![]() ![]() Kranzberg Art & Architecture Library Special CollectionsĪn acclaimed fiction writer and essayist, Joy Williams is the author of four novels and five short-story collections.Scholarly Communication & Digital Publishing Services.Kenneth and Nancy Kranzberg Art & Architecture Library.Special Collections Research Guidelines.Special Collections Collection Development Policy.This post also appears on Brain Pickings, an Atlantic partner site. The ocean is vast.įor more wisdom on the writing life, see Zadie Smith's 10 rules of writing, Kurt Vonnegut's 8 guidelines for a great story, David Ogilvy's 10 no-bullshit tips, Henry Miller's 11 commandments, Jack Kerouac's 30 beliefs and techniques, John Steinbeck's 6 pointers, Neil Gaiman's 8 rules, Margaret Atwood's 10 practical tips, and Susan Sontag's synthesized learnings. A different shark, in a different part of the ocean. Why do I write? Because I wanna be a great shark too. At an awards ceremony for him at the Folger Library several years ago, I said that he was like a great shark moving hidden in our midst, beneath the din and wreck of the moment, at apocalyptic ease in the very elements of our psyche and times that are most troublesome to us, that we most fear. ![]() Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve-hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve-not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace which knows us.Ī writer I very much admire is Don DeLillo. Williams ends with a direct yet wonderfully poetic answer: The somethingness that is sheltered by the wings of nothingness-those exquisite, enveloping, protecting wings. Those horrid hours are the writer's days and nights when he is writing. Whenever the writer writes, it's always three o'clock in the morning, it's always three or four or five o'clock in the morning in his head. It is no prescription, either is it diversionary, although it can and should enchant while it explodes in the reader's face. It is so unreal, so precise, so unsurprising, so alarming, really. The work-this Other, this other thing-this false life that is even less than the seeming of this lived life, is more than the lived life, too. The good piece of writing startles the reader back into Life. The writer must do all this alone, in secret, in drudgery, in confusion, awkwardly, one word at a time. The work stands a little apart from the writer, it doesn't want to go down with him when he stumbles or fails to retreat. Or which could be the writing if only the writer is good enough. The work is a stranger, it shuns him a little, for the writer is really something of a fool, so engaged in his disengagement, so self-conscious, so eager to serve something greater, which is the writing. ![]() The writer is never nourished by his own work, it is never satisfying to him. There is something uncanny about good writing-uncanny the singing that comes from certain husks. Language accepts the writer as its host, it feeds off the writer, it makes him a husk. She considers the generative power of awareness: Nothing the writer can do is ever enough. (Making contact with the self-healing the wound-is even less satisfactory.) Writers end up writing stories-or rather, stories' shadows-and they're grateful if they can but it is not enough. Why am I so isolate in this strange place? Why is my sweat being sold as elixir? And how have I become so enmeshed with works, mere works, phantoms?Ī writer starts out, I think, wanting to be a transfiguring agent, and ends up usually just making contact, contact with other human beings. Writers are like eremites or anchorites-natural-born eremites or anchorites-who seem puzzled as to why they went up the pole or into the cave in the first place. There is something unwholesome and destructive about the entire writing process. ![]() It's become fashionable these days to say that the writer writes because he is not whole, he has a wound, he writes to heal it, but who cares if the writer is not whole, of course the writer is not whole, or even particularly well. ![]()
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