Memoirist Dani Shapiro, in a recent LA times article, "A Writing Career Becomes Harder to Scale," beat me to the punch and delivered the topic I had planned to explore in my post this week. I'll let you all read the article, but will echo this much: there is indeed a very tight window, these days, that many of us, all at the same time, are trying to squeeze through, and it takes more determination to be a writer in 2010 than it did when I published my first novel in 1997. That said, Ted Solotaroff, who founded the New American Review and whom Shapiro uses as a touchstone, shares words that still hold true:
"Writing itself, if not misunderstood and abused, becomes a way of empowering the writing self. It converts anger and disappointment into deliberate and durable aggression, the writer's main source of energy. It converts sorrow and self-pity into empathy, the writer's main means of relating to otherness. Similarly, [the writer's] wounded innocence turns into irony . . . silliness into wit . . . guilt into judgment . . . oddness into originality . . . perverseness into his stinger."
Or, as Shapiro reminds us: "Every single piece of writing I have ever completed -- whether a novel, a memoir, an essay, short story or review -- has begun as a wrestling match between hopelessness and something else, some other quality that all writers, if they are to keep going, must possess."
Must.
Must.
--MD
"Writing itself, if not misunderstood and abused, becomes a way of empowering the writing self. It converts anger and disappointment into deliberate and durable aggression, the writer's main source of energy. It converts sorrow and self-pity into empathy, the writer's main means of relating to otherness. Similarly, [the writer's] wounded innocence turns into irony . . . silliness into wit . . . guilt into judgment . . . oddness into originality . . . perverseness into his stinger."
Or, as Shapiro reminds us: "Every single piece of writing I have ever completed -- whether a novel, a memoir, an essay, short story or review -- has begun as a wrestling match between hopelessness and something else, some other quality that all writers, if they are to keep going, must possess."
Must.
Must.
--MD
Comments
Sigh. I feel like I still have so much to learn.
And yet, I have to say, I've been adopting the "posture" (in the best sense of that word, in the yoga-sense) of one who creates first and foremost for the joy of creation more and more in recent years. Not by plan, but by instinct. "American Stories NOW" grew out of that impulse toward joy--and the creativity workshops I now run. I find the creative act just feels so intense, marvelous, exciting, enlivening, unusual--even at its most challenging--that it's precious in and of itself. I find a different "savor" in my work, in all its forms, when I celebrate it not without reference to, say, a publishing conglomerate, but NOT as a mere footnote to it, either. I don't know, Kathryn, maybe it's easier for me to take this "posture" because I've already got novels published and out there. And I will certainly and avidly continue to pursue publication, as I always have done. But I can tell you this frolicksome way of being a writer in the world makes me much happier than I was in my younger days. What a wonder it is that, as writers, we are made and bent in this particular fashion-- and how careful we must be that we don't let anything turn our way of moving through the world into a stoop, a hunch, some burden we don't want to face.