To write like a farmer
Unsolicited writing advice from a part-time blogger
Countless words, thoughts, phrases, and ideas have passed and will continue to pass through my mind into my hands and onto this screen or into my journal. One of my greatest anxieties as a writer emanates from the question of what it is, in the end, I will hope to have made. Will this blog be a portfolio deployable to job applications? Will my journals offer source material for some novel? Will any of this actually become anything singular, uniform, or complete? In one sense, I certainly hope so. Sometimes I worry about never having made anything and if I were to make something, writing seems like the most attractive means for doing so. In another, it really does not matter, nor should it. The important part is the actual act of writing. I began this venture by channeling Prufrock and deciding to say something when I could have just kept to my journal, or kept silent. Now, it’s the saying and not the something that I want to come into focus.
I’ve been passively participating in George Saunders’s new newsletter-qua-workshop Story Club, which I highly recommend you do as well (even if you don’t write fiction!). A recent post on worry helped kick my ass back into gear with regards to writing. About many writers, Saunders writes: “the preferred method is to first decide what to write, then write it. (That is, the natural tendency to over-control the process.)” When I come to moment of writer’s block it is usually because I obsessing over the process, asking myself such useless questions as “am I doing this right?” and “can I really be ready to write X having never read Y?” I have even procrastinated for not having the correct notebook, pen, desk, background music, or amount of ice in my whiskey. Thus, the lines below, from Saunders, comes as welcome advice:
The point is, we are trying to shift our view of writing, from “Being in such an exalted state, and so brilliant, that what I write is wonderful, the very first time” (a real stress-fest, that) to: “I am going to trust that revising a text attentively over a period of time is a way to both lure out and solve all problems, and so what I am doing today while I revise is not load-bearing. I’ll do my best, of course, but this is just one step in a longer process, in which I trust.”
While it might not be reflected here on Rambler, I have tweaked some of my writing habits in order to get on with the thing and rid myself of some of the above mentioned anxieties I have been experiencing. I challenged myself to write on the backside of unused worksheets from my teaching day to deflate the idea that I needed the perfect notebook. I started drinking NA beer to “kill my darling” Hemingway (more on that in another post). Instead of collecting experiences about which to write, I have embedded writing as an everyday event which must also be experienced. This comes from poet Dana Gioia who demonstrates the compound appreciation of writing just a little bit each day.
The opening of this video hits especially hard, but I think writing and writing advice ought to be more than a collection of neat aphorisms. I have a bunch quotes from writers on Post-It notes stuck to my bedroom door, and while their discreet, succinct messaging both affirming and aesthetically appealing, the best guidance in writing comes from actually carrying out the act (and reading; don’t forget to read). I’m not saying that by sitting down to write the story, blog post, or essay will automatically make itself known to you, but you certainly can’t gin it up by scouring GoodReads Quotes or pretending to be Hemingway during the 22 hours of the day you aren’t writing (talking to myself here as much as anyone). You have to actually write. The words and lines you create will look back at you with the best instruction on what to do or not do next.
“Labour is blossoming”
Stuart Patience at Driverless Crocodile posted a while back a list of “things which by their nature are never finished.” Among them are subtle stretches like “your education” and “change,” as well as things that could theoretically have a finite upper limit but are so incredibly vast that we submit to their limitlessness. Things like all the books/movies we wish to see, or meeting new people. The most striking category, though, are those things which are so obvious and banal that to admit to their endlessness feels almost intimidating when we zoom out and consider a life spent doing those things. These include: the laundry and other chores, your need for sleep/food/exercise, and, finally, work.
I’ve started to think of writing in this way, as something that by its very nature will never be complete. That is why is takes the gerund (-ing) ending; it is always in process. “Writing” is distinct from “a novel” in the same way “running” is distinct from “the Boston Marathon.” We might have races we want to complete or times we want to hit, and for some the accomplishment of these goals will signify the end of “running.” But many runners and many writers know that the race or the piece of work are not endpoints but checkpoints, the process begins again the next day (in college it was with an often grueling Sunday morning long run). In Aristotelian terms, they are accidental features of the thing itself. The process of thing is its essence.
I think the best analog for the writer is actually the farmer (one who grows crops, not raises livestock, because… well… you know). He knows that his work never ends because the world will not one day just be fed and that will be the end of it. Likewise, his crop needs planting, tending, and harvesting so that the cycle can go on.
The metaphors of planting and tending are more straightforward; they’re stand-ins for writing and revising. But writing, like farming, is an act most concerned with cultivation. Why is cultivation the most important element to our two archetypes? Because it demonstrates that the proof is in the process. Like Dana Gioia tells us, after weeks and months of doing the same small thing every day we may have something like a novel on our hands. This doesn’t happen if the writer is one who occasionally jots down trite sayings or publishes a blog post only when he feels like it (again, talking to myself).
Sacred and Profane, Part II
Maybe you’re wondering why I am giving you all writing advice when I know the majority of you don’t write. Well, for one thing, if you don’t write, you really should and then you should also think about my advice (and dispel it if it doesn’t work for you). Another thing you might have noticed is that I am largely talking to myself, a postmodern tactic I will try to spare you all from in the future.
Zadie Smith has appeared in the lines of Rambler before, and for good reason. She said once that she writes “so that I might not sleepwalk across my entire life.” If that doesn’t make you grab a pen and paper, I’m not sure what will. In all seriousness, though, I want all of us, myself included to live more intentionally, to lead more meaningful lives. Writing doesn’t have to feature in one’s life for it to be meaningful, but the advice in today’s post is meant to call to mind those activities we do every day that make it so we’re not just sleepwalkers in our own lives.
Last time I actually got around to posting here, I promised a narrower focus on the distinction between sacred and profane and I’d like to honor that in this conclusion. I think about the messiness of the writing process and the polished final product in these terms. Just like the dichotomy between sacred and profane, the process and the product often bleed into one another as with the constantly revised poems of William Butler Yeats, the college textbook in need of yearly editions (to keep pockets lined), or hip-hop remixes, jazz standards, and blues covers. We might never see the profane toil and sweat that goes into making a great work of art but it is just as worthy of aesthetic appreciation, even mediated through the “sacred” work. A writing life might be prolific, as were Wallace Steven’s and William Shakespeare’s, or it might yield strikingly little published work as in the life of Franz Kafka. However, we know that each life was full and no less a writing life.
Here again the sacred and the profane collapse; here again they are reinforced. The sacred beauty of the work is composed of quotidian efforts of profane struggle. These efforts, be them daily journaling, laborious farm work, or rerunning the same damn five mile loop to save yourself, amount to something greater than the sum of each individual effort. And, to me, that is beautiful and that’s sacred.
Ramble on!
“Work every day. No matter what has happened the day or night before, get up and bite the nail.” - Ernest Hemingway