Why I Write

“You may well ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many. For it is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people to desire to set down what they have witnessed for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely remote; or, if you please, just to get the sight out of their heads.”

--John Dowell, fictional narrator of Ford Maddox Ford's novel The Good Soldier

Early Saturday morning at about 3 a.m., I was sitting at my computer, its glowing screen the only light in the fully dark house, and I was typing away. Some people can't make it through the night without getting up to pee. Lately, I haven't been able to make it through the night without getting up to write. This morning, I woke again at 3, my brain in mad essay-writing mode, but I was stuck in bed: my father, who was here for an overnight visit, was asleep on the futon in the living room, and I didn't want to disturb him. So I lay there composing sentences in my head until 6, when I finally fell back asleep.

I've decided that I'm going to have to finish this essay I'm writing, if only to get the sight of it out of my head.

It also occurs to me that a sure-fire test of whether or not I'm passionate about what I'm writing is whether or not I'm getting up at some ridiculous hour to write whatever it is. I've always been a good sleeper – no, a great sleeper – and it takes a lot to get me out of my regular groove of eight to nine hours of blissful unconsciousness every night.

When I woke the first time this morning, I'd been having a dream in which I'd given birth to quadruplets, two boys and two girls. I have a total of four essays I plan to write in the next six months or so. Coincidence?

When I woke the second time (at 7:30, unfortunately), I'd been dreaming about a cat on a landing. In my dream house, there were two sets of stairs smack in the middle of my living space, both of which led to this landing, where the cat had taken up residence. The cat, sleek and self-satisfied, was licking its lips after having finished a big meal. It stretched and settled down for a nap. “That cat thinks it owns the place,” I thought to myself, but I could see why it was sleeping right in the middle of everything like that: the stairs were carpeted with bedding. A strip of pale blue sheet led like a runner up to the landing, where a blue patterned comforter padded the walls around the cat. I started walking up the stairs on the right, noting that the tree that was growing there was actually in a pot, which alarmed me: I realized I hadn't been watering it. But then I remembered that it had just rained. The tree was surviving just fine; I didn't need to care for it. “Even so,” I thought, “I'll give it a deep watering today, just to make sure.” Coincidence?

Oh yes, I forgot to mention: I have recurring dreams about houseplants and/or pets – usually cats – that I've forgotten about. In my nightmares, whatever I've neglected lives in the basement, down a set of stairs, behind a closed door I'm terrified of opening.

This brings me to another occupational hazard: writers see symbols everywhere. I'm deep into the process of writing a personal essay, which means I'm making all kinds of connections between the mundane and the significant, spinning everyday straw into gold. It's exciting. It's also a little bit scary: it feels like my brain has taken off without me.

One final oh-so-significant story, just to illustrate the extent of the problem:

After my daughter dragged me out of bed, I joined my dad in the living room. He'd pulled out his old high school yearbook (he was visiting us on the way back from his 45^th high school reunion) and the June 7, 1966 issue of Hanford Union High School's newspaper, The Meteor. There was an article on the front page about the top ten seniors (my father was one of them, but there was a black smudge over his face in the picture) and the graduation speakers.

Here's what the article said (I've changed names to initials – my father's are J.C. – but otherwise I've copied the text verbatim):

P.W. and J.C. were selected asthe [sic] senior speakers, following an elimination contest between four seniors who had volunteered to give speeches.

This new system of choosing the senior speakers came into being in an attempt to give equal opportunity to all of the top ten seniors who might choose to be graduation night speakers. The judges were local businessmen, so the outcome was the result of an entirely non-partial selection.

P.W.'s speech is entitled “The Identity Crisis”, and incorporates an awwrd [sic] winning poem by her classmate D.R. “The Gap Between Reality and the Ideal” is the title of J.C.'s speech.

K.G. and G.P. were the two speakers who were eliminated. K.G.'s speech revolved around the idea, “As we approach adulthood let us not lose the keeness [sic] and awareness of childhood.” The basic theme of G.P.'s speech was “Happiness”.

Why is this significant? Well, I'd have to write a whole essay to explain it. But just to give you the merest hint of the riches hidden in this banal passage, I'll leave you with a few pieces of the puzzle (and no, I'm not going to be putting this one together – I've got too many other things to write right now).

P.W., the girl who penned “The Identity Crisis”, grew up in a devout Methodist family, “the kind of folks who were always sending Bibles to Ghana” (this is the way my dad put it), and then, after going off to UCLA, turned on a dime “and started having boys sleep over at her place all the time.” Some time after this, she had a psychotic break. I still remember my dad talking about her after he got back from a reunion he went to when I was a teenager – he was shaken by how she'd changed to become a mere shell of the girl he'd known. She wasn't at this reunion. She's dead.

Of my father, I'll say only this: if there were a title that summed up what he seems to see as his life's struggle, the problem he was put on this planet to solve – we all have one, and adulthood is about putting a name to that face – it would be “The Gap Between Reality and the Ideal.”

And I can't help wondering: were those businessmen really so impartial? Why, when they listened to those four speeches, did they find themselves less moved by the speech about happiness and the speech about keeping the keenness and awareness of childhood? I imagine those men – I think of the lives they might have led – and I wonder if they may have chosen the speeches that correlated with their own experience of adulthood. I think they must have sensed, through that rousing rhetoric, that callow enthusiasm, a shadow of the disappointing truth to come. And this was a shadow they recognized, a truth they knew intimately: whenever they looked down, there it was, dogging their every weary step.

Then again, maybe I'm just crazy.

The Not-So-Terrible, Not-Exactly-Horrible, Kind of Good & Kind of Bad Day Off

I don't know whether today counts as a day off, exactly, since I've spent most of it writing like a maniac (and deleting like a maniac, too, but my essay did get longer by a page – single-spaced, I might add! – which means I must have written more than I deleted, right?)

However, on the off chance that someone out there is languishing due to lack of information on recent Tanya-related topics, I'll see if I have enough strength left in my wobbly wrists for a quick update.

Last Wednesday, I was stuck in a Black Donut Hole. Today, everything looks a little bit lighter – at least insofar as my current writing project is concerned. I may even finish it by the end of September, as planned, although that's probably being overly optimistic.

In other news, I read an article in the Willamette Week this morning that I don't even know what to do with. (With which I don't even know what to do, for all the preposition Nazis up with whom I sometimes find it hard to put. Aaaanyway....)

The article was about Tom Bissell (the name rang a tinkly little bell somewhere down the long hallway of memory when I first saw it on the WW cover), who happens to be, in Aaron Mesh's opinion, “Portland's finest writer.” So then it turns out that Bissell is the guy who wrote that article I read in Harper's way back in 2003, the one about the Aral Sea. Unless I'm mistaken, and there was more than one article on the Aral Sea in Harper's in 2003, which seems highly unlikely, not to say absurd, then Bissell wrote that sentence about the little Uzbeckistani kid with a head like a pumpkin, an image that has haunted me for years.

Then I find out that Bissell was born in 1974, which makes him exactly my age, and also that he was personally acquainted with David Foster Wallace, “the writer Bissell most obviously resembles.”

Continuing on with the uncanny coincidences, or at least what seemed like uncanny coincidences to me, “Two weeks ago, at Sellwood's former funeral home-turned-concert venue the Woods, Bissell stood on the small stage for the music and literature weekend This! Fest and read a story about a blowjob.”

Nope, I had nothing to do with the blowjob.

Here's the thing: I had fully intended to go to This! Fest. The Woods is within walking distance of my apartment, and the event was free, fer cripe's sake. I was dying to go. But Tyler had to work, which meant that I would have to have bribed my fourteen-year-old son to watch my three-year-old daughter (his usual fee is a jar of Nutella or a foot-long from Subway), walked up there, found somewhere to sit alone, tried not to feel like a complete dork among what I imagined would be a hip & savvy crowd of cronies for the one hour I might have at my disposal, sneaked out without offending whomever happened to be performing when my time was up, and walked back home in time to make dinner for everyone. So I didn't end up going after all.

There was something else in that article that really bothered me.

Bissell admits to having written almost all of his most recent book while he was under the influence of cocaine. So...okay, here we have another “relentlessly prolific” writer whose work I admire and whose habits I would not want to emulate.

But this is what really got me. After explaining that he “hopes” and “thinks” his substance-abuse “story” is “almost over” – WTF does he mean, almost?!? – Bissell says this: “I think the Grand Theft Auto chapter in Extra Lives is one of the best things I've ever written, and I would happily go through every drug-induced terror and self-mutilation to have written that piece. Seems to me like a very fair bargain.”

In some later entry, I'll probably say more about the Artist-as-Addict archetype, and the damage I think it does to those of us who feel driven to create art, in whatever form. But I think I've done enough writing for one day.

The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day Off

Today was supposed to be my day off.

That means I was under no obligation to conduct business of any kind. And I wasn't on the hook for child care, either.

Normally, a day off is a sure-fire mood boost. Today, not so much. Somehow it felt like everything went wrong – or not wrong, exactly, just not right.

For example, I had decided to treat myself to an afternoon of window-shopping downtown. So I walked the half-mile to the bus stop, and got there just in time to see the bus pulling away. So I waited for the next bus. When I could see it coming over the crest of the hill, I got out my wallet – and discovered I only had a $10 bill. As everyone knows, bus drivers don't make change. So, whether or not this was the most efficient solution, I walked all the way back home for dollar bills, then hoofed it back to the bus stop.

When I finally got downtown, I made the mistake of going into Buffalo Exchange, which was a madhouse. And although I can still pull clothes from the “small” rack, that doesn't mean they look good on me. I did find a cute pair of high-heeled boots, but they were $45 – out of the question, in other words. Then I decided to make things worse by going to Spartacus, where the outré lingerie failed to make me feel glamorous.

So I headed home by way of Voodoo Donuts. There was, as usual, a long line, and once again I wondered why they don't turn the sidewalk into a giant treadmill, so their customers can do some preventive calorie burning while they wait – and then, dismayed, realized I have become the sort of person who thinks about burning calories. Yep, I bought a bacon maple bar, which will no doubt end up as a permanent installation somewhere I really don't need it: bacon maple tummyroll, anyone?

The real problem with today, though, is yesterday.

Yesterday began well enough. I woke up and immediately began working on my essay, then went on a hike. Things started to go downhill as I went uphill.

In the time it took me to get from Timberline Lodge to the beginning of Mt. Hood's summer-diminished glacier, I had gone from feeling good about the morning's writing progress to mentally crafting a polite refusal to the Iowa Writers' Workshop: I regret to say that I will not be able to accept the Professorship you've so generously offered me – but I just can't move to the Midwest. I'm sure you can find some other famous essay writer to teach your nonfiction courses.

In other words, I fell off the wagon -- and I'm not talking about the donut.

You see, by the time I got back to my writing yesterday evening, I had turned the essay into a Really Big Deal, the Turning Point in my Writing Career, my Magnum Opus. Heavy stuff.

I just sat there looking at the screen, reading and re-reading the one page that's in anything like decent shape.

Today, I couldn't even bring myself to open the file. It seems that when an essay puts on too much weight, it turns into a Black Hole.

Chocolicious Allegory

It started with chocolate: a bar of chocolat au lait et noix de pecan, to be precise, which she had bought in a duty-free shop with the last of her euros. On the verge of breaking off a second square, she suddenly decided to give up chocolate altogether, and the whole bar went into the garbage. Later in the afternoon, she felt guilty about the waste and wondered if perhaps it wouldn’t have been better to break it up and distribute it amongst her co-workers. She eyed the basket in the corner of her cubicle and debated: she had told no one about throwing it away; she was fairly certain the other garbage was just paper scraps and a few pieces of the tape she was in the habit of rolling up into tight little cylinders which she squashed between her thumb and index finger until they lost all their stick; and even supposing there were a used kleenex she had forgotten about, the chocolate was still in its box, doubly protected and snugly hygienic thanks to the inner wrap of gold foil. However, this moment of weakness passed, and she spent the remainder of the work day illuminated by a gleaming halo of resolve. Had the man from the next cubicle looked around the partition, he would have seen the fine hair on her arms glittering as she deleted each of the three hundred and twenty-nine emails that had accrued in her absence.

When she arrived at the office the next day, she was pleased to note that the trash had, as usual, been emptied by the janitorial staff. There was no way for her to know that the bar of chocolate had been discovered and eaten, that in fact everything she was to throw away over the next few weeks, beginning with each item she had carefully culled from her pantry and discarded the night before because cocoa powder had been included in the list of ingredients, was fated to be consumed by someone or, in the case of her nearly-empty jar of body frosting, something. This particular irony, however, does not concern us.

What concerns us is the health of our heroine: after cutting out chocolate and sugar and alcoholic beverages and meat, first red then white, and wheat flour and peanuts and products processed in factories in which peanuts had also been processed, she was beginning to have trouble at the grocery store. She decided that it was enough to select one very specific thing to eliminate from her diet each day; in this way, she could move at a more leisurely pace toward starvation. But no sooner had she hit upon this method of prolonging the inevitable than a new problem arose: about three quarters of the way through the beans and legumes category, she realized that she had never tried black-eyed peas. There's no point in wondering how this woman could have lived through the thirty-seven years that had passed since her birth without ever having so much as tasted what is, after all, a traditional food in the southern United States. We must confront the same question that confronted her: How could she give up something she had never had? The obvious solution might occur to us, but it did not occur to her. She was still a novice at renunciation, and did not yet understand that all those abstract nouns -- possibility, sensation, novelty, experience -- can be jettisoned along with the lemons when your ship is sinking.

So began a different era, with a kind of exotic itemization: after taking care of the black eyed peas, there was still fried lotus root, acacia honey, escargot, toasted grasshoppers, and bird nest soup to try. Not even the specialty stores in her urban neighborhood carried all of these delicacies, so she was forced to quit her job and spend her entire savings traveling though other countries in search of the exotic foods she needed to taste before they could be plausibly given up. Being on the whole a concrete thinker, she never gave up stupidity or caprice or stubbornness, and thus could perhaps have gone on almost indefinitely, reaching extreme old age, if not sainthood, nourished in this haphazard way, but, to make a long story short, she acquired amoebic dysentery while sampling holy water from the Ganges, and, given her gaunt condition, her quick demise should not surprise us.

Review of Steven Pressfield's The War of Art

Two nights ago, as I contemplated beginning the first of four essays I intend to write in the next six months, I was feeling pretty panicked.

Fight-or-flight hormones were coursing through my veins. Of course, I knew it was no use fighting (with what, my computer keyboard?) or fleeing (aaaaagh, this essay's gonna kill me!), so I just sat there, frozen, while my uncooperative instincts duked it out in the pit of my stomach.

I've been clear with myself that these essays don't actually have to be any good, that my goal is merely to complete them, but my limbic system has apparently decided that this essay-writing business is serious threat to my survival. 

I finally managed to work for about an hour and a half, during which time I wrote a grand total of eleven sentences. Only the first six were any good. Even so, it was a relief to have begun.

It makes sense that, having just gone through this harrowing experience, I would want to reward myself yesterday with a field trip to Powell's bookstore, and that, while there, I would be immediately attracted to Steven Pressfield's The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles.

I read the whole thing yesterday in the time it took my daughter to watch Mulan (which also happens to be a story about a girl who must fight a battle).

Here are a few of my favorite (and, for me, most apropos) bits:

“Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.”

“Are you paralyzed by fear? That's a good sign....Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or a calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.”

“The Bagavad-Gita tells us we have a right only to our labor, not the fruits of our labor.”

“[T]he most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.”

“Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It's a gift to the world and every being in it. Don't cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you've got.”

And I'll quote in full Pressfield's companion piece to my last post, “No More Excuses” (his sub-heading is “A Professional Accepts No Excuses”):

The amateur, underestimating Resistance's cunning, permits the flu to keep him from his chapters; he believes the serpent's voice in his head that says mailing off that manuscript is more important than doing the day's work. 

 

The professional has learned better. He respects Resistance. He knows if he caves in today, no matter how plausible the pretext, he'll be twice as likely to cave in tomorrow. 

 

The professional knows that Resistance is like a telemarketer; if you so much as say hello, you're finished. The pro doesn't even pick up the phone. He stays at work.

I have only two bones to pick with Pressfield.

1. He's flagrantly guilty of conflating biological evolution with spiritual progress. Ironically, the dissertation I never wrote was going to be about this particular logical fallacy, a pernicious meme I dubbed Evolution teleologica. There was a time in my life when Pressfield would have made it into my rogue's gallery. But hey, I never did the work it would have taken to get this idea of mine out there, so who am I to criticize him for screwing up in this way?
2. In the middle section of the book, which is devoted to delineating the difference between the amateur and the professional, he advocates a single-mindedness of purpose, a focus on one's work, that can only be achieved at great cost to one's relationships. This is no skin off his nose; he's apparently divorced and childless. As an example of Resistance's clever but bankrupt rationalizations, he gives the following: “Our wife may really be in her eighth month of pregnancy; she may in truth need us at home....What Resistance leaves out, of course, is that all this means diddly. Tolstoy had thirteen kids and wrote War and Peace.” Well, Tolstoy may have been able to stick to his work schedule, but I'm guessing his wife wasn't able to do a damn thing other than pop out his progeny, especially with the kind of crappy support he was giving her.

On the whole, however, I felt like this book was just what I needed to read at this point in my process. Feeling inspired by his pep talk, I even managed to get in two hours of essay writing last night – after putting away the leftovers and washing the dishes and vacuuming the carpet and going through the whole bedtime routine with my daughter and negotiating with my son about his evening whereabouts....

So thank you, Steven Pressfield, for writing The War of Art – and thank you for not listening to your Resistance when it told you shouldn't write something literal and overt about the concept of Resistance -- that, as a fiction writer, you would do better to write a novel “in which the principles of Resistance were expressed as the fear a warrior feels.” Had you written that book, I would never have read it. I wouldn't have had the time.

No More Excuses

My friend Dave is a career counselor – and this is ironic, because his job is driving him nuts. For some time now, he's been thinking he ought to make a change, but it hasn't been clear what, exactly, he ought to do instead of what he's doing, or how this as-yet-unknown alternative thing is going to pay the bills.

Dave's predicament puts him in familiar territory: welcome to the land of Jarvikistan, where Tyler has just re-invented himself as a batik artist after ditching two careers, one in Landscape Architecture and one in Molecular Genetics, and Tanya is still dithering around about what she wants to be when she grows up, and fourteen-year-old Everest looks at his parents and thinks, “I am never going to be that lame.”

Recently, Dave came to Portland for a visit, and we had a little career counseling session. Tyler's advice, boiled down to its essence and served up with a stale Matzo, went something like, “So, stop kvetching and quit already.” Since I'm currently floundering with questions about what, if anything, I ought to do about supplementing the family coffers (my editing + Tyler's batik = not much $$$), I was a bit more compassionate.

But then Dave said something really strange: “You know, all this career stuff – I don't really care that much about it. When I think about what I really want to do, what's been left undone in my life, it's photography and playing the saxophone and learning to draw.”

I was floored. “Wait,” I said. “Your camera broke – what, two, three years ago? And you haven't gotten a new one?”

He acknowledged that this was so.

“And the saxophone – you don't even have a saxophone.”

No, he agreed, no saxophone. His parents had gotten him a clarinet when he was a teen, but he'd never really gotten into playing it.

“Well, have you ever signed up for an art class?”

No, he had not. “I've got art trauma,” he explained.

Apparently, way back in first grade, the teacher at the Catholic school he'd attended had somehow managed to convince him that he didn't have an artistic bone in his body. When little Dave colored his pumpkin purple instead of orange, Sister Adela did not approve. When little Dave ran out of space underneath his picture and had to write the last few letters of his name up the side of the page, Sister Adela was not pleased.

“Sounds like you need a whole box of purple crayons,” said Tyler.

“You can draw in my new coloring book,” said 3-year-old Ravenna. “It has ponies in it!”

Which brings me to my pithy point of the day:

When we look at the excuses other people make about why they keep not doing the things they say they want to do, it's obvious if they're making mountains out of molehills. However, when it comes to surmounting our own obstacles, we always act like we're going to have to spend our entire life savings on high-tech climbing gear. And we'll probably spend years thumbing through REI catalogs before we finally see that we can just step over whatever's in our way.

I think we talked Dave into taking an art class.

As for me – well, it may be time to write those essays I've been meaning to write for, um, years.

So, anyone know where I can find a pair of crampons? You know, those things you strap to your hiking boots when you have to get past a wall of sheer ice? 'Cause I think I'm going to need them.