Love Writing or Love Having Written?
My estimable fellow Doublethink editor Cheryl Miller wonders about the writing life:
here’s a reason for the saying, “I hate writing; I love having written.” (Anyone know who said this? I have Dorothy Parker, but I attribute everything cool to Dorothy Parker.) Every time I sit down to write a piece, I think of how bad I am at writing and how I’m going to go to law school so I can at least make tons of money doing a job I hate. But then I finish and I’m elated (you can decide if that’s just the exhaustion talking). Aside for “born writers”—people who just can’t stop writing (lucky few!)—I think this is probably the experience for most of us.
I hear this on occasion, but it’s always seemed somewhat strange to me. While writing can be frustrating from time to time, I’ve always found the actual business of writing — of sitting down with a stack of books, an dozen open browser windows, a dozen pages of notes, and a pot of coffee — incredibly fulfilling. Sure, it’s difficult from time to time; it can be a slog, especially if you’re busy or distracted. But as with any activity, even those which are typically enjoyable, not every project goes perfectly. (It’s possible to be annoyed going to a theme park, or have a bad day while on vacation, etc. etc.)
And I’ve actually sort of wondered about writers who profess not to enjoy the process of writing. The whole reason I wanted to write professionally in the first place was so that I could spend my days doing something enjoyable, even if that meant not making as much as if I were, say, a lawyer. It’s worth it because I spend my days reading and writing and talking with interesting people, many of whom are also writers.
Also I should note that I completely disagree that Cheryl is “bad at writing.” That’s just nonsense, and obviously so.
What about the dread of having to write? That, I think, is the worst of it. Particularly with anything lengthy, the awareness of how much there still is to do, how creative one will have to be to make any progress at all, and how horrible it will all sound the first time through.
In my experience, once one is in the zone writing (creative writing, that is) is not so much a pleasurable as a disorienting and yet exhilarating one, like an out-of-body experience (not like I’ve had one of those, but you know). But getting into the zone can be maddening, and trying to write when one is not in the zone downright painful.
And there’s an important distinction to be drawn between two kinds of retrospective appreciation of having written as well. A writer should, properly, enjoy reading what he or she has written; even reading it over and over, chuckling at the same jokes and smiling at the same felicitous turns of phrase. But then there’s the purely exterior motivation: the excitement of someone else having read it, of having been reviewed, etc. I’m not sure that excitement is, ultimately, good for a writer, who must depend on his or her unclouded judgement. But it’s probably unavoidable.
In any event, I believe Edward Gorey had the last word on this particular subject.
— Noah Millman · Mar 5, 02:28 PM · #
To my mind, talking about “writing” here is something of a misnomer. Writing isn’t hard — it’s just typing out a transcription of your thoughts, and that’s really quite easy. What’s hard is the thinking — having an idea about what to say, having an intellectual grasp of your subject, and after transcribing your thoughts, thinking hard about whether the words on paper make sense and express your thoughts clearly. If you’re having trouble “writing,” you’re really having trouble thinking.
— Stuart Buck · Mar 5, 03:29 PM · #
Stuart: in my experience, transcriptions of thoughts generally make pretty lousy writing.
— Noah Millman · Mar 5, 04:58 PM · #
That may be true, but I’d still prefer to say that the problem is really with the thinking — bad writing arises because the initial thought is confused or uninformed, and/or because one isn’t thinking clearly about how to express that thought. Put it this way: The problem is not that writing is hard in and of itself, it’s that after you’ve written down what you were thinking, you suddenly realize that your thoughts aren’t very good.
[Needless to say, the word “your” isn’t targeting you personally, but just means “anyone.”]
— Stuart Buck · Mar 5, 05:29 PM · #
Peter, thanks! Noah definitely got at what I was saying much better than I did. Starting to write is excruciating, and I’m always seized by despair whenever I look at those first pages. The other parts of my job—talking to interesting people (writers and subjects), doing research, reading—are great fun. I love that my job requires me (as it recently did) to just sit around and read Bernard Malamud short stories all day. And I love being finished with a piece and seeing it in print. But the actual writing process? Not so fun.
(Also, I’ve always thought of you as one of those lucky people for whom writing comes easily.)
Stuart: I’m completely willing to believe I have problems thinking as well as writing, but I have to agree with Noah. It’s definitely possible to suck at both.
— Cheryl · Mar 5, 05:42 PM · #
Cheryl — I wasn’t talking about you in particular! :) I was thinking of my own experience. When I have a firm grasp on what I want to say, writing is fairly straightforward. As is editing — if I know what I was trying to say, it’s similarly straightforward to go back and say, “Ah, that paragraph would work better up here; that sentence isn’t expressing my thoughts clearly; a better word here would be ___; that ending doesn’t work,” and so forth.
Whenever I have trouble “writing” about something, the real problem is always with the thinking — I haven’t mulled over and studied the subject enough to have a solid thesis and outline in my head of what I want to say.
Why do I make this distinction? Well, think of the cliched student who tells his professor, “I really did know the answers to your test, but I just had trouble putting it into words.” Nope — if you had trouble putting it into words, you didn’t really know it that well after all.
(Clarification: Some things can’t be ever be expressed in words very well. I think it was C.S. Lewis who pointed out that it’s very difficult to use solely words to describe how scissors work.)
— Stuart Buck · Mar 5, 05:56 PM · #
Stuart:
The effect you are describing may be different for things like law review articles and social science reports than for writing intended to, for example, lead a reader to draw conclusions that are not explicitly stated. If I want to get the reader to conclude X and believe that he or she discovered X independently, I may have a step after I clarify my understanding of X wherein I figure out some artful way to communicate X without acutally coming and saying “X is true”. This is roughly analogous to the difference between an engineering drawing and a paintiing.
— Jim Manzi · Mar 6, 02:49 AM · #
Fair enough. Fiction may also be a good example of something that doesn’t quite so heavily depend on all of the thinking that you’ve done prior to the writing.
— Stuart Buck · Mar 6, 08:36 PM · #