The romance of writing is
that sudden flush of inspiration, when a story, character, or idea grabs hold
of your entire soul until you have to rush to your paper or keyboard and write
it down. “Romance” is the correct word to use, too, since it’s not hyperbolic
to call it a love affair. Sometimes it’s merely a crush, but at other times
it’s truly love at first sight: a woman whose eyes make you dream of being
better than you are, or a man whose voice gives you goosebumps when you imagine
him speaking your name. Anyone who writes can relate to that feeling, after
having written five or six pages in white-heat, when you look up from the page
and think, “my god, I’m actually a writer! I’m in the middle of writing a
book!” The whole world makes sense, or at least you do, as you float
through it, no longer seeing a distinction between the world outside your door
and the one in your mind. It’s all grist for the mill, raw material to
construct the elaborate castles and cathedrals of your imagination to stand for
all time.
And then it stops. You run
out of ideas. Or the scene no longer makes sense. Or the characters stop
talking to you. Somehow, inspiration drops off, like a lover who will no longer
return your calls. You look, anxiously, at the phone to see if a new message
has appeared or better yet, if the cryptic “. . . “ is hovering by the person’s
face. But waiting alone will never bring back the Muse. Once the well runs dry,
you can sit and wait in vain, but the words will never come. Not until you make
them start writing again. And that takes excruciating, often mind-altering
resolve which is beset by doubt and self-recrimination at every turn. No writer
has satisfactorily answered the question, how do you keep writing after
you’ve lost the inspiration to write?
For this is what truly
makes a writer. Everyone knows someone who “wrote” at some point. They have the
beginning of a novel. A few short stories. An unfinished screenplay. The rough
draft of a book which they haven’t glanced at in years (though they’re going
to, any day now). When you ask them why they haven’t finished it, the answer is
usually, “I just forgot about it,” or “I lost interest,” or “I just don’t have
time anymore.” Funny how all these statements can equally be said about a
failed relationship: “We just didn’t have time to spend together anymore, our
lives are too busy...I started taking him/her for granted...the magic just left
our relationship.” A serial monogamist is someone who simply can’t make the
time for a relationship, who doesn’t want to believe that love is as much
mundane as it is magical. For every day of beauty you have ten days of
drudgery. Some days you don’t even like your partner; some days he/she
completely despises you.
But a relationship isn’t
measured in single days or temporary failures. After fifteen years, if you can
look back and see the things you’ve built together, the tragedies you’ve
endured together, and have someone who despite it all is still there, still
willing to give you a hand, then that is a work of art. And the same is
true of writing. Some days you can’t write, some days the art seems too much
like toil, and you have to throw up your hands. Eventually, however, you have
to find your way back, a way to remember why you fell in love in the first
place, and who this mysterious person staring back at you like a stranger truly
is. What works, what ideas, what dreams, and what delusions first besotted your
thoughts? Love might be an illusion, but it’s an illusion that works—and the same
is true of writing. It creates a fiction that looks and functions the same as
reality, to the point that we often ask the question, does art imitate life or
life imitate art?
In Orhan Pamuk’s essay,
“The Implied Author,” he writes of the ease of losing touch with your work and
watching it slink out of your grasp. As he explains, “It is not difficult to
dream a book. I do this a lot, just as I spend a great deal of time imagining
myself as someone else. The difficult thing is to become your book’s implied
author. Perhaps all the more so in my case because I only want to write big,
thick, ambitious novels, and because I write so very slowly.”
What he means by this is
that when you start writing a work, you are the implied author, the
person who is ideally suited to write this book or story. However, life gets in
the way: you pay bills, you go to work or school, you have arguments, you watch
movies, you read other books. In short, you forget who you were when you
started writing. And just like love, you suddenly find yourself five years into
a relationship that neither party seems to have time for. So who were you when
you were the ideal, the perfect, the implied partner for that book? That’s how
you find your way back to inspiration—remembering the circumstances and
situations that first threw you together in the first place.
For me, the implied author
of my books is usually the person I am in the summer. For most of the year, I’m
the implied professor: I teach, I grade, I read, I plan future classes. Writing
comes in fits and starts, and it’s hard to enter fully into the world of play
and make-believe required of a serious novelist. Only when the classes fall
away and I lose my identity as a teacher can I begin to recall who I was—or who
I am—as a writer. When the sun becomes a bit more intense and the skies darken
to that pitiless shade of blue, then I can remember what it means to write a
book without ego or distractions. That’s when the book most calls to me, and I
am able to lose myself in characters and plots and metaphors.
Until then, I’m often
doomed to gaze at the work between panes of glass, seeing without touching,
learning without feeling. It all feels curiously abstract and distant. But of
course, that’s the best time to start hammering a work into shape—when you
don’t care for it at all. Perhaps that’s why we lose inspiration and fall out
of love with a work...so we can learn to love it all over again?
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