Since I've started writing, I've spent hours searching through other writers' thoughts on how they dealt with the ups and downs of their craft (all writers seem to have something to say on how to write). Within their words, I've found plenty of evidence against making a life of writing. The writing life is difficult, painstaking, and lonely, and a writer may never make a proper living of putting legions of words on paper. If you believe the words of the literary greats, each day a writer writes, he engages in a proverbial battle up Everest, pelted by hail and driving snow. I don't disagree that writing is a heavy, uphill task, but I have to remind myself that the men and women whose advice I read have accomplished that impossible deed. If they hadn't, I would not have discovered the whisperings of their advice hidden in cavities of the internet and in books where their essays on writing have been published.
Despite its difficulties, the reward of writing - being able to accurately distill life into a stack of bound papers - is worth the pain. The problem I've come directly across on many occasions is that much gets lost in the translation from life to page.
Thankfully I'm not the only one who suffers this problem, and that makes me feel much less alone in my endeavor. Ann Patchett describes that feeling well in "The Getaway Car," one of a collection of essays she published in a truly amazing book entitled, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage. She writes:
"This book I have not yet written one word of is a thing of indescribable beauty, unpredictable in its patterns, piercing in its color, so wild and loyal in its nature that my love for this book, and my faith in it as I track its lazy flight, is the single perfect joy in my life. It is the greatest novel in the history of literature, and I have thought it up, and all I have to do is put it down on paper and then everyone can see this beauty that I see. And so I do. When I can't think of another stall, when putting it off has actually become more painful than doing it, I reach up and pluck the butterfly from the air. I take it from the region of my head and press it down against my desk, and there, with my own hand, I kill it. It's not that I want to kill it, but it's the only way I can get something that is so three-dimensional onto the flat page....Everything that was beautiful about this living thing - all the color, the light and movement - is gone. What I'm left with is the dry husk of my friend, the broken body chipped, dismantled, and poorly reassembled. Dead. That's my book."
Writing is tough. To translate life, all its sensory beauty, subtelty and gut-felt joys and pains, into lines of text is difficult. To write a stunning love story fraught with true-to-life setbacks and forward leaps; to paint the deep and rippling discomfort flashing across the face of a friend just returned from war; to describe the tugging sensation of losing something in life you can never retrieve won't be easy. To do it properly, the writer has to rip open his soul and carve away the layers of nicety and affect with a sharp scalpel to find the messy feelings and realities they hide.
Ernest Hemingway, as he did so well, put it simply. "There is nothing to writing," he wrote. "All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."
No matter how I go about it, I know that writing won't be an easy undertaking. But the excitement that comes with the prospect of painting life with words is alluring and enticing. Even if nothing I write makes it to a shelf, I'll be happy to know I've tried my best to carve out and expand on even the tiniest section of the marvelous wonder that is the human experience. And if I am very lucky, maybe someday, someone will read something I've written on writing and it will help them as they prepare for their own battle up Everest.
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