Becoming A Writer

Efrén Ordóñez Garza's Haunted by the Question: What It Means To “Become” a Writer raises questions to which I do not have an answer. Maybe reading this was more in my mind than I thought this past week. See Writing, Revising, Jitters and Writing, Revising, Jitters, Resolution. Perhaps you're thinking of writing, then give some thought to the following.

In his essay “To Write is to Quit Being a Writer,” he writes that he became a writer because 1) he wanted to be free and not have to go to the office every morning, and 2) because when he was sixteen, he saw and was blown away by the character of Marcello Mastroianni in Antonioni’s La Notte, as a writer dating a woman named Lidia, played by Jeanne Moreau, and he wanted both things. His first approach to the idea of the writer was not through reading, the act of writing, the need to think, or even an infection of literature—although the pull towards the idea based on the movie is extremely literary—but rather over the persona of “the Writer.” The aura. Around that time, when his father asked him what he wanted to do with his life, he said: “I want to be Malraux.” He did not say he wanted to write like André Malraux, or even to be like him, but to be him. His father replied: “Being Malraux is not a career choice. They don’t teach people to be Malraux in any university.” On his own way, even before he started writing, he felt the need to incarnate Literature.

However, later in the essay, he writes that at some point he realized that to be a writer, one must learn how to write well, and in most cases, to write at least “very well.” And that is hard. It also requires an infinite amount of patience. He then goes on to the famous and often tweaked Oscar Wilde quote on the comma to explain why the writer, to write well, must give oneself to the life of the artist, because for him and many others, achieving that requires much more than a manual. But Enrique Vila-Matas understood he had to engage in the act of writing first.

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Augusto Monterroso and Enrique Vila-Matas merged the writer as character and the writing as craft. To learn how to do it one has to read. Not guides or manuals, but great writers. The only problem with being a voracious reader of literature is that the more you read, the more likely you are to catch it as a disease. If you’re young, you want to emulate the lives of people who led romantic, idealized lives for the sake of art, and you could start believing in the self as a literary character, especially if that self flirts with the idea of becoming a writer. You might feel compelled to start acting like one and see yourself in the writers written by writers. If you read certain books, you might think that you need to become a starving flâneur or flâneuse, observing, always carrying a book, and getting lost in labyrinthine cities.

Enrique Vila-Matas, as many others, covers the act of writing with a literary shroud, since he says that to write extraordinarily well, he had to renounce playing the part and to chain himself to a “noble but relentless master.” Writing as an action, a craft, but also as a way of life in service of virtuosity. He probably learned this as Truman Capote did when he said, “Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down.”

Becoming a writer like this could feel like a death sentence. It perpetuates the myth of the artist as a martyr. Marguerite Duras wrote that in her life she was “more of a writer than someone who lives.” I adore Duras, reading her is exhilarating, but this idea of writing in opposition to living can also be suffocating. And yet it is true that for many literary writers there is a separation between those who live and those who write. Franz Kafka wrote to Felice Bauer that he did not have a tendency towards literature, but he was Literature, an idea many writers have taken to heart. There is a problem for some people when they make the connection between the writing self and the mere act of writing. It’s the approach. Why does becoming a writer mean to be Literature as Kafka said? Why does becoming an artist mean suffering at all? Renouncing the self?

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Becoming a writer means being in a constant search for time. César Aira wrote: “You can’t write a novel the night before dying. Not even one of the very short novels that I write. I could make them shorter, but it still wouldn’t work. The novel requires an accumulation of time, a succession of different days: without that, it isn’t a novel. What has been written one day must be affirmed the next, not by going back to correct it (which is futile) but by pressing on, supplying the sense that was lacking by advancing resolutely.”

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Or how about Tristram Shandy, Vila-Matas’s literary hero who’s a classic antihero, whose life events and opinions (as the title goes) come from his own observing of the world. Perhaps writing is not the act of typing. Perhaps writing is a mere categorization of thought. And if writing is not the act of stringing words together, but to find the time to observe, think, and give some sense to the world, then these eccentrics could very well be writers and Leopoldo would be a minimalistic, hyperabbreviated version of these classic, comedic, literary characters.

Vila-Matas wrote a novel about the process of becoming a writer, Never Any End to Paris, in which he tells the story of the time when he lived in Paris, in a mansard rented to him by Marguerite Duras, who taught him a great deal about writing. After reading Duras’s essays on writing, it is easy to see where Vila-Matas comes from. And speaking of Duras, she did say that “Writing is discovering what we would write about if we decided to write.” Maybe that is what Leopoldo is perpetually doing with his notes. Quite possibly I too will forever be trying to discover what I would write about if I decided to write.

 I will, again, fall back on Roland Barthes's Preparation of the Novel to stiffen my spine and help me weather my doubts – there is a will to write that differs from the will to publish. I do need to write for several reasons. Therapy remains one – so long as I feel creative, I can keep despondency at bay. I promised to make a record of what I have seen and some of the people I have known – I have no idea how to categorize that obligation.

This also seems a relevant thought to why to write from Wang Xiaobo on the Limitless Mind of Italo Calvino

However, he does not tell a single story, he just continues to describe new cities. Even until the very end of the book, he isn’t done giving examples of cities. I get what Calvino was trying to do, more or less: an author wants to incorporate all the elements that make up a work of fiction: it should contain lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, and finally consistency.

With all these elements at play, any story will turn out interesting and satisfactory to all readers. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done, but it must be tried—the reason is to ensure that we will not run out of books to read in the next millennium. I don’t think this is a topic that very many people will find interesting—unfortunately, it’s all I know.

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“Writing Was the Thing That Saved my Life”: On Being a Thai American Writer in Ohio got my attention - another Midwestern writer (he goes from Chicago to Ohio), another who found writing as a way to live. 

As Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College, Sukrungruang challenges his students — and continues to challenge himself — with topics that echo his childhood and adolescent dilemmas: marginalization, outsiderhood and, as he puts it, “universal grieving and belonging that transcends race in many ways.”  

“That’s the thing I always tell my students after they get out of my class: ‘You have to find the thing that saves your life.’ And writing was the thing that saved my life.”

We all should try to do the same.

Updated on 8/6

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