You Don’t Write Alone

We learn from other books. When younger writers only want to write and not read, I worry that their books will lack the depth that literature’s history supplies.

Civilians are often curious about how writers write: where they do it, in what room, what time of day. I’m not sure why, except some people think that being able to write is a kind of magic. Is there a trick? I can look at things I don’t know how to do—many things—or don’t understand—like nuclear physics—and wonder how those brains work. Sometimes I look at my books in surprise, did I really write this. Once I finish a book and years pass, and I see it on a shelf or in storage, I know I would not write that book now.

After writing my first longish fiction, Weird Fucks, because I was a terrible typist I took the finished manuscript to a professional. She did an excellent job, which couldn’t have been easy; there were many “cut and pastes” on pages. It was faster than retyping the pages, and I knew I’d make a lot of typos again. In the end, some pages looked like collages.

I remember the woman’s face when she handed the box of pages to me. She was trying to hide her feelings about this writing on sexual adventures, pleasures, mishaps, and misadventures. Her face was wet with light sweat, her hands clammy. I think she had a sour stomach.

But what I focused on most: She returned the manuscript in a paper box that could hold five-hundred sheets. My short book was just sixty-two pages. I remember wondering if I’d ever write enough to fill the box.

And then I did, and many more boxes.

There are reasons for every book I’ve written, reasons why I felt the necessity to write them. I felt I had to write it, who else would do this if I didn’t. Which probably sounds narcissistic, and maybe it is.

I believe that, odd as this might sound, in relation to her work, a writer senses it’s calling her. True or false, it doesn’t matter: It’s about motivation and desire. No one can motivate a book into existence, if the writer isn’t keen or not really feeling it. It’s the same in all of the arts: Makers execute their work with questions, hopes, illusions, with style and craft, fretting about its value. No one can know that. The maker absolutely can’t. As Marcel Duchamp has said, the public decides its value and meaning later. Aware of this, artists and writers go on. It’s a job you give yourself, and because of that you can’t expect any support.

I don’t have a sacred or fixed writing place. I just need to be alone. And left alone, with my computer, good light, and windows that let the sun in. I don’t remember specifically where I wrote Weird Fucks, say, because it wasn’t just one place. I was transient, no fixed abode, untethered, and wrote whenever I could, wherever I could. If I felt it. That’s urgent, feeling it. Having a place to write, Woolf’s room of one’s own, is for me a mental condition and space. Not a physical space, though that is a reality; I need a spot to put my laptop, on a desk, and a good chair. Getting myself to write is urgent, and where it happens is where it happens.

My way of writing—I don’t go ahead, don’t race. I stay with a paragraph, a sentence, until I feel I’ve gotten it—that is, right in my eye. I don’t write a complete draft and then go back. I can’t work like that. I stay with it until I feel it’s what I want. I build a story, a novel, word by word, sentence by sentence. Each word suggests another. A word creates images to produce on the page, and the story accretes.

Writing a novel, I address an overriding idea or several ideas and write toward that idea or set of ideas—I hope subtly. I want my characters to seem alive. For me, finding the structure is the hardest part of writing a novel. What makes a novel hang together. It’s not always plot; certainly it isn’t in my writing. A plot is based on causality: this happens because of that. I’ve done that a few times, but usually I see too many reasons for my characters to do or behave as they do. Also, my characters’ motives or reasons are ruled as much by, or more by, their unconscious feelings. They don’t necessarily know why they do what they do or what they feel. What I want is for readers to see that, to live with their doubt, their uncertainty, and it’s my job to let the reader into them.

Sometimes I comfort myself with a feeling that I am in the company of other writers, their pains and triumphs, their fight against doubt and anguish. Kafka, of course. Jane Bowles—her massive insecurity, so bad that she couldn’t keep writing, and yet she wrote one of the best, most influential novels of the 20th century, Two Serious Ladies. Virginia Woolf detailed her fears, worries about her books in her diaries. She also wrote, “Books continue each other.” That’s a brilliant truth. And it is why reading is the most important thing for a writer to do. We learn from other books. When younger writers only want to write and not read, I worry that their books will lack the depth that literature’s history supplies. It enters the writing ineffably.

I wonder at my drive to write. Ever since I was eight years old, that’s what I wanted—to be a writer. And that wish, want, hope shaped me, probably saved me. Like many people, I am subject to depression and, when I was ten, I recognized its colonization. Wanting to write, I had something to live for. Without it, I would have been lost.

And I write, whenever and wherever I can, when I need to, when something moves or arrests me: a memory, funny story, a new, delicious word, a stranger’s intriguing gesture. and then I know where I am.