Greil Marcus: Why I Write

I spent 40 minutes or so this morning watching and doodling Greil Marcus’s “Why I Write” lecture, recommended by Stephanie Zacharek as “deeply personal and… extraordinary. It may help anyone involved in any creative endeavor who’s feeling…stuck.”

It begins:

I write for fun. I write for play. I write for the play of words.

I write to discover what I want to say and how to say it.

And the nerve to say it.

The key word for me isn’t ‘fun,’ isn’t ‘play,’ but it’s ‘discover.’

I live for those moments when something appears on the page as if of its own volition, as if I had nothing to do with what is now looking at me in the face…

He then tells the story of the father who he never met, who was also named Greil. (Perhaps this is too obvious, but unless I missed something, he never explicitly points out that his name sounds like “grail,” or the mysterious thing which is eagerly pursued and sought after. In fact, if you try to type his name into your computer, spell check will correct it to “grail” — nominative determinism!) *

You can watch the whole thing on YouTube.

* I was struck by the autodidact’s curse here: I’d always read Greil as “Grail” and ignored all evidence to the contrary, though Greil emailed me and told me when his great-grandfather first emigrated from Prague to Alabama, the name was pronounced “grail” and changed to “greel,” so maybe I was onto something after all. (In talks, whenever I have to pronounce a name like “Brancusi,” I joke that I’m from Texas, so I’m allowed to mispronounce anything I want to.)

Here’s Stephen Harrigan (talking about his book, Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas) and a reproduction of one of Botticelli’s paintings of St. Augustine. (Like almost all writers, St. Augustine, too, wondered about the problem of how to begin. )

In my experience writing books, it isn’t just a “resistance” thing or a “perfectionist” thing or a fear thing, it’s more about research and wondering if you’ve done enough of it. Research becomes your way of procrastinating, because, let’s face it, research is just more fun than writing. (Me, personally, I became a professional writer so I could be a professional reader.)

Steven Johnson says the answer is to “research as you go”:

Email and social media and games are obvious distractions. In my experience, the more subtle threat – particularly for non-fiction writers – comes via the eminently reasonable belief that you’re not ready to start writing, because you haven’t finished your research yet.

And here’s David McCullough:

There’s an awful temptation to just keep on researching. There comes a point where you just have to stop, and start writing. When I began, I thought that the way one should work was to do all the research and then write the book. In time I began to understand that it’s when you start writing that you really find out what you don’t know and need to know.

Maybe that’s where fear comes in. As Greil Marcus put it in Lipstick Traces: