On Killing The Writer
It’s an odd, uncomfortable fact of the writing process that you can give a book your all – your absolute, no-holding-back, emergency-supplies-and-all best – and still produce something a bit shit.
And sometimes you scribble something out on the back of a receipt while waiting for a change of flights in an airport at 3am and it leads you to one of your most popular pieces.
Sometimes, inexplicably, these positions are reversed.
And you never really know – not really – until you put the thing out into the world and all sorts of forces of fate and whim and yes, societal prejudice and friends in high places and allies and strangers and deep algorithms opaque now even to their creators begin to act upon it.
It’s understandable, then, that writers often find the business of organising words for profit stressful. It’s a long, long journey from blank page to finished novel, and the very nature of creation means that your route – and what you encounter along the way – won’t be quite like anyone else’s. And you might trek all that way just to find – instead of the wondrous magical glade in your vision – a rusting tin bath with a dead fox floating in it.
All the cute homilies in the world can’t disguise that this possibility is ever-present when we set out to write, and no matter how far you get in your career, it never really goes away, though we may guard against it by embarking on increasingly modest journeys, heading for landmarks already in sight, visiting spots already marked out by our fellow wanderers, posing on the mountaintop and cropping out the ski-lift.
Some authors take the ‘what can I say? It’s tough, kid’ approach, perhaps hoping that playing the gruff sensei will scare off all but the truly committed, perhaps doubtful of their own path and keen for others to pursue something with less ontological instability – that horrible, embarrassing quicksand of the heart that says ‘I’m not a real writer’.
(why do so few writers feel like writers? Well, it may be because writing is an event, not an identity. Produce an acclaimed piece of work, and very soon the praise it receives is for a past version of you, one who no longer exists. Becoming ‘a writer’ is at once trivially simple and impossible.)
I think – in fact it’s developed into something stronger than a ‘thought’, closer to an article of faith – that writing is more interesting than an identity. More vital, too, than just another hustle. That’s not to say that its practitioners are some rarefied breed aloof from the mass of humanity – on the contrary, there is nothing special about those who write at all, save the inalienable unrepeatable magnificent uniqueness that is every human’s birthright. To misidentify as a mere ‘writer’ is to constrain your own miracle.
Writing, on the other hand, or – both more and less particularly – the act of creation, can be joyous, rewarding, empowering and mind-altering. It’s what I witness in my 2 year old daughter, Suki, when she colours, or sings improvised songs, or dances with her eyes closed. She doesn’t wait to be given permission. She doesn’t ask afterwards for approval (though of course I give it often, and wholeheartedly). She knows intuitively that to create, to express, is pleasurable, transporting, a source of joy in her and others.
Some of the inhibition that comes with age is organic – the brain does not fully mature till around 25, and as improved regulatory functions come online so our wilder self-expressive, creative impulses come under the cosh of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. The price we pay for greater executive control, social awareness and long-term planning is a chorus of peremptory voices warning us of all the reasons the visions and yearnings inside us are flawed, unwise or just plain bad.
The rest of our critical, self-censoring impulses are learned, shaped and reinforced by group norms. Fear of ostracism is hardwired into us as a social species. We use language not only to share and store information, but for what anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski termed ‘phatic communion’. That is, for bonding.
When we write, we’re taking the very glue that holds human society together, this substance that can give people visions, alter their heart rate and stimulate the release of powerful neurotransmitters like oxytocin which make us feel more trusting to those around us, and we’re hijacking it for recreation. Small wonder that our brains and communities seek to rein in the wilder revels of our imagination.
If this all seems like fanciful guff then I absolutely agree. One should always be on guard when dealing with a storyteller. The writer, like the heart, is deceitful above all things. Even unto ourselves. The beguiling narrative, the pleasing pattern running through the havoc of the universe – we harvest these phenomena and we call them truth.
This is what is so liberating about writing, truly writing, without a thought for posterity or even an audience. To write joyous nonsense, to list imaginary restaurant names, to write fanfic, to write transgressive filth or raw, tender sentimentalism, redgold fantasies of crab planets orbited by ships of clay, memories of childhood not worked into charming lyrical prose but sunken into the ground as markers for the author alone, to express anger and joy and lust and worship and gratitude, all of which may be shameful in different contexts, to ride consciousness itself, something which may only exist, for us, in this tiny corner of the universe, for this tiny sliver of time, and not know where you’re going with it, or why.
I do not imagine myself made of some higher, rarefied stuff because I’m a writer. I need to eat. I have bills to pay and a longing for acceptance like most everybody else.
But when I’m writing, creating like my daughter creates, asking not ‘will people like this?’, ‘am I mucking this up?’ – yes/no questions that never yield anything more than a temporary stay of execution – but ‘what might happen next?’, ‘what happens if I put these two words together?’, well. It’s a rapturous, expansive, deeply fun experience.
Decoupling process from product is itself a process. Life is managed, not solved. Some days we crave the safety of the trophy cabinet over the excitement and possibility of the pitch.
But when we remember, amongst all the discourse, and the admin, and the manoeuvring to protect ourselves from the pain of rejection, that creation is an end in itself, perhaps the strangest and most miraculous accidents of this unlikely universe – the shaping of new things, directed by conscious intent – then sitting down before the blank page no longer feels like a daunting test of character. Instead, it’s a sort of holy-silly act of gratitude. Whether the output delights others is very much a sideshow.
I hope you remember to be bold when you write. To not wait for the permission no one is qualified to give. Writing should cost you something. It should make explosions that cause those in an adjacent room to look up, alarmed. The page is not a court of law but a sparring pit. Your authority as a storyteller will not be tried by a jury but strengthened in a series of battles. The moment your attention drifts to how loud the crowd is cheering, that’s when you’re about to be laid out in the sawdust, baffled and dismayed.
Writing becomes easier, lighter, more joyful when you give up being a writer. Effort spent defending that identity is ultimately wasted. None of us are writers, really. We’re so much more interesting.
Every sentence you write, every moment you imagine and commit to the page, is, I think, a small victory for mischief. Whether this has any instrumental effect on the universe is a question for the mystics, but it undoubtedly has an effect on you. The fMRI scans of habitual and novice writers while writing show up quite different regions of the brain. Creative writing changes how you think, reshaping your brain in the process.
Finding a readership, shifting units, feeling like A Writer – these, I think, are the least meaningful, least rewarding aspects of making shit up. Once you let them go, and accept you are enough – you have always been abundantly enough – you’re free to get on with the serious business of having fun. Of creating joyously.
Of communion.
