Containing multitudes, part 1

photo credit: chriswatkins

I guess it’s natural that when someone learns that I have two degrees in writing, I am asked what I write. It is possibly less natural for me to cringe and say that I don’t, really. If you think this is contradictory, wait until you see my next post.

There’s no degree for editing. At UNC Asheville the only way I could practice editing was to take writing workshops and critique my classmates’ work. The downside to this was that I also had to write. Oh, first I tried to fake it, dashing off whatever random words I could muster in the half-hour before class. But the thing about good writers is that you have to earn their respect before they’ll listen to a word you say about their writing. And one of the ways they measure you is by your own words. So I had to get at least mediocre to gain entry.

I wanted to be comfortable with writers’ vocabulary too, familiar with the process of writing, getting stuck, plucking ideas out of the air or the newspaper or anywhere they come from, sharing a new piece while the act of creation still rings raw in your ears. I needed to become a writer so I could empathize with the challenges writers face.

photo credit: TCM Hitchhiker

But I don’t have the relentless imagination, the creative drive, to create new stories and new worlds. I can put it down, I can walk away, I can quit any time I want, and not just because I’m procrastinating. I just don’t need to get that stuff out of me. So I tell my inquirers that no, I don’t really write anything. I urge them to pay no attention to the man behind the keyboard.

Yet I can hear you protesting even now that what you are now reading would not exist if I weren’t a writer. Let me suggest another reason I don’t write.

I spend a lot of my time reading other people’s words and trying to make them better. I find this rewarding but I also read a lot of soul-crushingly bad writing in the process. I’ve read the kind of bad writing that will make your eyes go numb. Every time I read something like that I imagine the writer at composition, thinking, if not how grand the writing is then at least confident that it doesn’t suck balls. And with that I am struck not just numb but paralyzed. What if I am that writer? What if I’m pecking away at my keyboard, certain that the words I write will make nobody’s eyes bleed, when all the while a river of blood is in fact swelling at my feet?

photo credit: Ma1974

The flip side of this sentiment concerns truly stunning writing. I’m talking about the kind I read, and sigh, and read once more, and eventually try to come to terms with the knowledge that nothing I write will ever be as perfectly crafted or as emotionally rich as what I just read. This writing does not crush my soul, it fills up all the space inside it until there’s no room for petty little writerly aspirations. I admit that as I was reading Gilead I could feel my middling desire to write draining from me in real time. Hell, once I finished that book I found it hard to convince myself that anything else ever need be written, by anyone.

So here I am, a non-writer stuck between the grotesquely bad and the transcendent, with a keen sense of the amount of clutter in between. I am reluctant to contribute to the din. I do it anyway. Find out why in my next post.