Today I'm drinking a cup of actual caffeinated coffee. The gross instant kind. Sometimes a little real caffeine will make the headache go away. This morning I read a piece in my inbox that grabbed me hard and punched my head awake. I so love reading writing that makes me wake up, all the way up. Makes me pay attention- makes me swear out loud. I love when my inbox has these gifts that shape my day, change the way I see something, lodge all the way inside me. Reading other writers, and writers I know, makes my writing stronger. Makes me itch to get the pen to paper. Makes me want to write big and bold and loud.
My friend E has inspired my thinking this morning. She's made me think about who we read and why. And a good number of other things but for now- I'm thinking about who we choose to read. Books on writing often tell us to read other writers. I read a very good writing book last year that alternately inspired me and made me want to break all my pencils, or maybe his. He wanted us to read all of the great writers. All of them. There were pages and pages with lists of names and books we needed to read in order to write well. We also needed to let go of everything else in our lives in order to write, including our children. If we didn't, we shouldn't bother writing. We should take up needlepoint instead. Or television. Not unlike Rilke's Letters To a Young Poet- (1903) which is beautiful and in some ways timeless and has some wonderful advice about writing and life but is for me, fundamentally flawed. Rilke felt that if one could live without writing, one shouldn't write at all.
I have that compulsive feeling about writing, that if I didn't I'd be crazy (because that is my experience), that if I don't put pen to page my life is flat and colorless and doesn't make sense and I wouldn't want to live without writing. And I do want a writing life; I want to live as though writing was the most important thing. But my children are grown now. And they suffered as it was for the writing I did. I can't imagine what their lives would have been like if I'd written to the exclusion of everything else. And in order to raise them I had to work more jobs that fit in the hours of my day. I couldn't afford to spend a lot of time writing.
I'm 52 now and can choose to make writing the most important thing and I do. The imperative command that writing must consume us or we cannot be writers, that we must follow in the footsteps of long dead writers (many of whom were old white men and are now long dead ) or we can't be "serious writers" or "good writers" is wrong. I say that because I know it to be true. Writing belongs to me and belongs to you. I've read brilliant, crack you open while you sit at the table and try not to cry or yell or scream out loud writing by young people who haven't read much at all. Young men and women who don't know anything about grammar or punctuation and their writing is good writing. Unique and sometimes raw and achingly beautiful. You'd have to be dead to miss it's power, right there on the page.
Writing and reading and thinking and feeling and creativity belong to us. No-one gets to tell us how to do it or if we can or how we can. That's why any book that makes you doubt yourself should go back on the book shelf. Any how to write book that tells you why you are a bad writer is questionable. Being challenged is good, being inspired is good but not if it the result is your own silencing. Isn't there enough shhh in the world already? Haven't we been quiet enough?
I get to choose what I write and how and when and I get to choose what I read. What I read should make me want to write if that's why I'm reading. Otherwise we get to read anything we like. It can be literature or science fiction or both. It can be anything that brings you pleasure. Not everything we set aside to read must be a dead writer's work. And I would disagree with those who insist that if we we want to write well we must imprint ourselves with the writing style of long dead writers. It's a valid choice but not the only choice. And it is a choice not an imperative. My most hated writing assignment in (what was that class called anyway?) in my line up of English lit classes was to write in the style of another writer. I dreaded that assignment. My story was The Jilting of Granny Weatherall by Katherine Anne Porter. It was published in 1930.I liked her story. My finished product was a good short story. It managed to be in the style of Porter and in the style of me at the same time. I still would have rather had a different assignment. I wasn't ruined as a writer by that assignment. It might have even improved my writing, I'll never know but was it necessary to my writing? No. As long as we have these artificial rules about what steps we have to follow in order to write, and what authors we have to read and what degrees we have to have, writing will never belong to everyone. Writing will still be something that belongs to an elite group. I want to read what you have to say. I like to read the graffiti on the walls and the poetry in the funky, black walled bathroom at the Med where Ginsburg wrote Howl. I liked Howl. I also like the poetry in the bathroom and one doesn't have to be inherently better than the other. It's writing. We like it or we don't.
I am inspired and influenced all the time by writers- most often by writers I write with and writers I know. If you've sent me writing I've been inspired and influenced by your writing. It's impossible not to be and I'm grateful that this makes my own writing richer.
I don't apologize for what I choose to read and I won't read anyone I don't want to. I have a limited number of days on this planet and I read who I like. My favorite way to read these days, while I'm working on the book is to go into the library and wander through different sections and pick books at random and take them home. I'm avoiding the genres that are like what I am writing while I'm writing the book. I don't want to be influenced just in this moment in by a writer in a similar genre. I'm liking the picking of random books. Some I am loving and are not books I would have picked with my eyes open. So I get to be surprised. I get different styles of writing. I get a different window on the world, or worlds I am reading about.
That's a long way from a young me who read everything. Who read all the classics that her grandmother shipped to her before she was in middle school. I once wanted to read the entire library starting at A and ending at Z. Life got in the way. Now I read what I like. I look on your bookshelves and see what you read and the books that look worn down and well read- I write those titles and authors down. I listen to what people tell me about why they love what they are reading. I read those books. If I don't like them I stop reading. That's new. That comes from paying attention to exactly how old I am and factoring in all of the things I want to do before my life is over. When I was young if I started a book, I finished it. But books were my religion then. Books taught me how to have a moral code and now to act. And those books? Those books were detective books which made me an odd sort of person, but a better person than I'd be without them. I needed a counterweight to the things my parents were teaching me about who I had to be, about truth that was lies and lies that were truth. I learned about honor, about doing the right thing even if it was hard, from a fictional character named Spenser, written by Robert B Parker. I cried when Parker died, a lot harder than I cried when my father died. Because he helped raise me. This mystery writer that I had access to when I didn't have access to a library. There were times when libraries were too dangerous to allow me into and I was young enough to control completely. So I read my father's fiction. Better than living the fictions he taught me.
But that's just me and I'm the woman who had trouble sleeping last night because she felt like her dead mother was watching her from her collected ashes and bone, trapped in a black box, in a purple bag, wrapped up in the polka dot target bag. I'm the woman who hears her characters whispering to her and the voices of dead women telling her how to dust. But I do know this without a doubt. Your writing belongs to you. Your words are as valid as anyone else's words. You get to write if you choose to and it doesn't mean you have to renounce the rest of your life. You can marry the word and still have lovers and children and friends. You can have one job or two or more or no job. You can be schooled or not. You can read the poets or read the comics. You get to choose. You get to write. You have something already that you can't get at the bookstore or in school- your own unique experience, your own voice, your own stories real or imagined.
And that is enough of that.
The cat wants to know where the hell is his food, my characters are laughing at me because I haven't written the next part of their story and I need to take something more than coffee for this headache. My house is a disaster that needs one handed work because my burn isn't done healing. I have fliers that need making and posting to do.
Here is an excerpt from Rilke- who is worth reading even though I disagree with that fundamental idea bout writing belonging to you only if you will die without it-
You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have already asked others. You send them to journals. You compare them with other poems, and are upset when certain editorial offices reject your efforts. Now (since you’ve permitted me to give you advice) I ask you to abandon all this. You look outside yourself, and that above all else is something you should not do just now. Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There’s only one way to proceed. Go inside yourself. Explore the reason that compels you to write; test whether it stretches its roots into the deepest part of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would have to die if the opportunity to write were withheld from you. Above all else, ask yourself at your most silent hour of night: must I write? Dig inside yourself for a deep answer. And if the answer is yes, if it is possible for you to respond to this serious question with a strong and simple I must, then build your life on the basis of this necessity; your life, even at its most indifferent and attenuated, must become a sign and a witness for this compulsion.
Go deep inside yourself, live your life, write from that- don't compare yourself to other poets. I like that advice very much. What I don't like is that I read these words many times; they were often recommended to me by a trusted teacher and I came away agonizing over whether I should keep writing. I don't regret the reading or even the agonizing or the questioning, I regret that nobody told me to write anyway. Just write anyway. Because I didn't know enough then to do it on my own. And I did write anyway but always filled with doubt, always with guilt and always questioning my own right to the words.
A Sybil
Long before our time they called her old,
But she'd walk down the same road every day.
Her age became too much to say
In years — and, like a forest's, would be told
In centuries. She comes to stand at dusk —
Her spot each time the same — and to foretell.
She is a hollow, wrinkled husk,
Dark as a fire-gutted citadel.
She has to turn her flock of talking loose
Or it will grow too crowded to relieve.
Flapping and screaming, words are flying all
Around her. Then, returning home to roost,
They find a perch beneath her eyebrows' eaves,
And in that shadow wait for night to fall.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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She has to turn her flock of talking loose
Or it will grow too crowded to relieve.
Flapping and screaming, words are flying all
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If only ______ I would write...or...I will write if...or I will write because....
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This is why I write...or...this is what I won't write...or...if I could just tell you
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My words are like....or... These words are like
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I leaned closer to try and hear her whisper. This is what she told me...
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I hope this day is good to you and your creative. If it isn't, be good to you and your creative anyway.
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