A WRITING SCREED

It becomes clear, as the water drains out of the bathtub and reveals all the toys that have sunk there, that publishing has become something we hate to recognize: a closed circle of people who know each other and deal only with each other in ways that protect themselves and the circle. Mostly they are interested in maintaining the illusion that “authors” are men of a certain type and background.

This week there was a bit of an uproar among those women who write “chic-lit”, because their stuff is every bit as good as the guy stuff, but then everyone went back to their mirrors. “A capacious but intricately ordered narrative that in its majestic sweep seems to gather up every fresh datum of our shared millennial life.” Say that in a sarcastic voice and you’ll hear some laughing applause from those women. Sam Tannenhaus is madly in love with Jonathan Franzen. Franzen is his imagined life, his 19th century Indian hero brave on a spotted pony who snubbed Oprah in her fort. Tannenhaus appears to truly believe that Franzen or anyone (especially anyone like those two) can write a book that encapsulates a continent that is pied with people so different they don’t even know where Manhattan is -- never heard of it. The same phenomenon is writ small in Montana. Probably also in countries where the people don’t even know they are living in countries, much less the name of it or where the boundaries are. (They change all the time anyway.)

So why write?

1. Can’t help it. Words constantly form in your head.

2. Need the money. Better give that one up -- actually, there is no money. Wait, there IS, but it’s in writing contracts, instructions, repair manuals, useful stuff.

3. Chance of winning the lottery. The media keeps this one alive because the bait keeps a steady stream of free writing coming from the naive who believe in all the movies and books about people who wrote best-sellers and thereby won the equivalent of the Publishers Clearing House jackpot. Even the tiny little glow of your local newspaper print your amateur snapshot of your dog licking your child’s nose is enough to keep a flood of unpaid contributions coming in to the editor’s office. If you should have your cell phone handy when a crime or disaster happens, you might make big bucks. You’ll need an agent.

4. Expectations of others. Your English teacher (Well, my English teacher and even me sometimes.) said, “If you work hard, you could be a famous writer some day, like Hemingway or Steinbeck.” (These days no one knows who these men are. Not even the principal knows because he slept through English.)

5. Self-definition. “Whhoooooo aaaaaare you?” asked the Alice in Wonderland character, and not talking algorithms this time. Show, don’t tell. What acts, what thoughts, what memories, what ineffable choices (heavy on the “eff”) have created this unique confluence of forces in time? Are you unique or just like all the others? Did you DO or was it DONE UNTO you?

6. A useful skill. Ever since the first cuneiform stylus-wielder imprinted little marks into clay tablets, it’s been good to keep a record, a memoir-aide, a diary, and maybe someone will even pay you to do bookkeeping. Recently a tiny shard of one of these tablets turned up and the scientists were able to figure out what it said. Three discernible words: you, me, and later. Maybe that was the first Twitter. Maybe that’s all we need to know. How to rendezvous.

7. Revenge. I have a taste for this. So many sanity-threatening times were gotten through by promising myself I would lay it all out in a book and expose all the double-crossing and blood-sucking. There are two problems with this. The first is that it’s tattling and the second is that people read it and either think it’s invented or shrug, “Is that all? Mine was worse.”

8. Explanation. Our times cry out for this. How do we get into these terrible messes: war, crime, suicide, disease, economic collapse. Explain this Black Swan, this Blink, these guns and roses. Exactly how does a black star wormhole work? Explain the greenhouse effect and how I had anything to do with it. Because telling us it’s all our fault is not an explanation -- it’s an accusation. And what we really need to know is not how it happened, but rather, how do we get out of this?

9. Sharing. Don’t share your feelings -- everyone wants to share feelings. Share money. Share power. Share governance. Write all that out. Then see if you can get anyone to share, because it takes two: one to write and one to read. Everyone wants to write letters to the editor in order to share their opinion. Do you read them? I don’t. Therefore, I don’t write them either. Share the pain. At least witness on behalf of others. If you witness, make a record. Sharing is the heart of democracy which is why it depends so much on words, whether written or spoken.

10. Preservation. We love what we know, our scented memories. And we know we will try to forget what is to painful: childbirth, holocaust. So we preserve baby shoes and piles of victim’s shoes, preserving records of the feet of the past, their footsteps a kind of imprint in long lines across the planet and time.

Erik Erikson, who had no father and therefore made up his own patronym by doubling his Christian name, proposed that now and then the life of someone, particularly the writing and written account of that person, embodies the age in which he or she lives. Embodies. He had in mind Gandhi or Martin Luther, partly because Erikson privileged peace and civilization.

But it seems that there are imagined or at least literary lives that capture our times much more thoroughly and memorably. To many of us, that’s what a novel is, that’s what the Great American Novel is. “Why not me?” we whisper to ourselves at 2AM with the wind in the eaves and Balzacian coffee burning in our guts. We can’t help writing. It’s how we stay sane. Oh, how romantic! Bet your balls that the rush is better than anything Big Pharma can offer! Hear me, guys? And it’s gender neutral.