Anyone who thinks that writing can make him or her immortal is a damn fool. Writing is inherently a symptom of mortality—t lives and dies with or without you, regardless of acceptance or rejection. Furthermore, I think that a writer should know when something is good-being able to recognize what works and what doesn't is a pare of the job-which means that the acceptance-rejection thing only pertains to the career aspect of the writing, and that never depends on the writer anyway. If you start waiting for the reviews to tell you whether your book is good, it's time to do something else.