The Passion for the Job, part 2

How do you keep going as a writer? (Again)

How do you keep going as a writer?

Part 1 of this post covered my first-order answer: you re-inspire yourself, day after day. You find the fire for the work that is totally divorced from the current age, the current literary or publishing landscape, the current zeitgeist. Then you sit down to the writing yet again.

From there, I promised more about the concrete craft advice in Alice McDermott’s What About the Baby?.¹

In the book, Alice tells us not to write with a point to be made, neither in our storytelling nor in our character conception. She tells us to concern ourselves with speaking in our sentences, not with dazzling. She tells us to embrace exposition. That a few lines of exposition create the drama that we use to enter the scene.

She says more than this, too. But the best of even the hard craft wisdom always boils down to that all-important question: what will re-inspire you to sit down again to the work? What sparks the sentence or the new idea that unlocks the next sentence or new idea, what makes you believe this endeavor is worth returning to, what solves the problem that is the blockade between you and writing?

George Saunders calls this line of questioning “a finger pointing at the moon.” What small, matte, banal observation gets you moving toward the big ineffable celestial thing you are creating?

I love the hard craft lessons. I seek them daily and will share them here weekly. Yet I come back to only one question, and it’s, What will re-commit me? I’ve tried it most every other way over the past 15 years of both success and disappointment as a writer, and I’ve concluded that this is the only approach that works and the only one that matters.

What follows are some fingers pointing at the moon.

Photo by Felipe Dias on Unsplash

A point to be made

“There are many things that must be locked out of the room” when we are writing, Alice says. “But chief among them is a point to be made.”

There are a few big blockades that I’ve encountered when it comes to writing.

One is the question of whether the work matters, whether it’s big enough, whether it has a theme that will hang together, whether it’s relevant to the world today. Whether, in other words, it has a point.

These questions come up among my friends and students all the time. They’ve been somewhat less bothersome to me, because I have an inherent commitment to the idea that I can’t help but respond to the world today and to create a theme. I live in the world today, for better and for worse. And I’m human, a species that’s incredibly good at going from the concrete (my grandmother’s ring) to the abstract (family, inheritance, history). What we’re not good at is going the other way. (Family, inheritance, history leads to…my grandmother’s ring?)

Which means the bigger and much harder challenge doesn’t lie in actively responding to the world and thematizing our work. The bigger challenge is not doing so.

It’s also the bigger gift. Our minds get to be free in our own fiction, if nowhere else, to roam among the subjects we want to think about rather than those we’re told we ought to think about. If in our daily lives we have to consider the groceries and which doctor is in-network and the news cycle and the in-law’s shower we really should go to, in our fiction we get to consider the spiritual and aesthetic and philosophical and esoteric and whimsical and somatic. That’s the gift.

Flannery O’Connor says it simply: “Wouldn’t it be better for you to discover a meaning in what you write than to impose one? Nothing you write will lack meaning because the meaning is in you.”

Alice supplies the less-lofty reason:

to hell with your ideas and philosophies and points to make, what about the human beings you have brought to life with your words? What about your characters, their joys and sorrows, triumphs, failings, hopes? What about the baby?

This is the title of her book. It’s that important. She’s talking here about a story in which the baby character is in peril, and certain members of its book group are discussing the story’s theme.

Who cares about the theme, she says. Who cares about your political points, for which fiction is the wrong venue anyway? What matters is the creature you’ve created on the page.

I call this taking your premise seriously. If your premise is, at base, that these are real characters whose fates the reader should care about, then your first job is to tell their story.

I think this can be relieving, at times. You don’t need some grand unifying theory. All you need is to tell these people’s stories.

However you can.

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Of course, the way you tell a story may be via digression, big swings or swerves in the narrative gaze, a very indirect way of telling me what happened to that baby. In my own reading and writing of late, I’ve been most interested in big movements in the narrative gaze. (More on this soon.)

Alice’s point here is only that, if you want your reader to care, you can’t forget the beating heart you’ve brought onto the page, no matter how tiny. Always return there.

In a fantastic New Yorker essay called “The Box and the Keyhole,” Brad Leithauser articulates something similar:

The thing to worry about was that in learning to read like a critic she [my daughter] would lose the ability to read as a child—for that’s every legitimate critic’s worry. The child glances at a puppet and instinctively inserts into its wooden chest a miniature, fervent, tripping heart.

Don’t forget that, in your writing, you’ve created a miniature, fervent, tripping heart. Treat it tenderly.

There is a different thread of writing advice, which says you should pin your character against the wall, drive them higher up the tree, generally treat them badly. Fair enough; the world you make for your character, or the adaptations they’ve built for it, may be rough on them. Therein lies conflict.

But I’m convinced that a good writer wants their characters to make it through. Even their “bad” characters, those doomed to fail. Saunders says you must “cross-paint” even your worst character with “contradictory information,” a stroke of good. You must, in other words, see them as human.

Of course, good and compelling writing is not all about character. I might argue it’s all about voice. In my own writing, I often feel that plot and suspense are the Trojan horse through which I create an idiosyncratic voice, a worldview and set of wisdom claims that are new and unexpected.

That is, through which I create a skewed, sideways, human little heart.

Dazzling and deflecting

So: we as writers avoid a point to be made at the level of plot, theme, character. We might think of these as the macro level of the story. Ultimately, any point to be made is self-conscious. It is the writer inserting herself into the meaning of the story, when her job is only to tell a story from which the reader makes the meaning.

In much the same way that we avoid the point to be made at the macro level of story and plot, we also avoid it at the micro level of the sentence.

Often, at the level of the sentence, the point to be made is that we are brilliant writers.

Back to Alice, this time from her Art of Fiction interview in The Paris Review:

As a writer, I also see sentence-making as the ultimate test of authorial ego. As soon as a sentence calls attention to itself, demonstrates how clever the author is, how astute, how talented, I know something’s gone wrong. The writer is no longer at the service of her words, the words are serving the writer. …A sentence that seeks to dazzle is merely annoying. A sentence that dazzles even as it deflects our amazement, graciously leading us to the next, is a sentence worth keeping.

To describe the phenomenon of sentences that seek to dazzle vs. deflect, I talk about prose that I find laminated. It may have a beautiful sheen, but I bounce right off it. I can’t sink in and lose myself in the voice and the world of the story.

I want the prose I read to be permeable. I want to be able to sink in.

This is the foundational magic of writing, the thing prose can do that TV and movies can’t: speak in a voice that I sink into.

At this point in my life, the way I choose books is by wandering into a used bookstore or opening a Little Free Library and reading the first sentence. Sometimes the first paragraph. I can tell immediately if the prose is laminated or permeable. If I bounce off, I put the book down. No matter how highly praised it may be. If I can sink into its first paragraph, I can almost certainly read the whole book.

A lot of contemporary fiction is laminated, I find, especially—ironically—the contemporary fiction praised as lyrical. The books I’ll cover in this Substack are universally the un-laminated. They are the only ones I read.

There is a real degree of subjectivity, of course, in what’s laminated and what’s permeable. This is to be expected. What’s important is that we don’t learn to falsify our own sense of the laminated to accord with someone else’s insistence on what good prose is. Trust yourself in what you choose to read, which is what you will hear in your head when you write. Feel free to put books down.

Instead of dazzling, Alice says, with “linguistic somersaults or headstands,” we should seek “the inadvertent and the innovative, the bit of stumbled-upon magic, the voice never before tried, the beauty that appears only as aftereffect.”

How do you keep going as a writer? You stay open to that stumbled-upon magic, no matter how otherwise hard the work may be or cynical the world may make you. You keep finding the stuff that compels you to the page like there’s something sublime to be found there in its beating little heart.

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*Subscribers will hear more about What About the Baby? throughout this Substack. And about other great writers who keep going.

**I’ll actually be introducing Alice at an event on Monday night. Will add new wisdoms I come upon for paid subscribers.

Want small-group guided writing, accountability, and inspiration for your long-term writing goals? Join The Lab now.

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One last thought

Among the elements that we might find to be permeable, un-laminated, good storytelling—if we allow ourselves—is