Ink in my notebooks

Why do you write?

A persistent, nagging question. But also ridiculous in some—many—ways to even ask. 

The answers are never-ending. Beyond measure. Boundless. Bottomless. All the reasons to write, and all the reasons not to.

I always hate when some famous writer is giving what amounts to a pep talk to wanna-be-writers (or I guess I should say wanna-be published writers, or wanna-be-writers who make a living from writing because they may very well all of them be writing a lot more words everyday than say Isaac Asimov on his absolute most productive day and are therefore, already, very legitimately, writers) and says, when talking about the great why of writing, say something about not having a choice. That is, some version of: "I can't not write." 

Now—how is that helpful? If you can't not write, then you really don't need to talk at all about how you get yourself to do it. You don't really need to make that part of your presentation about helping young hopefuls.

In a spell of insomnia two nights ago I read Big Magic by Liz Gilbert. My cousin laughed (in email) asking, "Why do you call her Liz? Do you know her?"

No, I don't know her. 

I've read Eat, Pray, Love of course. I know she left her first husband, which prompted the whole privileged and now immensely famous year of Find Yourself Tourism that resulted in the phenomenon that is EPL. And I know in Indonesia at some point during that year she met and fell in love with an older Brazilian man and eventually married him and wrote about her decision in a follow-up research/travel/memoir Committed. And I know that she dedicated Big Magic to Rayya, which, at the point of publication, was, to the average reader, I'm guessing, a bit of a question mark. A "Rayya whoever that is." Yet there is something so personal about the dedication, "This one's for you, Rayya." The other ones, were not, but this one, finally, through all the year of traveling, through the two marriages, through the infinite questions about whether I was fulfilling myself enough, living a big enough life, whether I, Liz Gilbert, was maximally self-actualized, finally, this one's for you.

But! Does that dedication strike me that way merely because I now know, speaking about what I know about this woman whom I don't know, this one Liz Gilbert, that last summer she left (divorced) the committed older Brazilian, found in Edenic Indonesia, for that woman Rayya? 

I don't know.

But I do like what Gilbert comes back around to again and again -- the lightness and the joy and the wonder of writing. As I read the book, at 3 in the morning, cozy by myself in the living room (not a bad scene at all when I think back on it), I kept hearing Ani Defranco looping in my head. "I do it for the joy it brings, because I am a joyful girl."

Gilbert feels like that. She rejects the martyr-writer myth. She advocates for what she calls the trickster-writer instead. "Lightly, lightly. Ever lightly" she advises. And her voice is charming and conversational and appealing, and it carried me through the insomniac hours (which, cozy at they maybe should be, and sound now, often feel quite dark) with that transformative, open, Oprah-ish, Molly-at-the-end-of-Ulysses, ecstatic, creative Yes!

And that kind of advice works, for me, at least in the short term. Reminds me about why I want to write. Reminds me about the joy of it. The luck of getting to do it. I don't agree with Gilbert about art being ornamental. About the main reason behind making always being: Why not? It's fun. It's wonderful. Why not? I think sometimes there is a bigger why, more at stake. And yet, if faced with this critique, she'd likely agree. At times, yes, there is. 

Gilbert contradicts herself left and right - write for yourself, write for the rest of us. There's nothing serious about writing. It is everything that matters. She celebrates those contradictions (without adequately crediting Fitzgerald, to my mind, and very bizarrely credits Joan Didion with a thought that rightly belongs to E.M. Forster) but there are other contradictions that don't fit into that kind of mysterious polarity. For example, Gilbert goes out of her way to point out that ideas can be in the ether and lead to "multiple discovery" but also early in the book makes much of the fact that an idea for a book she abandoned passed on to Ann Patchett (possibly through a well-timed kiss at a conference). It left her (Gilbert) and moved to Patchett. That was big. That was magic. That was amazing. But why not ideas in the ether there? Why the transfer instead of multiple discovery? Gilbert would likely wave away the objection. Keep traveling on. Not let it slow her down. And indeed, next to the joy, she is best when she is talking about being good enough. Being done instead of perfect. It's a method that has gotten her far. 

She is likely to embrace a changed point-of-view, even midway through the book. After all, she is capable of radical change, seemingly overnight. In the book she describes how she learned to deal with fear by realizing, at one point, that it was boring to be driven by fear. Poof. Like that, it was gone! Not the fear, but the hold it had on her. 

In a 2015 New York Times article, Confessions of a Seduction Addict, Gilbert writes, "There is no way to stop a destructive behavior, except to stop." And so that is what she does. She is the writer giving advice who cannot not write. She is the scared teenager, suddenly brave. She is a writer-trickster. She is a shape-shifter, on the page and in real life. We've seen that—from the barest outlines of her biography, right? Yet she has always been committed to writing. As a teenager she took a vow, one of the only ones, it seems, she's been able to keep.

There’s certainly enchantment to spare in Big Magic. Plenty of inspiration for living your truth. And Liz is, let's face it, a great writer. Yet for those who have myriad commitments—other than writing—commitments they mean to keep, the path is not as insouciantly strewn with detours and contradictions.

Two writers in particularly, smaller writers, in some ways (and by that I only mean ones I wouldn’t refer to with an un-earned nickname of a first name I use for one who has perhaps gotten too big, too famous, become too much of a solipsistic cultural phenomenon) have been posed similar questions by their husband about not why but how they are writing, almost the same question, but in reverse.

At The Skeleton Club Kelly, describes a moment where her husband questions her daily blog posts. "Why write some obligatory blog post every night before bed, when you could take your time and write something better? Or get more sleep?" Kelly has many good reasons for writing on her blog, but admits the question bothers her as she is "already questioning [her] commitment to write."

Here, at Bread on the Water, Jeannette recounts the opposite dialogue. She reads out loud to her husband from her handwritten journal. He encourages her to post it publicly: "I think about it and then the day passes and the world's crazy energy swirls me around and I think how weak my words are and I leave them, just ink in my notebooks." She posts a picture of her journal writing instead.

Both writers wrestle with the question - not why they write, but here, how, in what medium. Both express a great deal of doubt. Both are caught up in the "world's crazy energy." Perhaps Liz Gilbert might say neither is focused enough on her own personal development and her own writing. Perhaps she might go further to venture a guess as to why: perhaps neither would be willing to radically alter her life based on truth a dedicated writing practice might expose.

I am intrigued with how others navigate the terrain between private and public, between "worth" spending time on (better) and not "worth" sharing with others. Jeannette offered the following advice, in response to my question along these lines:

“Inchoate ideas, however incipient or rudimentary, even they have roots...Exploring the fundaments of your current mindset, laying bare to yourself your full heritage and seeing, even experiencing, what it is you have covered over, abandoned or neglected to account for, such understudy can inform you in your journey forward and is likely to illuminate your chronicles. Some writing is like a mirror, some like a map. I try to be careful posting unless I have clarity about what I am reflecting and why. It is a great challenge, but then writers need to interact with people, that is to say, readers, and blogging is such an opportunity to do a sound check for resonance.”

Most of my writing remains in ink in my notebooks, as it should. Yet, on the other hand, I often write a blog post (now, would be a case in point) when it is not serving any larger goal, when I could instead spend my time, like Kelly's husband suggests, writing something better. And when I do post, it's often wrestling through  a feeling that seizes me, not a clarity of purpose about what I am communicating. I arrive at the end often still scattered, open-ended, questioning. ("Yes, that's exactly the problem" I can hear readers saying in their head right now. I am not giving you—at least I rarely do—a very clear "here's what to make of all this" anywhere in the post.) 

I share the uncertainty Kelly and Jeannette feel, in any media, the questioning, the wondering, the not knowing which path to follow, the struggle between desire for privacy and desire for communion. And I'm grateful for Gilbert, reminding me to not only indulge the wondering, but to follow the wonder, too.

Wonder seems personal, but there is that word, communion, that gives me pause. That question, Gilbert tries to straddle, never answers, about writing for yourself or for others. 

Kelly is undertaking a 365 blogging challenge, I believe, committing to post something every day, as Sarah did last year on One Blue Sail. And that turns writing—the little bit of it we grasp at daily, among the "world's crazy energy"—into a communal ritual of sorts. That sanctifies it. Daily writing for ourselves, ink in our notebooks, our Morning Pages, notes jotted in our journal at night, these can be sacred too. Yet as much as we want to go inward, something insists on reaching out, reaching for the light, reading Ecclesiastes: "Cast your bread upon the waters, for you will find it after many days."