I was talking to an American friend the other day, and she said she was at the end of her tether. Everything to her seemed so bleak - the environment, global warming, the war in Ukraine, the situation in the Middle East, the re-election of the current American president… It all seemed far too much. She just wanted to curl up into a ball and hibernate until everything was nice again (as if that’s going to happen…), and she felt totally unable to write.
After we’d spoken for a while, and she got off the call sounding (marginally) less wretched, I started to think about two things - what propels us to write, and what do we need, as writers, to make writing possible?
I’ll start with the latter. Each of us has a different way of writing, and different ways of getting the writing done. The crime writer Jefferey Deaver is probably the most meticulous planner I know. He spends months planning his novels almost down to paragraph level, then writes swiftly, in a matter of weeks. At the other end of the spectrum there are the ‘pantsers’, who write by the seat of their pants, as the saying goes, starting off gaily, and seeing where the writing takes them. For myself, I think I fall somewhere between the two - I like to know where I’m starting from and where I’m heading to (I often have the last scene clear in my head from the start), but I enjoy (if that’s the right word) the freedom of exploration along the way.
But what about the conditions for writing? Again, as many and various as pebbles on the beach. However, I think there is a common thread for almost all the writers I have spoken to - you need space in your head, as well as space for the physical activity of writing. Neither need be very grand, but they do need to be available. Space in your head is a funny one, because it’s not really just a question of getting to your desk and writing furiously as if you were taking an exam. There also needs to be time to put things to the back of your mind, on a slow simmer. This can often look like procrastination, but it really isn’t - fairly ordinary physical activities, washing up, walking the dog, tidying the cushions on the sofa - frequently provide the opportunity for ideas to take shape and gell. I remember once overhearing two novelists chatting to each other before they gave a talk. One asked the other, “Tell me, are your spice racks in alphabetical order?” When the other admitted they were, they both found that arranging things in the kitchen was one way in which they each kept their writing going.
The question of what propels us to write is much more vexatious, so, for now, I’d like to turn it on its head - what stops us writing? And, perhaps as important, what stops us writing well? By this I don’t mean physical hardship, but the emotional turmoil that, as for my American friend, seems to have made writing impossible.
In a speech which he gave at the University of Uppsala in 1957, just after he’d been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Albert Camus talked about the need to Create Dangerously. In this speech, and the lovely little book in which it is now available, Camus explores how to write in turbulent times - because, let’s face it, all times are turbulent. He is pretty salty about politically engaged writing, and, in particular, socialist realism:
Socialist realism “sacrifices art for an end that is alien to art but that, in the scale of values, may seem to rank higher. In short, it suppresses art temporarily in order to establish justice first. When justice exists, in a still indeterminate future, art will resuscitate. In this way the golden rule of contemporary intelligence is applied to matters of art - the rule that insists on the impossibility of making an omelette without breaking eggs. But such overwhelming common sense must not mislead us. To make a good omelette it is not enough to break thousands of eggs and the value of a cook is not judged, I believe, by the number of broken eggshells.”
Trading art for a message doesn’t work for him. So what does? First of all, Camus is quite clear that “art cannot be a monologue” - as writers, we are holding a conversation with our readers. Next, and in a strange way this takes us back to the well-ordered spice racks, “The free artist is the one who, with great effort, creates his own order. The more undisciplined what he must put in order, the stricter will be his rule and the more he will assert his freedom.” For Camus, of course, freedom was an extremely uncomfortable state, a state in which you were forced to take full responsibility, without excuses.
What I take from this is that, whatever the external turmoil, art creates order - and that’s worth doing. I am reminded of the splendid Hungarian/Canadian writer George Jonas, whom I was lucky enough to meet when he was relatively freshly escaped from Hungary after the 1956 Hungarian Uprising and was beginning to settle in Canada. When I said to him that it must have been a cause of great pain to him that his poetry was banned in his homeland, then under Soviet rule, he replied, “No, not at all. At least it means they take art seriously.” (He also mentioned that it was useful to know that the base of overturned tramcars were, in fact, bulletproof…)
So perhaps taking art seriously, and creating our own order, might be a way forward? What do you think?