emotions in motion

There is no sense, I have come to learn, in writing from the heart unless you are also willing to write from the edge. Semantically, it might well seem that there’s little difference between the two, but the difference is between merely writing honestly and, as Annie Dillard wrote, the willingness and courage to:

…spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place. Something more will arise for later, something better.

I’ve thought often of those words since I bought Dillard’s The Writing Life on April 26, 1992, at the old and dearly missed Woodland Park Bookstore in Lexington (sort of a pack rat like Hemingway, I save everything). Writers, of course, love reading as much about the act of creation as we do the work itself. Writing, by necessity, is lonely work for loners, and it’s something of a comfort to learn how others face the same challenges. It’s a way to not feel so…alone.

But it is also the writer’s solemn duty to control his or her emotions. Tears after writing are good; tears before writing are the quickest means to the god-awful embarrassment of simply writing for therapy as opposed to creating some new and hopefully strange form of art. Keep the former efforts in your personal journal and burn or delete them when you realize how trite they actually are; as for the others, sow them among the world.

Hemingway, it’s said, rewrote the ending of A Farewell To Arms thirty-two times. And yes, there are the manuscripts to prove it (probably with the greatest collection of his manuscripts in the John F. Kennedy library in Boston). He was searching, as we all are, for the greatest emotional control and impact; and of course, he found it, as Frederic Henry leaves the hospital in a daze, Catherine and their baby never to join him in life.

But after I had got them out and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn’t any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain…

the writing life

Writers, it seems, sometimes like to read about the act of writing as much as we enjoy the alchemy itself. The image of a young Hemingway in Paris is part of my consciousness; many, many years ago, A Moveable Feast became my standard of how a writer should work and live.

It was a pleasant cafe, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat above the bench and ordered a cafe au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write…

We know now that the mere act of sharpening pencils was part of Hemingway’s process for writing, a means to put himself in the right frame of mind for creating stories from memory and imagination. We each…procrastinate…a little before losing ourselves in the solitary and frequently frustrating act of writing. What writers don’t ordinarily admit, however, is that part of the delay is based on fear: fear that the writing won’t go well, that the feelings and stories we wish to express will evaporate before our eyes, that we lack the talent or vision to express what we secretly feel. Writing is a brave act, much more than what Fitzgerald wrote about “swimming underwater and holding your breath.” It’s an act of faith and hope and dreams, of laying your soul bare before the world. It’s a tightrope act, walking a wire without a net and never knowing if you’ll keep your balance or fall (and fail) in the attempt. It requires more than a little courage, not to mention the unshakable belief that the writer’s vision and belief is truly worth exploring. It’s not self-aggrandizement or justification;  it’s the eternal hope to make the reader feel, to touch someone’s heart and inspire that little glimmer of self-recognition in the stories we tell.

Annie Dillard, also, wrote eloquently of the process in her book The Writing Life:

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time.

So, hold nothing back, then.  Something else, Dillard writes, will occur to you later. It always does, in one form or another. To be able to write it well, though, requires a form of concentration, talent, and a sense of hope and wonder that most persons do not possess. I make no claims to the talent part. But I have never, ever, given up this thing we refer to as hope.