The thing about writing is you’re never over it. Never satisfied. Never finished.
You’re always in search of the perfect word, sentence, paragraph, page, manuscript, and then the next idea and the one after that.
You are ravenous, scavenging every situation for a tender morsel of inspiration. A scene, a saying, a sentiment, a sound. Anything is exploitable. Everything is fodder.
You love writing. You hate it. You can’t stop. You can’t get started. You fear the blank page. You crave it. You wish it were over. You can’t wait to begin.
It doesn’t matter how old you are, or young, when you first take up a pen or a keyboard. Once you’ve set ink to paper and blundered your way into magic, you cannot lay the words to rest. There will always be something more you could write.
I am not the first writer to complain of this conundrum. The exact quote varies as much as its attribution:
“Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.”
–Lawrence Kasdan
or
“Writing is hard work: it is like doing homework for the rest of your life.” –John Lutz
or
“Being a writer means having a homework assignment due for the rest of your life.”-Hank Moody, Californication by David Duchovny
Whoever said it first or best, the point remains undeniable. If you take writing seriously, then you are always writing. Not only because you want to sharpen your prose or refine your pentameter, but because you can’t not. Because you have to.
You know what I’m talking about—that incessant itch. The more you scratch, the faster it spreads. If you’re not making something or thinking about making something or editing the thing you made or researching for the next thing you want to make, then you are dying. Slowly. Inch by column inch.
I started writing when I was very young. I wrote letters to an imaginary friend. I wrote plays for my sister and friends to act out. I wrote long, meandering stories in a Mead spiral-bound notebook with puppies frolicking across the cover.
I didn’t know why I was writing. Nobody told me I should. It just happened. I breathed, I saw, I thought, I felt; therefore, I wrote.
I see the same thing happening with my own daughter. From her earliest years, she was making up stories. She was drawing pictures that told her stories, she was singing story songs that she made up. Even before she could write, she was dictating stories and asking me to write them down for her. There’s a box in her bedroom that contains an entire book series she created and illustrated, more than a dozen 5×7 staple-edged books about the adventures of an intrepid dog named Blossom.
Now 13, she continues to exist in a whirl of creation. Always drawing, writing, animating, doodling, singing. No one tells her she should make things. She just can’t help herself. There is no other way for her to be.
There is an oft-lauded book by a Marxist writer named Ernst Fischer called The Necessity of Art. It was published in 1959, but is still in print today, re-issued in 2010 by Verso Books. The most-quoted line of Fischer’s work reads: “Art is necessary in order that man should be able to recognize and change the world. But art is also necessary by virtue of the magic inherent in it.”
I believe this compulsion to create is the very thing that keeps me sane. Whether or not another soul ever sees the words I write, the urge to bring them into existence, to settle them on a page letter by gorgeous letter is inexorable.
It drives me from a warm bed in the early dark, fumbling for a place to scribble down that nascent germ of an idea before it wafts into oblivion. Year after year it keeps me clacking away at a keyboard on an endless quest for the high of a well-crafted sentence. It gives me a reason to get up and go on again. Again. Again.
Because in finding the words and assembling them into sentences, I find myself. I sort out my jumbled thoughts, pull them apart and lay them out in lines so I can make sense of them.
That alone is magic. Needful magic.
I’d venture a guess that existence has felt overwhelming for every generation ever since we first crawled from the muck. I think we have always needed a way to wringmeaning from the mess. A tether to keep us from flinging ourselves into the void one after another like hapless lemmings.
Art—in our case, the art of words—connects us first to ourselves and then to one another.
Writing is so often a lonely calling. I sit here at my keyboard in the cloister of my life and pull these words from the ether. There is no one here to see my labor. No applause to cheer me onward. But somewhere else, near or far, you are sitting at your kitchen table, at a morning café, at your desk, in your bedroom, on a train, in a park, by a riverbank with your coffee or your cat or the dark against your window. You are writing, too. You are making a start. You are finding your way.
Maybe someday I will read your words, or you will read mine. In so doing, we will discover a new idea or a different perspective. Something I wrote will crack you wide open. Something you wrote will mend a wound in my soul. In reading, we will know we’re not alone.
This magic, too, is needful.
“Poetry is not a luxury,” Audre Lorde wrote, “it is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.”
In all the clamor and calamity of the world we keep waking up to, I am glad for this incessant itch, this need to give name to the nameless. I’m grateful to have this homework until the day I die—grateful for the burden and the joy of it.
As bombs fall and forests burn and children starve and factions form and leaders lie and seas rise and life just goes on and on, we writers keep getting up and finding the right words. Telling our stories. Forming the quality of the light.