Im trying to figure out a way to get the natural, uncontrived, connected, joyful, spontaneous tone of my emails & Facebook comments into my stories. Because I cant abide the feeling of forcing, contriving, when I write....its torture to write and torture to read. With emails and FB I feel like Im part of a living conversation, a give and a take, a flow. All too often I sit down to write a story, a play, and feel as if Im in a vacuum, a deadended world of artifice. Why am I writing in the first place? Because I have something to say? Or because I want to make a splash, want to impress, merely want to prove to myself I still can do it? The latter is scarcely a worthy motive. Or is it? Whats the point in writing unless you have something of value to share with your reader? But how can you know in advance whether youre going to write something that has value for you or for any other reader? Theres never any guarantee. Youve just got to (gulp) jump in and hope there arent any sharks in the water, or that the sharks leave you in one piece. But some would argue that motives, or feelings about the process of writing, are irrelevant. ---The only thing that matters is the validity, the significance, the beauty, the truth, of the final product......the writing itself. That certainly makes sense from the readers POV. But from this writers POV, if the ACT of writing feels hideous, I can no more sustain it than I can saw off my hand with a rusty butterknife. If you look down this timeline youll see a video of a very very old Doris Lessing being told, by newsmen, that shes just won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Shes breathtakingly indifferent to the news. Wow. Heres a writer who has gotten WAY past a hunger for prizes and acclaim. For all I know, there was a time when the younger Doris yearned for recognition and acclaim, was motivated by them. But, as she says, Ive already won every prize in Europe. Whatever motivated the writing of her last books, it certainly wasnt a hunger for strokes. I find that almost incomprehensibly wonderful. On the other hand, her best books were written when she was younger, when perhaps she did still hunger for plaudits. I once asked a teacher of mine, Joe Heller, what motivated him. Fear of failure, he grinned. He didnt want to work selling ad space for Look Magazine forever. But he had a great subject back then, when he was a nobody. He had been a airman on B-17s bombing Germany, and it took him 15 years to figure out how to write about it. But nothing is ever sure, or given, in writing. After Heller wrote wonderful books like Catch-22 and Something Happened, he wrote a couple of books late in his life which read more like publishing deals than novels. They were forced, they were contrived, and who could have guessed, if he did not already know it, that they were written by the same man who had once written so brilliantly, so wittily, so incisively?
Posted on: Wed, 27 Nov 2013 17:33:58 +0000
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