Love Lifts the Pen, Discipline Sustains It
We first encounter the “writer” at a young age. This first encounter is vague. We are still questioning, still defining everything around us. Usually the encounter occurs when we’ve taken up a fascination with the concept of occupation. Firemen, librarians, babysitters, Mom, Dad, all have a different role and function. The writer may be too abstract at this stage for our limited comprehensive abilities, but assuming we all picked up a children’s book and found it interesting to some extent, even if only because of the pictures, I’d guess that, like I did, one imagines a magical being with creative energy shooting from their finger tips when they start to think of the “maker” of the text in their hands. This first perception becomes a stereotype in later life, and depending on upbringing and personality, can be attached to negative or positive attitudes toward reading and literature. The writer becomes elusive, untouchable, and specialized, even inhuman, or superhuman. The writer becomes a creature apart.
Academia carries this perception of the writer a step further, and away from the stereotype. Some scholars see “the creature apart” as one who exists on a higher plane. These scholars believe in the writer as if he is a prophet, having a closer relationship with divinity, and thus having easier access to inspiration. On the other hand there are those scholars who see the creature apart as a disciplined being. Here, I will briefly provide perspectives for examining my beginnings as a writer. This is useful not only for understanding that defining a writer is indeed a subjective matter of perspective but also because the writer too, when first becoming a writer, must choose what that role means for him, or her.
The Inspired Writer: “A Journey to Writerhood”
I was in the shower when I decided to be a writer. The next day I packed up a picnic and my dog, and drove to Luray, Virginia to meet up with my boyfriend. We drove towards the river, to the camping site where I’d often camped with my Dad and his buddies as a kid. When we were done there, we drove back towards the town of Luray. I drove off the road, onto gravel, more than once because I couldn’t keep my eyes off the mountains. The sun was folding its rays over the top of a chain of peaks as it sunk lower on the horizon, throwing sparkling confetti on a small lake as if bidding the world goodnight ceremoniously, as only the sun can. In spite of the sun’s flashy farewell my mind was wrapping itself tighter and tighter around the image of the mountains. Words and metaphors crashed into each other, repelling and attracting like tiny magnets.
Knarled hands. Clasped tight.
I realized that if I was going to be a writer I couldn’t let moments like this, I couldn’t let thoughts and words like these, fade from my recollection. I decided that as soon as I could I would buy a small notebook to keep with me always, so that when an image or an idea struck me, I could immediately write it down.
A few weeks passed and I found myself browsing the accessory shelves at the bookstore—a personal indulgence. I saw a shelf of notebooks and grabbed one that was small and plain. I wrote what I’d retained and some new things of the Luray memory.
hills, mountains,
slopes, peaks,
like Knarled
hands Clasped
together tight
encircled
soulful
sympathetic
protect and
support
*Luray (date unknown)
It was no poem to be sure, just ideas, for the future.
The Disciplined Writer: “Writing in ‘The Hood’”
In adolescence, during nights of angst and frustration, I’d often turn to one of the many empty, gift journals I’d received from relatives who didn’t really know me that well. I wrote fast and hard while the tears fell and evaporated with the heat of my angry, productive energy the moment they hit the page. As sun dawned the next day I reached for my journal and re-read what Id written the night before. Then, I would usually put it away from me with embarrassment– maybe rip the pages out and shred them, cross out my efforts with a sharpie, or hide the journal to avoid blackmail.
The idea that I had the depth and skill to be a writer always tickled the back of my mind as a result of my avid reading, and adult encouragement. I was even chosen, to read a poem I wrote, for an assembly in the 5th grade. But ever since I’d hit puberty and walked through the glass doors of my high school, I’d felt like a third-rate Hustler in the midst of a cold, overpowering metropolis. I had to learn– the hard way—that there was no room for garbage on “the streets.” If I wanted to be legit, I had to work to gain respect, and I had to stay “cool”. The streets were hard. There—nothing came for free. There—hot blood could get you shot. Danger pressed into my skin as I took my first steps into the academic, adult world, but I couldn’t comprehend it and I hid, clinging to fear and ignorance as they clung to me with equal force, suffocating me.
For the longest time any inclination I had towards writing I shut down. I kept my emotions, my thoughts, my creativity and curiosity to myself. I was a tough exterior, protecting a soft core. I yearned for the inner energy, and the motivation to become “legit”, or at least to try. Why couldn’t I be a Jenny on the block, who grew up poor, in the Bronx, but “made it”? I lived in a rough neighborhood too. Someone was stabbed in front of my house. Why couldn’t I be a Claudia Emerson? She had a menial job delivering mail and wrote when she was bored at work. Now she’s a Pullitzer Prize winner.
After taking a writing class in college the answers began to unfold themselves– I experienced discipline, work, and strength when writing. And so the answer to “Why couldn’t I?” became “You can”. I declared myself a writer and vowed to practice, to edit, to obsess. There was no divine inspiration for me.
Neither of these stories is fiction. I did go to Luray. I did buy the little green notebook. I did have nights during which I would relieve my teen angst by writing horrible poetry. Someone was stabbed in front of my house. But the question at hand isn’t a true or false question. The question is where does writing as a spiritual act end, and writing as a discipline begin, or vice versa? Can writing exist double-natured, being both a discipline and a “dance” as Richard Graves puts it?
Reading Graves’s “A Dance To The Music of The Mind,” an article about writing as inspired, was inspiring in itself. It was the kind of work that would have motivated me when I was still aspiring to be like J.Lo. But after reading an opposing piece ” Voice as Juice: Some Reservations about Evangelic Composition” by Hashimoto, my uplifted idea of writing as a spiritual act came crashing down around me. Graves writes “when everything is just right—the ideas are clicking, the words are coming—then writing is like dancing”. But what if everything isn’t “just right”, as it often isn’t?
Thinking back on my own limited writing experiences I realized that the only time writing was like dancing for me was when it lasted for five minutes, or when I’d procrastinated and so had no choice but to black out and let my subconscious take over the keyboard. These “dances” may have been beautiful but they were seldom complete. I tend towards inaccessibility when I write, and that quality is most prevalent in my writing when according to what I’d imagine is a beaming Richard Graves, “time slips away” Again, there’s a sort of unconscious quality to writing in this way and that unconsciousness is evident, and not always good, in the text. If I wrote like this all the time, like I did in my diaries, I would fall into a mental trap, thinking, like Hashimoto’s “voice students”, that think “students who spend their time learning about themselves and discovering their authentic ‘voices’ can take a short-cut to excellence, can perhaps, if they believe Peter Elbow, even become published in a relatively short period of time”.
On the other hand, I would argue that writing has to be inspired in part. If I wasn’t inspired to write then I wouldn’t want to do it—I wouldn’t do it. Everyone writes: grocery lists, notes, news articles, academic papers for school, job reports, and the list goes on. Although the only inspiration for writing these things is need, need is a motivation and in ways, an inspiration in itself. Deciding to be a “writer”, and staying a writer takes hard work, so when the hard work becomes overwhelming there needs to be some driving force other than discipline, or even, reward. Hashimoto and Graves argue for composition, but I argue for the writer. Being a “writer” isn’t dependent on need, it is dependent on desire. When inspiration isn’t necessary to appease a desire, the act of fulfilling that desire becomes meaningless. Inspired sex is love. Uninspired sex usually leaves one or both parties curled up in layers of terry cloth or cotton, alone, and staring at the wall, biting bottom lips, for at least a day. “Why did I do that?” Why am I doing this—to myself?” Like I said before, if one isn’t inspired to do something, one won’t do something, with or without desire. One may have sex simply because, they want to, but without inspiration it won’t be love, it can’t be. Being in love can’t consist of making love only. Being in love consists of so many things that mesh and meld, creating a larger intangible, ethereal, elusive…thing.
A writer is a human being in love. Whether the writer and their words, their ideas, their purposes—in short, the embryo of their text– spend a heavenly night “dancing”, sit staring blankly at each other, thrash and curse at each other , or discuss an issue and compromise , at the end of the day, they are still in love. Otherwise, the pen would have never been lifted, never even having been sought.
