{"id":5623,"date":"2009-09-09T11:08:12","date_gmt":"2009-09-09T15:08:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=5623"},"modified":"2009-09-09T11:45:48","modified_gmt":"2009-09-09T15:45:48","slug":"private-writing-vs-public-having-written","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2009\/09\/private-writing-vs-public-having-written\/","title":{"rendered":"Private Writing<\/em> vs. Public Having-Written<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I<\/span>t’s twenty-five(ish) years ago. Lunchtime on a workday. Walking the landscaped grounds of a building especially constructed for the two to three thousand programmers, managers, and support staff — and giant mainframe computers, hard drives, and other hardware — in the service of what, for now, is still the world’s largest telephone company.<\/p>\n

I’ve got two buddies with me, let’s call them JB and JDS (not not *cough*<\/em> their real initials). All three of us have talked, sometimes, of Going Outside for a living. JB aspires to make and sell software and training for programmers to use while they themselves work to make software. JDS seems to like the ideas JB has, and has even offered to help — although he also seems more clearly destined to manage<\/em> people like JB and me. (He’s so level-headed; the other two of us never have more than one foot planted firmly on the ground.)<\/p>\n

Me? I’ve been telling them about the second annual week-long vacation from which I just returned: a vacation during which I went nowhere and did “nothing” except write stories, in longhand, stories which I then type up and file away. I tell them: I might try doing something like this fulltime someday<\/em>. (The “someday,” back then, is still four or five years in the future.)<\/p>\n

JDS is talking with me about practical matters — what would I live on, and where, like that — but JB has stopped in his tracks. JDS and I have actually gone a few steps further (the momentum of dreams, y’know) and have to turn around and go back for him.<\/p>\n

JB’s got a faint smile on his face. He looks at me.<\/p>\n

“What do you do?” he says to me.<\/p>\n

“You mean—?”<\/p>\n

“When you’re writing. What do you do?”<\/p>\n

“Uh…” I still don’t know what he’s talking about.<\/p>\n

“You just sit there in a chair,” he says, “and you pick up a pencil, and some paper—”<\/p>\n

“Well, yeah—”<\/p>\n

“…and then you… you just write<\/em>?”<\/p>\n

“Sure, yeah—”<\/p>\n

But he’s not listening to me. He’s laughing, softly. JB has two sorts of laughter: rarely, a short bark of derision when he’s feeling cynical; more often, when delighted beyond speech, a soft heh-heh-hff<\/em> sound. Today, at the thought of someone sitting at a table while fiction pours from the point of a pencil, today he is laughing the good way.<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I<\/span>t is a little odd, isn’t it? Hell, it’s a lot<\/em> odd.<\/p>\n

Luckily, I had never stopped to consider how bizarre the whole enterprise might be — the act of it, I mean. I remember being vaguely discomfited the first few times I sat at that card table. Okay<\/em>, I thought, I’m here. Writing… Writing<\/strong><\/em>… Uh… What about?… Well, suppose there’s this guy, and he’s on a train going to work, and he looks out the window and he sees — wait, better write this down before I forget it<\/em>…<\/p>\n

Eventually, I came to realize, I always do<\/em> forget it: not the story itself but the act of putting it to paper. There’s everything that happens when I’m “in writing” and then there’s everything that happens when I’m outside it. Two distinct psychological, even sensory states: in the former, for long bursts of time I don’t even see or feel the keyboard, barely see the words on the screen. You remember the old advice, Be sure brain is engaged before putting mouth in gear<\/em>? For me, writing’s the other way around. If I’m too conscious of the mechanics, the physical activity, my surroundings, I lock up completely.<\/p>\n

I’ve got to coast<\/em>. And that’s when fiction happens.<\/p>\n

—-<\/p>\n

O<\/span>ver the past few days, especially while reading writerly\/bookish blogs, I’ve noticed a tension not just in my head but in the heads of many writers — the tension between the acts of writing a story and sharing it.<\/p>\n

Is it a given that all of us imagine someone, sometime and somewhere, reading what we’ve written, and liking it? some stranger<\/em> especially, someone with no stake in the writer’s happiness or fortune? I think yes, that’s a given. (Even many a plain-old diarist experiences little thrills to think that someone might someday find his dusty journal buried in the rubble — find it, pry its little toy lock open, and read it, and weep with the recognition of their own tragedies in its pages.)<\/p>\n

DarcKnyt, last week, worried<\/a> about succeeding not with fiction, but with blogging. But many of the questions were the same: how do you find readers, and how do they find you? what do you do when you’ve found one another? how much should you care<\/em> about your readership, in the sense of tracking their numbers, being intermittently satisfied with same but mostly panicking when they zoom dramatically up or down? how important is it — whether or not you obsess about their numbers — that you hear from them? does the conversation need to be two-way?<\/p>\n

Over at writing in the water<\/em>, on<\/a> pretty<\/a> much<\/a> any<\/a> given<\/a> day<\/a> you can find its author chewing over a dilemma of art and\/or writing — mostly not a dilemma of technique but of mind<\/em>, of the things artists and writers do inside their heads which stop them from doing the things they’re “supposed” to do.<\/p>\n

Recently, The Intern delivered to her readers who also write some very bad news<\/a> (which we’ve secretly known all along): As a writer, you’ll never be happy for good. You know you can always be better: more talented, more successful, more, more, more.<\/em><\/p>\n

And yet… and yet…<\/p>\n

—-<\/p>\n

Y<\/span>esterday, Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast<\/em> presented an interview<\/a> with the author and the illustrator of a new kids’ book. If you haven’t already, set aside some time to hop over there. Bring a cup of coffee (etc.) of your own, and settle in. Take your time…<\/p>\n

Here are two creative people for whom the joy and wonder of creating<\/em> are almost indistinguishable from the experience of having-created<\/em>. Do they have perfect lives? Not a lot of people do, and I’m sure Liz Garton Scanlon and Marla Frazee have their moments of doubt and despair. But dang. These two love what they do<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Is it just because they’re creating for kids? (I don’t believe for a minute that this is easier than doing so for adults, by the way.) Is it just because they’ve hit some certain, maybe inexplicable level of success at it? Is it something else? A combination?<\/p>\n

And then there’s the home of the former Warrior Girl, now a Warrior Mama, whose proprietor just yesterday completed<\/a> what was, to me, an almost unimaginably ambitious program: to produce 100 art projects — works of art<\/em> — in 100 days. She’s feeling ambivalent, but mostly optimistic now that she reached that particular objective:<\/p>\n

I run out of energy sometimes. I get gloomy sometimes. Things don’t work out right and I get other things wrong sometimes, but this is where I am planted. The only way I know how to grow is one day at a time. One petal, one step, one painting at a time.<\/p>\n

It seems insurmmountable when you look at the big goal from the beginning. It looks inconsequential when you pay attention to only the single steps, and doesn’t seem like you are going anywhere. But when you start to add those days up, you can literally track your UNimpossible progress. You can see the logic of movement. You can understand how growth happens.<\/p>\n

And then when you reach your goal, the thing that once seemed so unreachable, you look back and think, “huh! that wasn’t so hard after all.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You know what? I think The Intern might not be 100% right about the whole thing after all. The dirty secret isn’t that it’s hard or impossible, that there’s always another challenge, that our labors go unrewarded, are for naught. No.<\/p>\n

The dirty secret which writers and artists keep to themselves, don’t share with the outside world, is this: <\/em><\/p>\n

We really <\/em>like doing what we do<\/em>.<\/p>\n

So then: Why do we like it? Why do you<\/em>? At the end of a writing session that’s gone well — any project born of sheer imagination and creativity and craft — what makes you grin to yourself as you look back at it? what makes you, to yourself only, shake your head and go, softly, heh-heh-hff<\/em>?<\/p>\n

[In the comments for this post only, if you’re shy about confessing any of this, feel free to use “Anonymous” as your name, together with some bogus email address.]<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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