The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (32 page)

This can be tricky. I have an eleven-year-old pen pal who has written half a story and is now demanding that I put him in touch with my agent and a publisher. It is my very disagreeable duty to tell him that he hasn’t quite earned that much trust in himself as a writer, yet.

On the other hand I know some very good writers who never finish anything, or finish it and then destroy it with overrevising to meet real or imagined criticisms, because they don’t trust themselves as writers, which means they can’t trust their writing.

Confidence in yourself as a writer is pretty much the same as all other kinds of confidence, the confidence of a plumber or a school-
teacher or a horseback rider: you earn it by doing, you build it up slowly, by working at it. And sometimes, particularly when you’re new at the game, you fake it—you act like you know what you’re doing, and maybe you can get away with it. Sometimes if you act as if you were blessed, you will be blessed. That too is part of trusting oneself. I think it works better for writers than it does for plumbers.

So much for trusting oneself. Now, to trust the story, what does that mean? To me, it means being willing not to have full control over the story as you write it.

Which would explain why it takes so long to learn to write. First you have to learn how to write English, and learn how to tell stories in general—techniques, practice, all that: so that you are in control. And then you have learn how to relinquish it.

Let me say here that many writers and teachers of writing would disagree strongly with what I’m saying. They’d say, you don’t learn how to ride a horse, control the horse, make it do what you want it to do, and then take off its bridle and ride it bareback without reins—that’s stupid. However, that is what I recommend. (Taoism is always stupid.) For me it’s not enough to be a good rider, I want to be a centaur. I don’t want to be the rider controlling the horse, I want to be both the rider and the horse.

How far to trust your story? It depends on the story, and your own judgment and experience are the only guide. The only generalisations I’m willing to make are these: Lack of control over a story, usually arising from ignorance of the craft or from self-indulgence, may lead to slackness of pace, incoherence, sloppy writing, spoiled work. Overcontrol, usually arising from self-consciousness or a competitive attitude, may lead to tightness, artificiality, self-conscious language, dead work.

Deliberate, conscious control, in the sense of knowing and keeping to the plan, the subject, the gait, and the direction of the work, is in
valuable in the planning stage—before writing—and in the revision stage—after the first draft. During the actual composition it seems to be best if conscious intellectual control is relaxed. An insistent consciousness of the
intention
of the writing may interfere with the
process
of writing. The writer may get in the way of the story.

This is not as mystical as it sounds. All highly skilled work, all true craft and art, is done in a state where most aspects of it have become automatic through experience, through total familiarity with the medium, whether the medium is the sculptor’s stone, or the drummer’s drum, or the body of the dancer, or, for the writer, word sounds, word meanings, sentence rhythm, syntax, and so on. The dancer
knows
where her left foot goes, and the writer
knows
where the comma’s needed. The only decisions a skilled artisan or artist makes while working are aesthetic ones. Aesthetic decisions are not rational; they’re made on a level that doesn’t coincide with rational consciousness. Thus, in fact, many artists feel they’re in something like a trance state while working, and that in that state they don’t make the decisions. The work tells them what needs doing and they do it. Perhaps it is as mystical as it sounds.

To go back to my horse metaphor, a good cowboy on a good horse rides with a loose rein and doesn’t keep telling the horse what to do, because the horse knows. The cowboy knows where they’re going, but the horse knows how to get them there.

I hope I don’t sound like one of those bearers of glad tidings to writers who announce that there’s nothing to it, just shut down your intellect and free up your right brain and emit words. I have enormous respect for my art as an art and my craft as a craft, for skill, for experience, for hard thought, for painstaking work. I hold those things in reverence. I respect commas far more than I do congressmen. People who say that commas don’t matter may be talking about therapy or self-expression or other good things, but they’re not talking about writing. They may be talking about getting started, leaping over timidity, breaking through emotional logjams; but they’re still
not talking about writing. If you want to be a dancer, find out how to use your feet. If you want to be a writer, find out where the comma goes. Then worry about all that other stuff.

Now, let’s say I want to write a story. (Speaking for myself personally, that can be taken for granted; I always want to write a story; there never is anything I’d rather do than write a story.) In order to write that story, first I have learned how to write English, and how to write stories, by doing it quite regularly.
¹

I have also learned that what I need, once the story gets going, is to relinquish conscious control, get my damned intentions and theories and opinions out of the way, and let the story carry me. I need to trust it.

But as a rule, I can trust the story only if there has been a previous stage of some kind, a period of approach. This may well involve conscious planning, sitting and thinking about the setting, the events, the characters, maybe making notes. Or it may involve a long semiconscious gestation, during which events and characters and moods and ideas drift around half formed, changing forms, in a kind of dreamy limbo of the mind. And I do mean long. Years, sometimes. But then at other times, with other stories, this approach stage is quite abrupt: a sudden vision or clear sense of the shape and direction of the story comes into the mind, and one is ready to write.

All these approach states or stages may occur at any time—at your desk, walking on the street, waking up in the morning, or when your mind ought to be on what Aunt Julia is saying, or the electricity bill, or the stew. You may have a whole grandiose James Joyce epiphany thing, or you may just think,
oh, yes, I see how that’ll go
.

The most important thing I have to say about this preliminary period is don’t rush it. Your mind is like a cat hunting; it’s not even sure
yet what it’s hunting. It listens. Be patient like the cat. Very, very attentive, alert, but patient. Slow. Don’t push the story to take shape. Let it show itself. Let it gather impetus. Keep listening. Make notes or whatever if you’re afraid you’ll forget something, but don’t rush to the computer. Let the story drive you to it. When it’s ready to go, you’ll know it.

And if—like most of us—your life isn’t all your own, if you haven’t got time to write at that moment when you know the story’s ready to be written, don’t panic. It’s just as tough as you are. It’s yours. Make notes, think about your story, hang on to it and it will hang on to you. When you find or make the time to sit down to it, it will be there waiting for you.

Then comes the trancelike, selfless, rather terrifying, devouring work or play of composition, which is very difficult to talk about.

About planning and composition I want to make one observation: that it’s delightful for a writer to be sheltered and shielded while at this intense work, given solitude and freedom from human responsibilities, like Proust in his padded cell, or the people who keep going to writers colonies and having their lunch brought in a basket; delightful indeed, but dangerous, because it makes a luxury into a condition of work—a necessity. What you need as a writer is exactly what Virginia Woolf said: enough to live on and a room of your own. It’s not up to other people to provide either of those necessities. It’s up to you, and if you want to work, you figure how to get what you need to do it. What you live on probably has to come from daily work, not writing. How dirty your room gets is probably up to you. That the door of the room is shut, and when, and for how long, is also up to you. If you have work to do, you have to trust yourself to do it. A kind spouse is invaluable, a fat grant, an advance on spec, a session at a retreat may be a tremendous help: but it’s your work, not theirs, and it has to be done on your terms, not theirs.

All right, so you shut the door, and you write down a first draft, at white heat, because that energy has been growing in you all through
the prewriting stage and when released at last, is incandescent. You trust yourself and the story and you write.

So now it’s written. You sit around and feel tired and good and look at the manuscript and savor all the marvelous, wonderful bits.

Then it cools down and you cool down, and arrive, probably somewhat chilled and rueful, at the next stage. Your story is full of ugly, stupid bits. You distrust it now, and that’s as it should be. But you still have to trust yourself. You have to know that you can make it better. Unless you’re a genius or have extremely low standards, composition is followed by critical, patient revision, with the thinking mind turned on.

I can trust myself to write my story at white heat without asking any questions of it—if I know my craft through practice—if I have a sense of where this story’s going—and if when it’s got there, I’m willing to turn right round and go over it and over it, word by word, idea by idea, testing and proving it till it goes right. Till all of it goes right.

Parenthetically: This is the period when it is most useful to have criticism from others—in a peer group or a class or from professional editors. Informed, supportive criticism is invaluable. I am a strong believer in the workshop as a way of gaining confidence and critical skills not only before you get published, but also for experienced professional writers. And a trustworthy editor is a pearl beyond price. To learn to trust your readers—and which readers to trust—is a very great step. Some writers never take it. I will return to that subject in a moment.

To sum up, I have to trust the story to know where it’s going, and after I’ve written it I have to trust myself to find out where it or I got off track and how to get it all going in one direction in one piece.

And only after all that—usually long after—will I fully know and be able to say what, in fact, the story was about and why it had to go the way it went. Any work of art has its reasons which reason does not wholly understand.

When a story’s finished, it’s always less than your vision of it was before it was written. But it may also do more than you knew you were doing, say more than you realised you were saying. That’s the best reason of all to trust it, to let it find itself.

To conceive a story or manipulate it to make it serve a purpose outside itself, such as an ambition to be famous, or an agent’s opinion about what will sell, or a publisher’s wish for instant profit, or even a noble end such as teaching or healing, is a failure of trust, of respect for the work. Of course almost all writers compromise here, to some extent. Writers are professionals in an age when capitalism pretends to be the arbiter of good; they have to write for the market. Only poets totally and sublimely ignore the market and therefore live on air—air and fellowships. Writers want to right wrongs, or bear witness to outrages, or convince others of what they see as truth. But in so far as they let such conscious aims control their work, they narrow its potential scope and power. That sounds like the doctrine of Art for Art’s Sake. I don’t offer it as a doctrine, but as a practical observation.
²

Somebody asked James Clerk Maxwell in 1820 or so, What is the
use
of electricity? and Maxwell asked right back, What is the use of a baby?

What’s the use of
To the Lighthouse
? What’s the use of
War and Peace
? How would I dare try to define it, to limit it?

The arts function powerfully in establishing and confirming human
community. Story, told or written, certainly serves to enlarge understanding of other people and of our place in the world as a whole. Such uses are intrinsic to the work of art, integral with it. But any limited, conscious, objective purpose is likely to obscure or deform that integrity.

Even if I don’t feel my skill and experience are sufficient (and they are never sufficient), I must trust my gift, and therefore trust the story I write, know that its use, its meaning or beauty, may go far beyond anything I could have planned.