Professor X (5 page)

“Let's talk about writing for a moment,” I said.

We talked, or rather I talked at them, for an hour. I had a sense that perhaps no one had ever addressed for them the emotional component of writing.

“I'm a writing teacher, yes, but I'm also a writer,” I told them, and a case could be made that neither thing was exactly true. I didn't care. “This is not just something I got a degree in. And the first thing to know is that we're all in writing hell. All of us.”

What I was about to tell them—how writing was so tied to our weaknesses and lunacies and psychoses—was not covered in our English 101 textbook. I'd been thinking about writing for twenty years, and it all burst out of me in a torrent.

“You sit in front of the blank screen and feel like an idiot,” I said, “unable to form a single cogent thought. I sit there and I think to myself: what business have I writing anything, when I can barely remember how to burp? Breathing itself seems a cognitive struggle. At least the computer cursors don't blink at you anymore. They used to, rhythmically, like the impatient tapping of a foot. Oh, the worry! The anxiety! I've been fighting it for years. I remember working on a typewriter, with the bond paper in the roller and my feeling, as I sat there, of rising panic.
I've got to get something typed or that paper will be hopelessly curled!
And then where would we be?”

I told them: the writer must just start, and write terribly until he can, with any luck, get into a groove. This is not how other endeavors work. The barber would go out of business if the first few haircuts of the day were complete butcheries. The surgeon does not leap into the operation knowing how badly it will all go at first.

Writing is difficult for so many reasons, I said.

It doesn't fit in with our contemporary ethos, in which everything is neat, cleaned, pressed, ordered, and lightly perfumed, with ample backup systems in place. Ours is an age in thrall to perfection. We demand every contingency prepared for, routes planned to the last turn in MapQuest, high definition and great nutrition, stadium seating and mouth-covered sneezes and enormous umbrellas and frequent hand washing, spotless sidewalks, 20/10 vision, a New York City without crime; we demand sobriety, prudence, and good manners. Writing, no matter how disciplined the writer or detailed the outline, is a messy business. No matter how hard the writer works, the writing is never quite complete. The writer is like a kidnap victim: blindfolded, in a sack, in a car trunk, struggling for a glimpse of the light of cogency. Even the most careful and orderly-of-mind writer must fight battles on multiple fronts simultaneously, rendering repairs on the introduction that make paragraph seven entirely redundant, introducing the lightning-brilliant never-before-uttered concept in paragraph two that makes paragraphs three, four, and five seem vaguely sheepish, as though they are pointedly not mentioning this stunningly brilliant idea.

Writing is difficult because, at first blush, most of us have little to say. Even when we think we have an essay in us, even when our passions are inflamed, attempting to order and flesh out our thoughts just makes the reality apparent. The whole thing starts to deflate. Under no circumstances, though, should the writer stop writing at that point, for what we have to say emerges from the craft of writing—our pieces are in some ways a by-product of the endeavor, the way a toned body emerges from exercise, or a fluted and tapering vase emerges from fingers pressing on a spinning mass of clay.

We will not be writing “the college essay,” I told them, but rather “the college composition. An essay indicates something tried, something essayed. A composition is built, crafted, worked on, composed. It must be level and plumb, like a bookcase or a coffee table, planed and sanded, all of its nail holes puttied. The composition is not merely an end but a thing.”

And now here's a contradiction, I told them—the first of many. Writing is difficult because of its many contradictions. The full, rounded, resonant meaning of prose emerges as it is worked over, but some of those ideas must be present at the outset. On the old television series
The Odd Couple
, Felix the photographer thinks he might like to try his hand at writing, and so follows Oscar the sportswriter around, taking notes on what he does. Oscar sits motionless at the typewriter and looks heavenward. Felix asks him what he is doing. “I'm thinking of stuff to write,” Oscar barks with impatience. “Ah!” says Felix, intrigued, and dutifully jots a note to himself: “Think of stuff to write.” Now that is a rather profound summary of the process. The thinking part of writing is often overlooked. I would be very pleased to have that as an epitaph: HE THOUGHT OF STUFF TO WRITE.

I had been looking off into the professorial middle distance, strolling around the room and not making eye contact. Now I looked closely at the class. They were with me. They had felt, in some form or another, what I was talking about. My tattooed woman dug into the flesh of her hands with her thumbnails. Her eyes didn't leave me. She wore an expression of wonderment. I felt very powerful.

I pressed on. Writing is difficult because we don't even call it what it is. The writing, the recording, the typing, whatever, is the least crucial part. Writing is thinking and crafting and editing; unfortunately, the writer always desires to make progress, and without constant vigilance may slip out of thinking and crafting mode and into mere progress, which can signal doom.

Writing is difficult because it seems so useless. One cannot imagine one's writing having the smallest impact on the world. And is there any process that calls for more self-discipline to get it right with less potential payoff?

Gore Vidal said it well. “The phrase that sounds in the head changes when it appears on the page. Then I start probing it with a pen, finding new meanings. Sometimes I burst out laughing at what is happening as I twist and turn sentences. Strange business, all in all. One never gets to the end of it. That's why I go on, I suppose. To see what the next sentences I write will be.”
¹

E. B. White said that, when writing, he had “occasionally had the exquisite thrill of putting my finger on a little capsule of truth, and heard it give the faint squeak of mortality under my pressure, an antic sound.”
²

Both writers manage to convey how the act of writing can seem like the pastime of a lunatic.

Writing is difficult because sometimes as we write we are forced to confront the shattering reality, about midway through composition, that no part of what we are saying is true. Writing, often inconveniently, reveals truth. The composition of an essay advocating a position may reveal to the writer that he believes the exact opposite. What could be more demoralizing? The honest writer, upon seeing that the piece will not move forward, chucks out everything and begins afresh, which requires copious amounts of moral fiber. Writing assignments require honesty and fortitude in a way that chemistry homework doesn't.

Writing is difficult because it is so fraught; we know that we will be judged as people by the work we present. Math, even badly done math, is more neutral. As a friend of mine said after watching a comedian who failed to amuse him, “You never say, ‘Hey, what a bad comedian!' You say, ‘Hey, what an asshole!' ” Writers are in the same fix. We are judged as human beings by our writing, but how difficult is it for us to convey in writing the depth and subtlety of our minds? How often do we receive an e-mail at work that portrays the writer as completely different (and not in a positive way) from the person we know so well? It's a writing issue. At the wedding, the sozzled best man, normally a considerate chap, manages with his toast to the bride and groom to embarrass every last person in the tent. It's a writing issue. The man disappoints because his prose does.

The reverse, of course, can also be true. On September 11, 2001, when asked how many firefighters New York City had lost, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani would say that he didn't have the figure yet, but it was certain to be “more than we can bear.” That morsel of extraordinary diction—the choice of the word “bear”—would help make the mayor the most respected public official in the United States.

I told my class of writers to think of a compressed spring. When expanded, the spring can do nothing; potential energy is only created when the thing is compressed. The most powerful writing is that which has been cut to its essence. The writer must discard much of what he does. Is that the case in any other field of endeavor? Writers know to be suspicious of any seemingly clever turn of phrase. Are accountants told that? Must they, as an old writing teacher of mine liked to put it, knock down their own sand castles? Are medical researchers cautioned to kill their darlings? (“I came up with a cure for cystic fibrosis over the weekend, but I chucked it out. I don't know . . . It just seemed too pat.”)

The class was still with me. I could feel their apprehension and sense their resolve. In this class, they thought, they would finally slay their writing demons. College instructors, even newly minted ones, know when they are falling flat and I certainly was not. I had them convinced, at least for the moment, that good writing was the most important thing in the world.

The contradictory instructions, I warned the students, will never stop coming. Exhaust your topic, cover it thoroughly—but at all costs avoid tangents. Stay focused, adhere to your thesis—but illustrate with very detailed examples. Be vivid in your language—but not wordy. Be tightly organized—but remember that some memorable writing results from serendipity.

Writing is difficult because the smallest infelicities—repetition, bits of ambiguity, parallelism out of whack—can harden into speed bumps, slowing the reader down and distracting from the content. Prose must go down like honey. Take another look: “When expanded, the spring can do nothing; potential energy is only created when the thing is compressed.” The spring/the thing—is it a rhyme, a typo, a what? The reader will slow down, perhaps by an amount so small as to be immeasurable, but for the duration of that sentence, the rickety girder work of the prose overwhelms the meaning. A careful writer can wrestle with a sentence like that all day, ending up in one of those weird positions writing puts you in, wishing that springs had been called something else.

Finally, I told them, writing is hard—and writing courses are hard—because really there is no such thing as college-level good writing. There is no such thing as beginner's-level or intermediate good writing. Writing is either good or it is bad. Good writing has something fine and profound about it. The homeliest classroom assignment, composed well, written with honesty, carefully crafted, can put us in the mind of Thoreau.

And now for the last word, the most demoralizing fact of all. Even when writing is technically without fault, it can be not much good. When I was a young teenager, my sister, eight years older and a marvelously impressive figure, sat down at the huge Smith-Corona she'd gotten for Christmas and began writing a novel. I was speechless with admiration. She wrote a chapter or two and abandoned the project. I asked her what had happened.

She considered a moment and sighed, “It just all seemed so
pedestrian
,” she said.

Her phrasing has stayed with me all these years. What better way to describe the dull, weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable way that our own writing often strikes us? Pedestrian. If she had brought that level of inspiration to the actual composition, she'd have written one corking novel! It's all been done before, we think. Why am I even bothering? Some other monkey at some other typewriter has churned all of this stuff out before. Even as I write this now, I can't shake the feeling that, sitting in some dusty back room of the Strand Book Store, there sits a yellowing copy of some other
In the Basement of the Ivory Tower,
all of my thoughts and words out there already, already written by somebody else.

I was practically panting with excitement. Had an adjunct ever had a heart attack on the first night of class? I had forgotten how much I loved thinking about writing, and never before had I had the opportunity to do so at such length. Everything I thought poured out of me, all of my writing worries, my frustrations, my writing demons, coupled with all that I had learned after spending thousands of hours at the keyboard, thousands at the typewriter, thousands hanging over legal pads. God, I thought, I'd written for so long I'd written through multiple ages of technology. And there was more. Already I was filling up with more stuff about writing. Yes, yes—I would have to tell them about balance, about preambles that are too long and rushed conclusions; I would have to tell them about my wife's trick—how she, as the first step in evaluating a page of my writing, would look at the literal shape of it, eyeing it from halfway across the room so that she couldn't actually read the text but could see the paragraphs as mere shapes, like the outlines of continents on a map.