Writing to find out what you don’t want to know

Friday, August 2, 2019

“Write what you know,” goes the adage, but you don’t really know what you know until you write about it.

May Sarton: “I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose—to find out what I think, to know where I stand.”

Kathryn Schulz: “For me, the engine of writing is almost always ignorance. I write to figure out what I think.”

Adam Philips: “Anybody who writes knows you don’t simply write what you believe. You write to find out what you believe, or what you can afford to believe.”

James Baldwin (it’s his birthday today) went even further: “When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out.”)

The more I think about it the more it knocks me out.

It’s one thing to write to find out what you don’t know, but to write to find out what you don’t want to know takes guts.

“You’re finding out what you got,” George Saunders says, “and it might not be what you want to have.”

A one-armed miniature version

Monday, July 29, 2019

“Babies eat books. But they spit out wads of them that can be taped back together; and they are only babies for a couple of years, while writers live for decades; and it is terrible, but not very terrible.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World

Here is a six-year-old photo of Owen and me. A few days ago, at a signing, an expectant mother asked me if I had any advice. “Oh man. I don’t know,” I said. “That first year is rough. Just take it easy on yourself.” Then I thought about all the hours I spent trapped with a sleeping baby under my arm. “Try to find a one-armed miniature version of what you do!”

A negative approach

Tuesday, July 16, 2019

“I keep thinking that I shall have no more to say,” said philosopher Mary Midgley, “and then finding some wonderfully idiotic doctrine which I can contradict.” She admitted it was “a negative approach, as they say, but one that doesn’t seem to run out.”

She was 81 when she said that. She wrote well into her 90s.

This is what writing often is for me: Making a list of everything stupid and idiotic that someone else is saying and then sitting down and trying to articulate the exact opposite.

There. Now you know my secret!

A bag of words

Friday, June 21, 2019

In my favorite writing book, What It Is, Lynda Barry explains how to make a “Word Bag.” A word bag is basically just a bunch of words you like that you write down and stuff in a bag and pull out randomly when you need to begin a piece of writing and you’re not sure where to start. (Here’s Lynda, taking you through the exercise.)

This is pretty much how Ray Bradbury got started, too.

INTERVIEWER

In Zen in the Art of Writing, you wrote that early on in your career you made lists of nouns as a way to generate story ideas: the Jar, the Cistern, the Lake, the Skeleton. Do you still do this?

BRADBURY

Not as much, because I just automatically generate ideas now. But in the old days I knew I had to dredge my subconscious, and the nouns did this. I learned this early on. Three things are in your head: First, everything you have experienced from the day of your birth until right now. Every single second, every single hour, every single day. Then, how you reacted to those events in the minute of their happening, whether they were disastrous or joyful. Those are two things you have in your mind to give you material. Then, separate from the living experiences are all the art experiences you’ve had, the things you’ve learned from other writers, artists, poets, film directors, and composers. So all of this is in your mind as a fabulous mulch and you have to bring it out. How do you do that? I did it by making lists of nouns and then asking, What does each noun mean? You can go and make up your own list right now and it would be different than mine. The night. The crickets. The train whistle. The basement. The attic. The tennis shoes. The fireworks. All these things are very personal. Then, when you get the list down, you begin to word-associate around it. You ask, Why did I put this word down? What does it mean to me? Why did I put this noun down and not some other word? Do this and you’re on your way to being a good writer. You can’t write for other people. You can’t write for the left or the right, this religion or that religion, or this belief or that belief. You have to write the way you see things. I tell people, Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them. When I wrote Fahrenheit 451 I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are.

Here’s more from Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity, about about how these “long lines of nouns,” these lists, helped him figure out who he was as a writer:

These lists were the provocations, finally, that caused my better stuff to surface. I was feeling my way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of my skull… I was beginning to see a pattern in the list, in these words that I had simply flung forth on paper, trusting my subconscious to give bread, as it were, to the birds.

He encourages other writers that making “similar lists, dredged out of the lopsided of your brain, might well help you discover you, even as I flopped around and finally found me.”

(I talk more about the magic of making lists in chapter one of Keep Going.)

Finding something new to say

Monday, June 17, 2019

Our dear friends are letting us stay in their house and this is my office for the week. I plan to practice on that Wurlitzer every morning and read and write in that cozy chair.

I feel ready to start on The Next Book. Or at least, I feel ready to think about it.

I have been listening to Bill Callahan’s Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest on repeat. Here’s “Writing”:

It feels good to be writing again
Clear water flows from my pen
And it sure feels good to be writing again
I’m stuck in the high rapids as night closes in
It feels good to be singing again
Yeah, it sure feels good to be singing again
From the mountain and the mountain within

It’s been five years since the last album and it’s obvious that Callahan found something new to say. He got married. He had a kid. His folks died. And then he wrote these new songs about it all. “It feels good to be writing again…”

A reporter asked Erykah Badu why she wasn’t recording and this is what she said:

I just don’t have anything to say. As a songwriter, you have to kind of have something to say, something to record, something to ignite a conversation. I don’t have anything right now. I guess I’m uploading information. After that, we’ll see.

Finally! I thought to myself. Somebody just comes out and says it.

Input and output. Import and export.

I was reading another interview with Rob Delaney, recovering from the death of his son and wrapping up Catastrophe: “What he wants now is some time to sit and think about what to say next.”

Same here.