Why I Write; Why Do You Write?

Last night's lecture by Lydia Davis had me reflecting...

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In this newsletter:

• Why write? Lydia Davis on why she writes--

• A close look at a line by Shakespeare

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Why do any of us write? I was thinking about this the other day, as I sat in my stuffy attic office struggling to make sentences into paragraphs, on a beautiful September day, the breeze riffling the pear tree outside my window. What was I doing? Why spend my time—a one-way spending; I can’t get it back—trying to express something I wasn’t sure I knew how to express, something other people could probably express better than I?

And then last night, I went to the annual Windham Campbell Prizes Lecture and Award Ceremony at Yale (where I teach creative writing and edit The Yale Review) to listen to Lydia Davis give the annual talk titled “Why I Write.” (Each year, a different prominent writer tries to answer this question; you can read part of Greil Marcus’s answer here.)

Davis, as you can imagine, was both hilariously resistant to the prompt and piercingly insightful—about writing, about aging and mortality, about surviving pain and loss.

She began by talking about how much she didn’t want to write “Why I Write.” “I drew a blank,” she said. She’s right: such prompts are impossible. They invite a frontal, earnest response when the truest answers probably live beneath the surface of our consciousness. Instead of talking about why she wrote, she said, she’d rather talk about why other writers write… From here she got to John Ashbery (one of my favorite poets) talking about how he wrote his famous, pivotal poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” an ekphrastic response to the Renaissance painter Francisco Parmigianino’s painting, because he was “bothered” by the title. He was bothered by it, that is, until he wrote about it.

Davis said this is essentially why she writes. Something external to her—call it material or raw material—“bothers” her until she puts it into form. There is something she is trying to understand and can’t understand—until she finds a specific shape, syntax, and shape for it. It’s this last part that is, of course, the most important: what alleviates “bother” is not just any writing, per se, but the writing that achieves a specific form which releases the sense of being haunted. As Davis put it, in writing, we transform our slippery failure to understand experience by putting it into “the solidity of form.” Without finding the form, that sense of being bothered never goes away.

At issue is a matter of emphasis; if Davis imposed a purpose on one of her stories, the life would go out of it. But if Davis focused instead on discovering the solidity of form, the piece would come alive. Too often, we emphasize the wrong thing: our own “why” instead of the piece’s. This is a hard distinction to make as we write, but a crucial one: often, my work as an editor involves helping the writer see what the piece they have made wants, rather than what they think the piece should do.

This “solidity of form” is the hardest part of writing to teach—but I think it is the most essential. Its importance is a discovery we make over and over: the biggest breakthroughs in any writing projects are breakthroughs about form. Just last week, rereading my current manuscript—I’m at work on a new memoir, about time, sexual assault, aging—I realized that something was missing. It wasn’t the writing, per se; it was that I had lost, in the third chapter, the pressured sense of form that the book began with. Something had gotten too loose, too lax. Without the solidity of form, I would continue to be “bothered,” and the book would continue to feel (to me, at least) as if it had not fully understood its material, not fully transformed or metabolized it.

What does it look like to find “the solidity of form” in practice as we write? An example (please be kind, it’s from my own imperfect work…)

This all must sound rather abstract. I won’t poach Davis’s examples (her talk will come out as a book next year); but to give a concrete example in action, here is a poem I wrote ten years ago, called “Ever,” which ultimately was published as a sonnet:

Ever

Never, never, never, never, never.
—King Lear

Even now I can’t grasp “nothing” or “never.”
They’re unholdable, unglobable, no map to nothing.
Never? Never ever again to see you?
An error, I aver. You’re never nothing,
because nothing’s not a thing.
I know death is absolute, forever,
the guillotine—gutting—never to which we never say goodbye.
But even as I think “forever” it goes “ever”
and “ever” and “ever.” Ever after.
I’m a thing that keeps on thinking. So I never see you
is not a thing or think my mouth can ever. Aver:
You’re not “nothing.” But neither are you something.
Will I ever really get never?
You’re gone. Nothing, never—ever.

The poem is about grief and its obsessive, whorled, inward-turning. I think that in this sonnet form it captures some of that by enacting the speaker’s obsessiveness in a compressed, limited vocabulary, over a short number of lines, while evoking the history of the sonnet—a form that historically has been home to lyric arguments with the self. (See Shakespeare, Keats, Ovid.) This is a free-verse sonnet.

But the original version was long and spindly:

Even now I can’t
grasp “nothing” or “never.”
They’re unholdable, unglobable, no
map to nothing.
Never? Never ever
again to see you?
An error, I aver. You’re never
nothing,
because nothing’s not
a thing. I know death
is absolute, forever,
the guillotine—gutting—never
to which we never say goodbye.
But even as I think “forever” it goes
“ever”and “ever” and “ever.” Ever after.
I’m a thing that keeps on
thinking. So I never see you
is not a thing or think
my mouth can ever. Aver:
You’re not “nothing.” But neither
are you something.
Will I ever really get never?
You’re gone. Nothing,
never—ever.

In this version, I was playing with enjambment as a way of creating meaning—trying to make the line break trip up the speaker’s attempts to make meaning, ending many lines on negations. But something about it felt too intentional—I could feel the poet making the decisions about the line, rather than the “poem” enacting them.

Then, too, the length of the poem didn’t help enact the emotional conundrum the poem was exploring, the choked compression of grief. Suddenly, rereading it one day, I realized it needed to be much shorter—that it was, perhaps, a SONNET. And once I did, the poem was as done as I could make it.

Sometimes, the answers to form lie in literary history—in the genres, shapes, and forms others have made before us. (Davis suggested as much too.)

Why do you write? I write for a similar reason to Davis…

Like Davis and Ashbery, I write because there is something I can’t understand and am troubled by, and I don’t know how to express it in everyday speech; finding form is the only thing that alleviates that sense. I’m an iterative, slow thinker, and often I leave conversations feeling I haven’t said what I meant, have failed to find the real words. Then, too, language seduces me with its possibilities, its pleasures—there is delight in making an idea visible.

Finally, too, I write because form helps us uncover aspects of experience that normative culture covers up or hides from itself. I also write to communicate truths that otherwise might remain hidden or secret. Amidst the horror around us, putting the murk of experience into language alleviates anxiety, helps me feel there is some tiny thing I can control.

Why do you write? I’d love to hear more…

P.S. Shakespeare’s “Never, never, never, never, never…”

By the way, the epigraph from “Ever” is an example of the kind of enactment or solidity of form that Lydia Davis was talking about. “Never, never, never, never, never” is the (heartwrenching) line Lear says when he realizes that his daughter Cordelia is dead. The line already has what we might call a content-based intensity to it, in repeating the same negation over and over. (I seem to recall Harold Bloom saying, in a class I took with him, that this was the only perfect line of blank verse in the English language.)

But Shakespeare further intensifies the line by playing with its music or form (whether consciously or unconsciously): “Never” is a trochee (STRESSED / unstressed), not an iamb (unstressed/STRESSED). So some people think that “Never, never…” is actually perfect line of trochaic pentameter, troubling the organized surface of the play’s iambic pentameter with the protest of form pushing against form.

In this way, the line, with its inverted meter, enacts and embodies Lear’s NO by making it sound wrong. (If you’ve seen the play, you know what I mean.) Other experts read the line as iambic, but note that it is a “headless line” with a feminine ending since the last “-er” is unstressed (and yes, we need a new term for such endings!). Either way, it troubles the placid pentameter around it—a great example of the solidity of form doing work for the writer.