Topical Guide 202
Mark Dorset
Writing: Beginning
Writers: Their Motivation
… as most people who can read do at some time or other, often in their youth, I began to want to write a book. And, as most people do who begin to want to write a book, especially those who begin to want to write a book in their youth, I wanted to write a book about myself. …
Had I simply been willing to admit all that, however, I would have written, had I managed to write a book at all, a chaotic, pointless, formless book, because I hadn’t more than the foggiest, inchoate notion of what I was like. It took nearly twenty years for me to discover what my books should be like …
What headaches I gave myself over this. What pits of despair I threw myself into. How difficult I was to live with. What a pest I was at parties.Little Follies, “Call Me Larry”
Of all the several ways of beginning a book which are now in practice throughout the known world, I am confident my own way of doing it is the best—I’m sure it is the most religious—for I begin with writing the first sentence—and trusting to almighty God for the second.
’Twould cure an author for ever of the fuss and folly of opening his street-door, and calling in his neighbours and friends, and kinsfolk, with the devil and all his imps, with their hammers and engines, etc., only to observe how one sentence of mine follows another, and how the plan follows the whole.
I wish you saw me half starting out of my chair, with what confidence, as I grasp the elbow of it, I look up, catching the idea, even sometimes before it half way reaches me—
I believe in my conscience I intercept many a thought which heaven intended for another man.Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
One of the things I’ve discovered about writing is that you have to sink way down to a level of hopelessness and desperation to find the book that you can write. . . . I think many novelists have this experience.
E. L. Doctorow, in Charles Ruas’s Conversations with American Writers
Repeatedly I took stabs at writing, but the results were so poor that I would tear up the sheets. I was striving for a level of expression that matched those of the novels I read. But I always somehow failed to get onto the page what I thought and felt. Failing at sustained narrative, I compromised by playing with single sentences and phrases.
My purpose was to capture a physical state or movement that carried a strong subjective impression, an accomplishment which seemed supremely worth struggling for. If I could fasten the mind of the reader upon words so firmly that he would forget words and be conscious only of his response, I felt that I would be in sight of knowing how to write narrative. I strove to master words, to make them disappear, to make them important by making them new, to make them melt into a rising spiral of emotional stimuli, each greater than the other, each feeding and reinforcing the other, and all ending in an emotional climax that would drench the reader with a sense of a new world. That was the single aim of my living.
Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. At this point many of you will remember with pleasure the large library which Jean Paul’s poor little schoolmaster Wutz gradually acquired by writing, himself, all the works whose titles interested him in book-fair catalogues; after all, he could not afford to buy them. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like. You, ladies and gentlemen, may regard this as a whimsical definition of a writer.
Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library” (translated by Harry Zohn)
A writer is, at the very least, two persons. He is the prosing man at his desk and a sort of valet who dogs him and does the living. There is a time when he is all valet looking for a master, i.e., the writer he is hopefully pursuing.
See also: Writer at Work, The TG 19
The evening’s short subject:
[more to come on Thursday, February 24, 2022]
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