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truth, a career as a writer is enjoyable, but also lonely. Tell that to a construction worker, a nurse, a truck driver, and you will likely be mocked. But conceiving of interesting ideas and conveying them in words is intellectually, if not physically, arduous.
Yet as I consider my writing process as the author of a book about the writing process, I realize that over the course of the project this line of thinking has had a tendency to send me reeling. To engage in the activity of which you are peeling back the layers is to also engage in a meta-project that inevitably pokes at insecurities and questions things previously thought certain. You’re never quite sure if you’re writing about someone else, or if in writing about someone else you’re unmasking something about yourself. But maybe that’s the whole point.
To paraphrase Salman Rushdie, writing can be a grueling, unforgiving business, but even at its worst it’s better than having a regular job.
Genius, I have concluded, is the presence of not one ability but several that work together in tandem. Genius is far more tedious, far less romantic, far more rote, far less effortless, than we imagine it.
What he saw as the existentially crushing weight of employment within the bureaucracy of a large company hampered the pure writing life that Kafka felt he was meant for. And yet it was the very experience of navigating and existing within that faceless establishment that inspired much of what has come to be known as “Kafkaesque” in his writing: the insubordination of the individual to the larger machine, the overwhelming and confusion-inducing bureaucracy, the incomprehensible structure imposed from some nebulous above. He didn’t see it that way, but his full-time employment inspired some of
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“My interior dissolves (for the time being only superficially) and is ready to release what lies deeper.”
She turned the idea for Beloved around in her mind for three years before getting started on it.53 “It’s a sustained thing I have to play with. I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don’t have any answers to,” she says.54 The process always starts with a question like this, a void in the canon of literature that Toni Morrison wants to see filled.
If the idea hasn’t coalesced for her, she doesn’t force it.
As Wallace matured—he was thirty-three when Infinite Jest came out in 1996—he began to formulate a calmer life, staying in at night and avoiding substances, teaching at various universities to keep himself grounded. It was around this time he began to notice that in the midst of all that excess, humans maintain a crystalline capacity for boredom. Boredom as a concept for Wallace was interesting to think about precisely because it was so tedious to experience, and because it thrived amid the availability of more entertainment than the human race had ever known.
It turns out that bliss—a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.
Throughout his life, Wallace was an enthusiastic reader, and he used reading as a thought exercise for his writing—the heavily annotated books in his personal library stand as testament to this.
Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer made the writer’s life seem like a goal in itself. Price latched on to Miller’s description of his own existence: “I have the most enviable life, I don’t have a pot to piss in but I’m fucking everything that moves. I don’t have to answer to anybody.”
For Price’s 2008 novel, Lush Life, the going out meant heading down to New York City’s Lower East Side, where the novel takes place, and talking to whoever would give him the time of day. He knew he wanted a story that incorporated the myriad worlds coexisting in the legendary neighborhood: hipster, immigrant, yuppie; housing projects and lingering ethnic enclaves; the major and minor players in crime and punishment. He spent three years observing the neighborhood, hanging out in Schiller’s Liquor Bar, which would become the model for the main character’s workplace and the image on the book’s
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Sure as she was of the first and last pages, Wharton didn’t always know how her characters were to arrive at their fates when she wrote the first lines.
For her, reading and writing were very nearly one in the same, twin passions that sustained the other.
She tended to latch on to writers who fell into one of two categories: those who simply wrote beautifully, and those who challenged the rules of fiction or other conventions in ways that appealed to her own goals to experiment with words through fiction and to use fiction to probe consciousness—conventional plot was never a primary component of her work.
“Memory is, really, in itself, a tool, one of the many tools that an artist uses,” he said.
These stumbles were rare. More common was Nabokov’s stone-cold belief in his own genius. He claimed never to have learned a thing from another writer, taking everything he accomplished from somewhere inside him. “As for influence, well, I’ve never been influenced by anyone in particular,” he said at the age of sixty-nine.306 History suggests otherwise.
This continually improvised existence has come to define Rushdie’s writing and inform his knack for finding the universal in every particular: “My subject is the way in which the stories of anywhere are also the stories of everywhere else,” he says.340 This was true from the outset. Aside from the ever-present desire to “simply tell stories,”341 Rushdie became fascinated early on with the implications of being a migrant.
But once a project is under way, Didion avoids the work of others, and not just in the physical space of her office. “When I’m working, I don’t read much at all,” she has said. “If it’s a good book, it will depress me because mine isn’t as good. If it’s a bad book it will depress me because mine’s just as bad. I don’t want anybody else’s speech rhythms in my dream.”
And, of course, it was Cassady who got Kerouac out on the road in the first place. (In one of the great ironies of literary history, Kerouac went to his grave having never learned to drive.)
He finally had everything at his disposal for a stable writing life, and he could no longer make the writing happen. Kerouac passed away at age forty-seven from internal bleeding caused by alcoholism. For Jack Kerouac, the journey was clearly preferable to the destination.
He invented the writer as hero, and in doing so reinvented what it meant to have a literary life in America. Getting out in the world, running up to death and then teasing it—in Hemingway’s conception, this was the life of the writer.
A writer was no good at it after six hours, he firmly believed, and for him the stopping point was the most important moment of the writing day:
At any rate, he believed in the importance of simply getting that first draft down: “You put down the words in hot blood, like an argument, and correct them when your temper has cooled.”
Ulysses famously takes place over the course of just one day, June 16, 1904—the day Joyce met Nora. But it also contains vastly more than that day, as does each prosaic day in a person’s life.
Joyce might even go so far as to manipulate reality for literary ends. Friends sometimes noted that Joyce seemed to be steering conversations in a deliberate way.502 “While one talked to him one could not help but feel, at times, that he was using the conversation as a sort of counterpoint to his own thoughts, which ran in an altogether different vein as he mentally composed ‘Work in Progress’ (published as Finnegans Wake),” wrote his friend Arthur Power.503 He took such manipulation to perhaps its most egregious extreme when he urged his wife, Nora, to sleep with other men so he could write
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“When I am working I like to hear noise going on around me—the noise of life,” Arthur Power remembered Joyce telling him.
On the other hand, he’s managed to harness the low times as a motivating force. “Well if I have to deal with being fucking depressed,” he says, “I’ll figure out some way to make some art out of it.”518 His particular art, though, isn’t the kind that comes with a blueprint. Díaz follows in no one’s footsteps and strives to do things with his writing that haven’t been done already. “If you feel familiar and you feel comfortable, you’re in mapped territory,” he says. “What’s the use of being in mapped territory?”519 Mapping uncharted territory, full of wrong turns and dead ends, by definition
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The things that Díaz’s characters aren’t willing to say, it turns out, say a striking amount about them.536 The silences, or what isn’t said, are a crucial element in Díaz’s work.
He wrote, “Premature success gives one an almost mystical conception of destiny as opposed to will power.”
All were written, it seemed, in the spare moments between cocktails.
When feeling out a new book, Roth began writing without exactly knowing where he was going. In those early pages, he was looking for that conflict, “for what’s going to resist you.”627 Until he found the tension inherent to all his best characters, the writing served as mere exercise.
“I’m a magpie with prose,” she says. “I collect little pieces of information, overheard conversation.”642 Sometimes she has been storing that information for years.
On a daily basis, she finds that rote chores provide crucial brainstorming time: “I think it induces ideas to do a repetitive activity that is not connected with writing.”
Given her allergy to present technologies and the grand realism of her novels, Smith can come across as a writer from another era caught in the present, and that’s not always far off. As a young mixed-race girl growing up not exactly poor in a London council estate—her mother Jamaican, her father “a short white guy”721—there were novels around the house, but the Smith household wasn’t particularly bookish, and Smith looked up to the rarefied literary world from the outside.
And she made a screen saver out of the following quote from Derrida: “If a right to a secret is not maintained then we are in a totalitarian space.”
