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.