Writing is Damn Hard

W H Hudson

In 1928, Asa Don Dickinson–who was then the librarian for the University of Pennsylvania–published The Best Books of Our Time. It was an ambitious project–and one that perhaps only a librarian–a lover of cataloguing and organizing–might have undertaken.

In it, he ranks the authors of the first quarter of the 20th century according to the number of times their works were cited in any one of 61 different literary references of the day, ranging from The Book Review Digest to the New York State Library’s annual list of the best books of the year, to John Drinkwater’s Outline of Literature to a list compiled by a woman named Harriet C. Long, who won a prize from Scribner’s magazine for the “best list of books by American authors.”

Dickinson’s method is simple: he counted the number of times a particular book was mentioned in one of his references, awarded its author a point for each mention, and then ranked the authors according to the number of “endorsements” his or her books earned.

Many of the names on the list are familiar even today, almost 80 years after Dickinson published his book: John Galsworthy (most famous for his Forsyte Saga) ranks first, with 197 endorsements, followed by H.G. Wells (172), Arnold Bennett (137), George Bernard Shaw (123), Edith Wharton (118), Joseph Conrad (110), Booth Tarkinton (103) and Rudyar Kipling (79).

The writers who rank ninth and tenth, however, are fairly anonymous today: W. H. Hudson and Joseph Hergesheimer. (Eugene O’Neill ranks eleventh.)

Hudson, according to The Best Books of Our Time, earns his place from a dozen books. The most popular is Green Mansions, which Dickinson describes as “A symbolic idyll. The tragic love of a young naturalist and a native girl in the forest of Guiana.” Galsworthy, himself, praised it:

“Immortalizes as passionate a love of all beautiful things as ever was in the heart of man. In form and spirit the book is unique.”

Other of Hudson’s work also earns considerable praise. Athenaeum descibes Far Away and Long Ago as “like a mixture of a Conrad novel and Robinson Crusoe,” while Booklist calls A Hind in Richmond Park, “An engaging book, embodying all that is most delightful in Hudson’s art.”

And yet, 78 years later–and 84 years after Hudson’s death in 1922–few remember him. While a google search for him yields a few brief biographical entries in several encyclopoediae, he and his work are obscure. A search of the New York Times database finds the last article about him appeared in 1956, a roughly 50-word report that Argentina was turning the cottage where he was born into a museum.

He certainly is no longer in the league of Shaw, Wharton or Conrad.

For writers, the fact that Hudson–like many of the writers on Dickinson’s list (Margaret Deland? James Branch Cabell? Percy MacKaye? Zona Gale? M.S. Watts? Romain Rolland? W. F. Moneypenny?)–is little remembered today, however, is good news.

It means no one is watching us. If no one is watching us, then, it means we have permission to fail; we have permission to attempt work we may not be able to pull off.

I can sit at my computer today and write anything I want. I can write for myself–not for posterity, not for fame, not for money (my eating, my buying gasoline, my paying my electric bill–none of that depends on whether I finish my novel). If I can write for myself, then, I can write badly: I can write badly today, tomorrow, the next day, the day after.

I can write badly until I learn to write well.

No hurry.

(For more on this, you can read the draft of a talk I gave in 2005 about writer’s block.)

Paint

I hate painting perhaps more than I hate any other household project. I think I would rather snake out a clogged basement drain than paint. I don’t think I have the patience for it and I always end up making a huge mess: paint spatters everywhere when I paint and often I don’t seem to get the drop cloth to stay where it should so paint ends up on the floor.

Yesterday, I primed the master bath at my house to prepare to paint it. The master bath has been two-toned—a light green on the top half of the walls and a dark green on the bottom half of the walls. In order to put the new color on top of that, then, I had to prime it first so that the old colors would not show through the new one, which is an off white with a slight blue tint to it. So, last night, I decided to prime the bathroom so I could paint it today.

It did not go well.

Before I could prime it, I had to remove the wallpaper border that ran around the wall, separating the two shades of green. Removing that was more difficult than I thought. While I could pull most of it after worrying one edge, when it came up, it left some of the backing on the wall and to remove that I had to use an adhesive remover. Clearly, also, the people who last painted the bath didn’t wait until the paint was fully dry before they applied the border because in some places, paint peeled away, leaving small impressions in the wall that I would have to fill.  Once I removed the border, I had to take down the mirror mounted to the wall above the sink and also take down a small bathroom cabinet mounted to the wall.

In all, it took me an hour and a half to prepare the room to prime—longer than I expected it would.

Priming the wall was also difficult. For some reason, the clerk at the hardware store told me I should use an enamel stain blocking primer—but enamel does not go on as easily as latex and it covered poorly. No matter how many times I went over an area, the green paint beneath showed through.

The enamel also seemed to spatter more than latex does and I ended up with paint on the floor, on the sinktop, on the door.

This morning, I decided to reprime it. I went and bought some latex primer and applied it, going over some areas more than others where the enamel had done an especially poor job of covering the former color.

Once I was finished, the wall looked better—not perfect, but the walls seemed more white than they had before and I knew that when I applied the top coat, it would look much better—maybe near to what I imagined it would.  I also cleaned the bathroom—scraping up the paint spatters from the vinyl floor and from the porcelain sink and toilet. I scraped away paint that had spattered on the door and then, when I had gotten as much paint as I could from the door by scraping, I used a product called Goof-Off which removes paint.

By the time I was finished—five hours after I had begun on Saturday morning, nine hours into the project in all—the bathroom looked much better, ready to paint tomorrow, finally.

It struck me as a perfect metaphor for writing. The first effort looked terrible. In most ways, the bathroom looked much worse than it had before I started painting.  That was the first draft—the draft in which I got some paint on the wall, made some progress toward getting the finished product. More importantly, it was the draft that taught me how to paint the bathroom: it taught me that I was using the wrong material. The plan was good, the execution was poor.

Then came the revision, which comprised several aspects. The walls are essential to the project and so I had to work meticulously to get them to look good. The floor—which I am replacing anyway in a week and a half—was not essential and so it was not important what I did to it. It will be excised, replaced with other material I will find. The door, which is essential, since I am not replacing it—I cleaned carefully with the chemical paint remover.  Those aspects of the job represent the decisions you make when you revise: some pieces of a project you throw out entirely, so it’s perhaps not essential to get them exactly right when you’re in the first draft of the project. The parts you’ll keep and that are essential, you clean up.

But the thing is, you can’t paint a room without opening the paint can, without putting brush and roller to wall.  In the first stages, you make large strokes and then, when you perfect the job, you touch up what needs touching up or just replace it.

As writers then, we have to be willing to make huge messes with our first draft. We can’t care where the paint goes, so to speak—we just have to get it on the wall.

Boredom

In her book, 13 Ways of Looking at a Novel, Pulitzer Prize winning writer Jane Smiley (A Thousand Acres) talks quite a bit about boredom—that is, the causes of a writer becoming bored with his work-in-progress. She outlines four possible causes of boredom:

Ignorance, confusion, fear and the inner critic.

I can see, for myself, the truth of all four causes, but I’ll address one here, now.  

Boredom from ignorance arises, she suggests, when the writer does not know enough of his or her own story: where is it going, how did it get where it is. On the one hand, I think—and others have suggested as well—a writer needs a certain amount of ignorance when he writes. To know too much is to write without the delight of discovery and surprise. In one of the most familiar aphorisms about writing a novel, E.L. Doctorow compares writing the novel to driving at night on an unlighted highway: the writer can see only as far ahead as his headlights illuminate.  Flannery O’Connor talks about her own process of writing “Good Country People,” in which a dishonest Bible salesman steals the wooden leg of a woman he seduces. O’Connor once said that she had no idea he was going to steal the leg until the moment she wrote the sentence telling the reader that he did. So, yes, surprise is vital.  Discovery is vital or the writer succumbs to another kind of boredom.

But I fully admit that for the longest time I haven’t known where my story was going. Partly this arises from fear  of committing to a specific story: What if it’s not good enough?  Maybe something else would be better.  I think of a character in one of William Trevor’s stories (the title escapes me now) about a woman who persists in going to a hotel bar, looking for the man of her dreams. She is, by the time of the story, in dire financial straits.  In the principle scene of the story, she runs into an ex- who suggests that maybe they could give it another go.  He is charming, she likes him, enjoys him—but she rejects him, because he is not the man of her dreams. The reader knows the woman has blown it; she will never find the man of her dreams but will continue alone and dreaming. 

The truth, however, is that a story just has to be a story. There is no such thing as the story.  I think of the title of John Dufresne’s book on writing: The Lie That Tells A Truth. He doesn’t say, “The Truth,” but “A Truth.” There is nothing absolute about what you write. It is a small step in the journey of literature (or, if the notion of literature is too daunting—a small step in the journey of fiction—or a single brick in the edifice of fiction. A single brick in a wall can have all sorts of flaws—the flaws cannot be structural; the brick cannot fall to dust—but it can have all sorts of cosmetic flaws: pock marks, small cracks—and still do what it’s supposed to do: fill that specific space in the wall. That’s all it has to do.

All a writer needs to do is tell a story. A story.

Resistance

I tell my students that writing is often the quickest way to get everything else done. I sit down at my laptop, open the file for my book. . .and remember that I need to clean my bathrooms. I need to vacuum the family room. I need to pay bills. I need to clean the litter box. Cleaning the litter box is onerous but somehow I prefer that to sitting down to work on my book.

I have been working on this book for just about five years now, ever since I wrote the first line while I was at a writer’s conference in Swannanoa NC in the summer of 2001. At first, writing the book was a joy–and it was especially a joy in the fall of 2004, when I was on sabbatical from the university where I teach and could go every morning to a Border’s near my house, set up my laptop, order my large coffee, and sit down to write. Since then, however–sporadic at best. Partly, this is because I have struggled with finding the direction of the book but partly–the primary reason–is resistance, pure and simple. Fear of the blank page–or, rather, fear of the blank screen.

As I get older, I find it harder to overcome the resistance. When I was a young writer, it seemed easier. I didn’t mind failing, maybe–or perhaps I didn’t think I could fail. Perhaps it’s a writer’s version of this:

Pittsburgh Steelers’ quarterback Ben Roethlisberger recently cracked up his Suzuki Hayabusa, which the manufacturer calls “the fastest street legal motorcycle on the market,” according to a story about the accident in the New York Times. Roethlisberger was not wearing a helmet, according to the reports. A story in a recent Sporting News reported that the quarterback–who had previously described himself as conservative, someone who doesn’t take unnecessary chances–just didn’t think an accident could happen to him.

As a young writer, maybe, I thought bad writing couldn’t happen. I was too enamored of taking the prose out for a high speed run and the feel of the machine was enough: look at me; God, that wind is a rush, God that feeling of speed is amazing. The ride was enough. Now, perhaps I resist because I am too conscious of the getting there, of the arrival–and don’t pay enough attention to the ride itself.