Two types of writers
Pardon the pun. Both artefacts from the RI Museum!
There are two types of writers in the world: the ones who love writing, and the ones who don’t. I count myself firmly among the ‘Type B’ writers, the ones who would rather do just about anything than write. I often tell students just how much I dislike writing, not to shock or impress (or thin out the competition), but to answer as honestly as I can the question of ‘What do you enjoy about writing?’ that frequently comes up in readings and workshops. Of course, I caveat that there are many writers of the first variety – and that it’s certainly not a requirement to hate writing, to call yourself a writer. But I do.
‘Type A’ writers, I imagine (well aware that I may be projecting here), are the ones who’ve fallen in love with the act of writing itself. Writing comes easily to them; all they need is to enter a special writerly state, and let the words out on the page. It might be hard to get into the ‘flow’, sure, but once they do, it’s as easy as turning on the tap. Magic spills from their fingers. The muse speaks through them.
Well – good for them! I say this without spite, because I too would dearly love to love writing. For me and other ‘Type B’ writers, there’s nothing so terrifying as the blank page, and we have to come up with all sorts of rituals to trick ourselves into confronting it. Some of you will have heard me talk about how I used to drag myself to the same seat in the same coffeeshop every other Thursday at university (choosing one with spotty internet, to avoid the all-too-easy alternative of replying to emails) and force myself to put down the scratchy first draft of a poem before finishing a £2 flat white.
The problem is, it doesn’t get much easier after you’ve started. The first line (so difficult to get right) basically takes the wind out of your morning. And then you have to write the next one. By the tenth line I feel like I’ve finished an essay, and at the fourteenth I’m tempted to end things and call it a sonnet (I’ve caved, several times). On occasion, to avoid coming up with the next line, I go back and edit the first three, which then means I have to rework the rest, too. Arriving at the last line of a poem feels like a miracle, and I’m often too tired to tell if an ending works. Be kind to yourself, whispers the devil on my shoulder, and I shut my laptop and leave revising for another day.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s a privilege to write; to have space and quiet to spend a morning at the keyboard, hammering words into shape to approximate an understanding of the world. It’s also a privilege to enjoy the accoutrements of the writing life, which are rarely material in nature, yet still deeply rewarding: the opportunity to lend support to others, connect with readers, build international friendships, and teach (always a joy). But the writing itself – daunting enough – can feel closer to wrestling. And like wrestling, you don’t always win.
Why should this be? For me, there are two reasons. The first is that language, I find, is a slippery thing. It resists being held to scrutiny, or bent to purpose (at least, if you think language should follow meaning, and not the other way round). This is all the more so when the language we otherwise use in daily life – that of bureaucratic advisories and shopfront advertisements – seeks to control us, rather than allowing us to control it. In the first interview I ever did as a writer, I readily confessed to having a thesaurus beside me, anything to expand my arsenal against the brick wall of the page. These days, my toolkit relies more on form and rhythm than trying to stretch my vocabulary. But the basic challenge of having to flounder through language, towards an idea, remains.
The other reason has nothing to do with language itself, but with clarifying the idea in my head. Most writers, I’ve learned, begin working on a poem with only the foggiest outline of what it’ll end up saying. Here’s how I describe it to my students: we might begin with the ‘frame’ of an event/place/person that provides the starting-point for a poem, but just a partial sense of the full weight of meaning or signification that will be unrolled like a painting within that frame. An important part of the process allows the poem to be shaped along the way by what you might discover in researching it, or the demands of language (still strong enough, when wrestled under control, to tug meaning in different directions). And it takes considerable patience and effort to allow ourselves to be open to that process, to allow that we might not, in fact, know how a thing is best said. That we might never know.
If you, like me, are a ‘Type B’ writer, you’ve probably arrived at your own diagnosis of why writing is so hard – I’d love to hear about it! Otherwise, I hope you know that you’re not alone. There are plenty of us out there, and I daresay we outnumber the ‘Type A’s. Finding writing difficult is something that can give any writer a real crisis of confidence: how can I call myself a poet/novelist/translator/etc. if the poems/novels/translations aren’t coming naturally to me? Remember that good poems, and their impact on the worlds they inhabit, can be worth the effort. Remember to be kind to yourselves.