I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Wednesday Writing, I consider my writing practice and skills and how to improve upon them.
Even as I wish to be an art monster, and make tentative plans to (try to) sell my work at festivals next year, I default to writing. Writing was my first creative love.
When I was twelve or so, I wrote a letter to Piers Anthony, my favorite author. I didn’t care that he used sexist tropes such as if a woman is pretty she can’t be smart, and vice versa. I was enchanted by his storytelling, first in Split Infinity, which I read almost in its entirety in someone else’s den, waiting for the parents of the child I was babysitting to come home, then the other stories of the Blue Adept series, and then every other Anthony book I could check out from the library.
I told him, “I want to be a writer but I have no talent.”
He (or perhaps an assistant) wrote back: “If you have no talent then forget it.”
I didn’t start writing until maybe the year 2000, when I launched a mom blog. I found I did, in fact, have a talent for it. Once I started mom blogging I liked it so myself I started writing about technology, and that attracted the notice of other people who were also joining into the Web 2.0 world of publishing one’s self, not through a traditional media outlet. Through my writing, I got a professional blogging job and then a book contract. I wrote a book, but it wasn’t a book I wanted to write, like I want to write my memoir. It didn’t sell well. It was a bust, in most ways.
More important than talent, I had a drive to write as much as I could. I found it the most exciting thing I’d ever done. Writing was a way for me both to become more of who I was but also to overcome who I was.
Talent alone won’t produce anything of value in the world. Talent plus a drive to do the thing you want to do: that’s what creates magic.
Though maybe I am more talented a writer than a painter, still, I know more about finishing a painting than finishing a book.
I know that a painting can only be finished in the time it takes to finish that painting, not on any schedule.
I know that often the first version of a painting must be sacrificed for the painting that will be completed to emerge.
I know that while creating the painting I will at times feel like, in fact, I cannot paint and there is no reason for me to keep doing it, ever again.
I find in my accumulated manuscript of memoir snippets a need to cover over everything and start again, as I do when a painting has gone too far towards mayhem and meaninglessness.
Even though I wrote a book before, I don’t know how to write a book that is finished, that represents something I want to put out in the world. I don’t know how to achieve striking power in a book manuscript.
There is a unique freedom to creating a book, writes Annie Dillard in The Writing Life:
Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex that it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself….
The obverse of this freedom, of course, is that your work is so meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except you cares whether you do it well, or ever.
This is like painting. I do it in almost total freedom. I decide what (or how) I will paint. I select a canvas, a priming color (usually warm brown-black, the color of tree trunks in the mountains), an initial set of colors to work from. I don’t, in fact, pace myself. I just go paint when I feel inspired. At first a painting doesn’t flow, I don’t like it. At some point it may metamorphosize into a painting that I start to love and care for. Then I can’t stop going up to my loft and working on it. Sometimes after that I will make a change that destroys it. Then I must cover the painting over with my warm brown-black and start over, perhaps with the same idea, perhaps with a different one.
None of my paintings matter to anyone but me, and yet I paint them anyway, producing meaninglessness. Except they are meaningful to me–and I am a subject in the world, I count, don’t I?
I hope I can write a book that has meaning for more than just me.