I'm sure I must have talked about Joy Williams' "Why I Write" more than once here, but I can't help bringing it up again, especially now that there's a podcast of her reading the full text at last year's Tin House Summer Conference. She sounds incredibly present here, and at some point along the way, ideas transmute into something else. Music is the only word I can think of.
An excerpt:
The writer must not really know what he is knowing, what he is learning to know when he writes, which is more than the knowing of it. A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the light. The writer is separate from his work but that’s all the writer is – what he writes. A writer must be smart but not too smart. He must be reckless and patient and daring and dull – for what is duller than writing, trying to write? And he must never care – caring spoils everything. It compromises the work. It shows the writers’ hand.
The writer doesn’t want to disclose or instruct or advocate, he wants to transmute and disturb. He cherishes the mystery, he cares for it like a fugitive in his cabin, his cave. He doesn’t want to talk it into giving itself up. He would never turn it in to the authorities, the mass mind. The writer is somewhat of a fugitive himself, actually. He wants to escape his time, the obligations of his time, and, by writing, transcend them. The writer does not like to follow orders, not even the orders of his own organizing intellect.
The writer doesn’t trust his enemies, of course, who are wrong about his writing, but he doesn’t trust his friends, either, who he hopes are right. The writer trusts nothing he writes – it should be too reckless and alive for that, it should be beautiful and menacing and slightly out of his control. It should want to live itself somehow.
6 comments:
lovely, Paul! and of course, right on. Like Joy Williams herself. Thanks for posting.
You're welcome, Lakin. :-)
I just listened to Joy Williams' reading. In a few minutes I am off to my memoir group -- committed to being reckless and alive and a bit out of control for the next few hours (although giving up the control is so difficult for me) Thanks.
Donna: a great prelude to any workshop, writing meeting, etc. It will be interesting to see whether you see a shift in your work and thinking.
I get everything about this except the thing about not caring. "Caring spoils the work."
I don't understand how you write without caring, much less how you write well without caring. So much terrible new writing seems to be careless, whereas this passage by JW strikes me as assiduously precise and, not care-ful, but caring.
Or is it, as my wonderful painting teacher used to say, that you can destroy your painting by being "precious" about what you've painted?
Christopher, I think Joy assumes that the condition of the writer is to care, and she's trying to speak to the notion that caring too much--putting too much energy into getting it right--can crush things. We all know what it's like to try too hard. Spontaneity gets lost in all that, and you're left with nothing but deliberateness. That's how I hear it, at least. Of course, it would be hard to bring this notion to the classroom, especially to a group of beginning writers.
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