An Award is no Reward
Its literary awards season all over again. Time for the great and the good of high culture to take off their mauve sweaters and sandals and stagger down the aisle and be lauded and applauded amongst the cameras and bright lights. Writing is a dark, lonely business. As rabbits in the highlights go, these are less your Bigwigs and more your Flopsy-Wopsies. Nobody likes award ceremonies do they? Not the judges, the recipients, even the viewers. Not even the publishing houses, now the promise of a vast increase in sales for victory is as debatable as the presenter's opinions on the great literary words of the evening. In fact it makes you wonder what the point is of winning at all, or even turning up in the first place. Trust me, if I was comfortable standing in front of a crowd of hundreds, without even considering the...about one million watching on TV, then I wouldn't be an author.
When you think about it, winning the Booker Prize, for example, is the antithesis of why anyone would embark on a career in writing in the first place. It's an award for literary fiction, not crime or romance or film, so anyone who looks to write in this most unglamorous of genres must surely not be doing it for the fame, fortune or glamour. Their motivations must be greater than that, deeper than anything as prosaic as an award ceremony.
So what is it? What are the reasons we embark on the tortuous adventure of writing in the first place? If there is very small chance of fame, and even less of fortune, what possible motivation could we have for doing it?
Psychological issues
I mean there has to be something. Writing is a lonely, tedious, incredibly time-consuming enterprise and as humans we should intrinsically not want to do something like that. We should want to enjoy ourselves, do things that make us happy. Sitting in a room alone for hours on end trying to think about the lives of some people we have just made up is not happy pursuit. It is many things, but it is not 'happy.' At no point, in the middle of a large puddle of character exposition with no idea where I am or where I'm going, have I thought - yep, I'm really enjoying this. This is better than going out to the pub, or watching football, or having sex. Oh yeah.
So there must be something wrong right? For me to want to do this there must be an imbalance in my mind, some motivation for wanting to torture myself, every day, for hours on end.
The first and most obvious condition must be loneliness.
If one is on one's own for days on end, with no confidence to talk to anyone, no means by which to meet anyone and a strong belief in their own intellect and opinions, then writing seems like the immediate route out. There is something wrong with the rest of the world, so why no not take the easy way out and create your own world? It means you never have to meet anyone and have no reason to worry about the fact that you don't anymore. You're a writer. You need to be alone. Everyone else is just characters in the book of your life. You just need to observe and consider, never interact. That would corrupt your perception. Your mind needs to be pure. Proust wrote In Search of Lost Time while consigned to his cork lined bedroom. Hardy locked himself away from the wife he grew to despise. Writing was there solace. Writing gives loneliness a purpose. It means you don't have to bother with the rest of the world.
Then there is insecurity, where one feels unsure of themselves in the world, or around other people. They are not sure of how they are or who they are, and how they are going to act. They have no sense of 'self.' They are transients, with no certainty of present or future. They can see how people and find no part of themselves with them. They are different.
Without any confidence to express themselves in the world they move inside. They put pen to paper. They find no-one watching them, no-one shaking their head, or laughing or averting their eyes. They can do whatever they like. They can put it all down, let it all out. They can project all those paranoid possibilities that have been stuck in their heads all this time. They can be a person, and maybe become certain of who they are at the same time. Writing is difficult, but for a lot of people it is a damn sight easier than talking. At least the paper doesn't judge.
Finally there is the most common of all - depression and low self-esteem. In a fit of depression, you may hate yourself, you may have no way out, you may not have any light shining in the darkness, you may want to end it all, but at the same time there is an urge to write it down. You want people to know. You want people to understand how miserable you are, even if you have no wish to talk to them. Then the more you write you the more you realise that you don't have to be depressed all the time. It helps. It takes you to a different place, where you are not 'you' but a character of you, and his or her feelings are different. They are yours, but not yours at the same time. They are taking place outside of your body. It gives you a third way, a place to look and think and take perspective, without the black wave taking over.
I'm sure there are many others as well, after all writing and mental disease almost go hand in hand. Psychological problems make you insular, they make you egotistical, they make you think about yourself and other people whether you want to or not - all essential attributes of becoming a writer. You might say 'you don't have to be crazy to do this job, but it helps.'
Mind numbing boredom
It sounds obvious but it's true. Boredom is particularly conducive to writing. Now, as we must all agree, writing is not particularly fun - it's not as exciting as going on a rollercoaster or watching the new Michael Bay movie, but compared with some things it is interesting, and sometimes it is the only thing that is.
I think boredom induces writing in a cumulative way. We are all bored a lot of the time, of course - on the train, in a class, at work, walking down the street, reading blogs on internet sites. As children of an accelerated culture we are also not very good at being bored, so our minds waver and drift and think - a lot. The more we think, the more we get ideas, and the more we feel like we need to do something with them. But for most of us, work is incredibly dull, the pub is for jokes and flirting, and weekends are for precious leisure time away from incredibly dull work, so we don't do anything with them, we leave them there latent, redundant, simmering in our minds until we become bored again, and the fiery broth begins to bubble once more.
Then eventually we become so bored that there is nothing else for it. We can't keep it any longer. We know no-one will be interested if we just talk about them, so we write them down - how I'd like to kill my boss, how the world is going to implode, what would happen if we forgot the concept of money, a world ruled by hamsters, whatever. Most of us think about this kind of random stuff at some point, but just leave it or forget about it, but for some it stays on and it lingers. For those who are really bored, whose minds are not easily pleased, who finally get bored of Football Manager or Eastenders, for whom boredom stops covering periods of minutes, and turns into hours, days, weeks at a time, for whom nothing is interesting, who have to make your own interest - that is where writing comes in. Writing may be a lot of things, but it is not boring. It's arduous, it's difficult but if there is nothing to distract you - and if you're bored enough there shouldn't - then it is actually better than nothing. When your mind drifts, it has to be interested in something, and in many ways that's all writing is - a form of expressing the drifting of your mind. You just need your mind to be able to drift in the first place. And in a world of mind numbing jobs, dumbed-down culture well-educated minds, that should not be too difficult.
Fear of Death
Yep, that's right, writing is often motivated by the knowledge that tomorrow it might all be over, that the biological clock is ticking, that one day we will be no more, and the world is going to move on even though we have been eroded from our pit in the ground. It's a frightening thought, that one day we won't be here and that will be it. Nothing. Forever. Gone. In fact it's so frightening that we can't possibility deal with it. We can't accept it. Try and think about for more than five minutes - it isn't possible, it's scarier than anything, scarier than this.
Now most people are good at dealing with this, and can just to the normal thing - like forgetting about it. If we are all going to die, then we might as well enjoy what time we have here, instead of thinking about pointless things like death all the time. 'We'll cross that bridge when we come to it,' as my father always used to say, before getting us lost somewhere outside Norwich. However, for some it plays on their mind. They can't deal with it. They need an answer, a way out, and when it comes to death this is not an easy thing to find. Try as they might, scientist behind such clever things as this, and this, have not come up with a way to make us immortal as yet. 'We're all gonna die' as this man said so eloquently.
So how do they do it? How do they deal with the inescapable fear of death? How do they become the impossible, the dream of mad politicians and incredible cool sixties film producers - to become immortal, then die?
Ever heard of John Donne?
Geoffrey Chaucer?
Homer?
These guys have been dead for hundreds or thousands of years, but they still hang around and don't seem like going away any time soon. They may not have their heads frozen in jars, but they are by no means just rotting flesh in the ground. Their thoughts, their ideas, their words permeate our culture to this day, even though at school most of us can't understand a word of what they're going on about. Compared to most of the population they are pretty well alive and until humans become so arrogant as to completely dismiss their entire culture and history they are here to stay. That is what writing fiction, and literary fiction in particular, is all about. Doing something. Doing something that means something. Creating meaning in a culture of transience. Making something of value, something timeless, something to resonate throughout humanity. That is the aspiration of the writer, to somehow contemplate the prospect of forever, and have their name shining through it. That is how they cope with death, by their words, which can be more immortal than any of us ever will be.
Vindictiveness
Nothing motivates like revenge. There is no greater incentive to engage in otherwise painful and arduous pursuits, than the belief that you are getting one over your greatest foe. It is the silent sense of achievement, the feeling that once your work gets out in the open that you will be victorious, and he or she will sit beneath you on your cowering below your throne of glory.
It may be the girl who dumped you at secondary school, the teacher that failed you in maths, the boss that declined you that promotion. It could be your mother, your father, your best friend, your wife, your husband, your dog, but someone will have wronged you at some point, to the point where you have no choice but to put pen to paper.
Anything can happen to a character in a story. You can take any experience and abstract it in written form no matter how traumatic, no matter how painful. You can put in down, because you can solve it, you can make it okay, you can find a way out of the trap. In the world of your writing, you are God and as such you can throw your bolts of lightning down upon whomever you choose in whatever manner you wish. The one who gets the girl is the one you choose. The one crying into the bottom of their pint glass having had their smug faces ripped apart is the one you decided on. How they have to come to fall or rise, is however you decided - be it a facial deformity from a car accident, a huge financial loss, tumbling into hell on the day of judgment, whatever. This is the world how it should be, how it would be if people met their rightful fates, if the outcome justified the cause. You know how the world should be, you know what should happen to those who have wronged you and in writing you can make that happen. You can make it all right. You can say the correct thing, act the correct way, achieve the right outcome - you can win, you can triumph.
That's what writing can do for you. It can make you live in your own personal heaven and give you control over everything. If you have been wronged enough than you will feel that this isn’t just a frivolous exercise either. You have to do this - you have to protest against reality, you have to show people what can happen and how it can affect people.
We live in a world where there is very little room for voicing our frustrations, but writing is the canvas where there are no limitations. You can say whatever you like, because there is no-one there to tell you otherwise - the police are your police, the boss is your boss, God is your God. Most of us would just survive with a moan down the pub or a teary phone call after a glass of wine, but some are different. Some do let it go that is easy. Some - the most vindictive - will write a book about it, because sometimes there is no other lawful way back.
Ego
This seems the most obvious, but somehow I don't think it as much of a motivating factor as you might think. Fundamentally writing is about two things - a story about yourself, or a make believe world - and is usually composed of a mix between the two. However, aside from books that are purely based on the latter, which would be either autobiographical or bad literary fiction, the motivation to write is not often drawn from a sense of one's own self-importance. It is a belief in yourself as a story-teller, but not as the subject for the story to be told. If one has this feeling about oneself, then one would imagine that your aspirations would lie in different direction, where people can see you as who you are, rather than from a mask of plot and characterization.
However, that is not to say that writers do not have a sense of their own greatness, and particularly literary writers as that, but it takes rather a different form. They will of course believe they are talented individuals, with great intelligence, and that what they write will be worthy enough to be read by the great and the good, and be of a standard to make them marvel at the writer's brilliance and intellect. However, I think that that is not enough motivation for writing in the first place. It needs to be more than that. It requires an ego that has been battered, bruised and squashed - that is when a pen is taken up, that is when a need to write resides.
If I am happy, believe I'm great, have a great wife and loads of friends, then I don't have that need. But if I don't, if live among people I despise, if my family think I'm a black sheep, if my grades were never what they should have been, if my job is depressing and moronic and if people don't listen to my erudite opinions, that is when I need to find something else, that is when I need to express myself in another way, that is when I become motivated to write. I am smart, I am clever, I am a worthwhile, superior human being - all these idiots in the world, they are below me, they do not understand me, they could never appreciate the depths of me - and I need to show it. No-one appreciates me. Me, me, me.
You feel your arrogance boiling up like a volcano and that is when the writing begins. No-one wants to listen, but they will now. Now they'll see how smart how I am, now they will view the intricacies and complexities of my vast literary mind.
In this respect writing is all about striving for greatness, like Shakespeare or Milton, but only in the sense that one is not great already. That is where the writer's ego stems from - a practical application of a belief in a world where they can be great. Why else are they all so pompous and so socially inept at the same time?
Difficulty
However, that doesn't mean you're not going to do them. Because they are hard, it does not make them not worth doing - it just requires an alteration of the mind, whereby we do actually want to do them for some reason or another.
Running is a good example. When you get home from work, you hardly ever want to go out running, but when you get going, after the first couple of miles, you begin to enjoy it. The mind feels clear, the body feels good and you feel happy. It is hard, but you overcome that and you feel better for it. You experience a happiness that is hard to attain, and therefore it is special, it is something not can do.
Writing works in a similar way. A novel, or certainly a good novel, will take you around two years of hard slog. Two years! What could make you want to do that? Well, the answer lies in the question itself. Two years. Two years of hard work. What could be harder? Who could be more special than to complete that? That is why we begin writing, because it is hard to do, because we believe that inherent in its difficulty lies a happiness greater than we are simply able to obtain.
Literary fiction in particular stems from this idea. It makes use our mind operate in a different way, a way that is harder than real life and from that comes thoughts and insights greater than we could ever imagine we could obtain. It takes a while, but one you get going there is a happiness to it. The ideas flow. Characters react. Settings expand. Plot moves forward. Humanity comes out. The world unravels in front of our eyes. That's when it starts to take over your life, when nothing become easy anymore, because easiness is dull compared to the insight of writing. The writing world becomes your world, and the empirical world, the reality down to the pub and in front of the TV is no longer enough. It is the world that becomes difficult, because it is so easy.
The other difficulty of a novel is that it is never finished. It never feels like that's it, that it is perfect, that it's done. It's never complete, we never gain the reward for all our hard work in the first place and yet we never want to stop. We have to keep going, keep trying, keep journeying towards that light at the top of the well. It is that difficulty that makes us start and difficulty that makes us not want to stop.
No awards will make a difference. No accolade will ever be enough. That is the curse and the beauty of writing.
When you think about it, winning the Booker Prize, for example, is the antithesis of why anyone would embark on a career in writing in the first place. It's an award for literary fiction, not crime or romance or film, so anyone who looks to write in this most unglamorous of genres must surely not be doing it for the fame, fortune or glamour. Their motivations must be greater than that, deeper than anything as prosaic as an award ceremony.
So what is it? What are the reasons we embark on the tortuous adventure of writing in the first place? If there is very small chance of fame, and even less of fortune, what possible motivation could we have for doing it?
Psychological issues
I mean there has to be something. Writing is a lonely, tedious, incredibly time-consuming enterprise and as humans we should intrinsically not want to do something like that. We should want to enjoy ourselves, do things that make us happy. Sitting in a room alone for hours on end trying to think about the lives of some people we have just made up is not happy pursuit. It is many things, but it is not 'happy.' At no point, in the middle of a large puddle of character exposition with no idea where I am or where I'm going, have I thought - yep, I'm really enjoying this. This is better than going out to the pub, or watching football, or having sex. Oh yeah.
So there must be something wrong right? For me to want to do this there must be an imbalance in my mind, some motivation for wanting to torture myself, every day, for hours on end.
The first and most obvious condition must be loneliness.
If one is on one's own for days on end, with no confidence to talk to anyone, no means by which to meet anyone and a strong belief in their own intellect and opinions, then writing seems like the immediate route out. There is something wrong with the rest of the world, so why no not take the easy way out and create your own world? It means you never have to meet anyone and have no reason to worry about the fact that you don't anymore. You're a writer. You need to be alone. Everyone else is just characters in the book of your life. You just need to observe and consider, never interact. That would corrupt your perception. Your mind needs to be pure. Proust wrote In Search of Lost Time while consigned to his cork lined bedroom. Hardy locked himself away from the wife he grew to despise. Writing was there solace. Writing gives loneliness a purpose. It means you don't have to bother with the rest of the world.
Then there is insecurity, where one feels unsure of themselves in the world, or around other people. They are not sure of how they are or who they are, and how they are going to act. They have no sense of 'self.' They are transients, with no certainty of present or future. They can see how people and find no part of themselves with them. They are different.
Without any confidence to express themselves in the world they move inside. They put pen to paper. They find no-one watching them, no-one shaking their head, or laughing or averting their eyes. They can do whatever they like. They can put it all down, let it all out. They can project all those paranoid possibilities that have been stuck in their heads all this time. They can be a person, and maybe become certain of who they are at the same time. Writing is difficult, but for a lot of people it is a damn sight easier than talking. At least the paper doesn't judge.
Finally there is the most common of all - depression and low self-esteem. In a fit of depression, you may hate yourself, you may have no way out, you may not have any light shining in the darkness, you may want to end it all, but at the same time there is an urge to write it down. You want people to know. You want people to understand how miserable you are, even if you have no wish to talk to them. Then the more you write you the more you realise that you don't have to be depressed all the time. It helps. It takes you to a different place, where you are not 'you' but a character of you, and his or her feelings are different. They are yours, but not yours at the same time. They are taking place outside of your body. It gives you a third way, a place to look and think and take perspective, without the black wave taking over.
I'm sure there are many others as well, after all writing and mental disease almost go hand in hand. Psychological problems make you insular, they make you egotistical, they make you think about yourself and other people whether you want to or not - all essential attributes of becoming a writer. You might say 'you don't have to be crazy to do this job, but it helps.'
Mind numbing boredom
It sounds obvious but it's true. Boredom is particularly conducive to writing. Now, as we must all agree, writing is not particularly fun - it's not as exciting as going on a rollercoaster or watching the new Michael Bay movie, but compared with some things it is interesting, and sometimes it is the only thing that is.
I think boredom induces writing in a cumulative way. We are all bored a lot of the time, of course - on the train, in a class, at work, walking down the street, reading blogs on internet sites. As children of an accelerated culture we are also not very good at being bored, so our minds waver and drift and think - a lot. The more we think, the more we get ideas, and the more we feel like we need to do something with them. But for most of us, work is incredibly dull, the pub is for jokes and flirting, and weekends are for precious leisure time away from incredibly dull work, so we don't do anything with them, we leave them there latent, redundant, simmering in our minds until we become bored again, and the fiery broth begins to bubble once more.
Then eventually we become so bored that there is nothing else for it. We can't keep it any longer. We know no-one will be interested if we just talk about them, so we write them down - how I'd like to kill my boss, how the world is going to implode, what would happen if we forgot the concept of money, a world ruled by hamsters, whatever. Most of us think about this kind of random stuff at some point, but just leave it or forget about it, but for some it stays on and it lingers. For those who are really bored, whose minds are not easily pleased, who finally get bored of Football Manager or Eastenders, for whom boredom stops covering periods of minutes, and turns into hours, days, weeks at a time, for whom nothing is interesting, who have to make your own interest - that is where writing comes in. Writing may be a lot of things, but it is not boring. It's arduous, it's difficult but if there is nothing to distract you - and if you're bored enough there shouldn't - then it is actually better than nothing. When your mind drifts, it has to be interested in something, and in many ways that's all writing is - a form of expressing the drifting of your mind. You just need your mind to be able to drift in the first place. And in a world of mind numbing jobs, dumbed-down culture well-educated minds, that should not be too difficult.
Fear of Death
Yep, that's right, writing is often motivated by the knowledge that tomorrow it might all be over, that the biological clock is ticking, that one day we will be no more, and the world is going to move on even though we have been eroded from our pit in the ground. It's a frightening thought, that one day we won't be here and that will be it. Nothing. Forever. Gone. In fact it's so frightening that we can't possibility deal with it. We can't accept it. Try and think about for more than five minutes - it isn't possible, it's scarier than anything, scarier than this.
Now most people are good at dealing with this, and can just to the normal thing - like forgetting about it. If we are all going to die, then we might as well enjoy what time we have here, instead of thinking about pointless things like death all the time. 'We'll cross that bridge when we come to it,' as my father always used to say, before getting us lost somewhere outside Norwich. However, for some it plays on their mind. They can't deal with it. They need an answer, a way out, and when it comes to death this is not an easy thing to find. Try as they might, scientist behind such clever things as this, and this, have not come up with a way to make us immortal as yet. 'We're all gonna die' as this man said so eloquently.
So how do they do it? How do they deal with the inescapable fear of death? How do they become the impossible, the dream of mad politicians and incredible cool sixties film producers - to become immortal, then die?
Ever heard of John Donne?
Geoffrey Chaucer?
Homer?
These guys have been dead for hundreds or thousands of years, but they still hang around and don't seem like going away any time soon. They may not have their heads frozen in jars, but they are by no means just rotting flesh in the ground. Their thoughts, their ideas, their words permeate our culture to this day, even though at school most of us can't understand a word of what they're going on about. Compared to most of the population they are pretty well alive and until humans become so arrogant as to completely dismiss their entire culture and history they are here to stay. That is what writing fiction, and literary fiction in particular, is all about. Doing something. Doing something that means something. Creating meaning in a culture of transience. Making something of value, something timeless, something to resonate throughout humanity. That is the aspiration of the writer, to somehow contemplate the prospect of forever, and have their name shining through it. That is how they cope with death, by their words, which can be more immortal than any of us ever will be.
Vindictiveness
Nothing motivates like revenge. There is no greater incentive to engage in otherwise painful and arduous pursuits, than the belief that you are getting one over your greatest foe. It is the silent sense of achievement, the feeling that once your work gets out in the open that you will be victorious, and he or she will sit beneath you on your cowering below your throne of glory.
It may be the girl who dumped you at secondary school, the teacher that failed you in maths, the boss that declined you that promotion. It could be your mother, your father, your best friend, your wife, your husband, your dog, but someone will have wronged you at some point, to the point where you have no choice but to put pen to paper.
Anything can happen to a character in a story. You can take any experience and abstract it in written form no matter how traumatic, no matter how painful. You can put in down, because you can solve it, you can make it okay, you can find a way out of the trap. In the world of your writing, you are God and as such you can throw your bolts of lightning down upon whomever you choose in whatever manner you wish. The one who gets the girl is the one you choose. The one crying into the bottom of their pint glass having had their smug faces ripped apart is the one you decided on. How they have to come to fall or rise, is however you decided - be it a facial deformity from a car accident, a huge financial loss, tumbling into hell on the day of judgment, whatever. This is the world how it should be, how it would be if people met their rightful fates, if the outcome justified the cause. You know how the world should be, you know what should happen to those who have wronged you and in writing you can make that happen. You can make it all right. You can say the correct thing, act the correct way, achieve the right outcome - you can win, you can triumph.
That's what writing can do for you. It can make you live in your own personal heaven and give you control over everything. If you have been wronged enough than you will feel that this isn’t just a frivolous exercise either. You have to do this - you have to protest against reality, you have to show people what can happen and how it can affect people.
We live in a world where there is very little room for voicing our frustrations, but writing is the canvas where there are no limitations. You can say whatever you like, because there is no-one there to tell you otherwise - the police are your police, the boss is your boss, God is your God. Most of us would just survive with a moan down the pub or a teary phone call after a glass of wine, but some are different. Some do let it go that is easy. Some - the most vindictive - will write a book about it, because sometimes there is no other lawful way back.
Ego
This seems the most obvious, but somehow I don't think it as much of a motivating factor as you might think. Fundamentally writing is about two things - a story about yourself, or a make believe world - and is usually composed of a mix between the two. However, aside from books that are purely based on the latter, which would be either autobiographical or bad literary fiction, the motivation to write is not often drawn from a sense of one's own self-importance. It is a belief in yourself as a story-teller, but not as the subject for the story to be told. If one has this feeling about oneself, then one would imagine that your aspirations would lie in different direction, where people can see you as who you are, rather than from a mask of plot and characterization.
However, that is not to say that writers do not have a sense of their own greatness, and particularly literary writers as that, but it takes rather a different form. They will of course believe they are talented individuals, with great intelligence, and that what they write will be worthy enough to be read by the great and the good, and be of a standard to make them marvel at the writer's brilliance and intellect. However, I think that that is not enough motivation for writing in the first place. It needs to be more than that. It requires an ego that has been battered, bruised and squashed - that is when a pen is taken up, that is when a need to write resides.
If I am happy, believe I'm great, have a great wife and loads of friends, then I don't have that need. But if I don't, if live among people I despise, if my family think I'm a black sheep, if my grades were never what they should have been, if my job is depressing and moronic and if people don't listen to my erudite opinions, that is when I need to find something else, that is when I need to express myself in another way, that is when I become motivated to write. I am smart, I am clever, I am a worthwhile, superior human being - all these idiots in the world, they are below me, they do not understand me, they could never appreciate the depths of me - and I need to show it. No-one appreciates me. Me, me, me.
You feel your arrogance boiling up like a volcano and that is when the writing begins. No-one wants to listen, but they will now. Now they'll see how smart how I am, now they will view the intricacies and complexities of my vast literary mind.
In this respect writing is all about striving for greatness, like Shakespeare or Milton, but only in the sense that one is not great already. That is where the writer's ego stems from - a practical application of a belief in a world where they can be great. Why else are they all so pompous and so socially inept at the same time?
Difficulty
'If something's hard to do then it's not worth doing,' as the famous mantra says. We all know that this is not entirely correct, but it does have some resonance. No matter how much of a diligent, hard-working individual you consider yourself to be, if something is hard to do then you do not immediately want to do it.
Wake up in the morning and you do not want to do 100 press ups. Get to work and you do not want to start with a complicated file you've been putting off for weeks. Sit on the sofa and you do want to read Ulysses. You are going on holiday to China but you don't want to learn Chinese. All these things are hard, and that is why you don't want to do them.However, that doesn't mean you're not going to do them. Because they are hard, it does not make them not worth doing - it just requires an alteration of the mind, whereby we do actually want to do them for some reason or another.
Running is a good example. When you get home from work, you hardly ever want to go out running, but when you get going, after the first couple of miles, you begin to enjoy it. The mind feels clear, the body feels good and you feel happy. It is hard, but you overcome that and you feel better for it. You experience a happiness that is hard to attain, and therefore it is special, it is something not can do.
Writing works in a similar way. A novel, or certainly a good novel, will take you around two years of hard slog. Two years! What could make you want to do that? Well, the answer lies in the question itself. Two years. Two years of hard work. What could be harder? Who could be more special than to complete that? That is why we begin writing, because it is hard to do, because we believe that inherent in its difficulty lies a happiness greater than we are simply able to obtain.
Literary fiction in particular stems from this idea. It makes use our mind operate in a different way, a way that is harder than real life and from that comes thoughts and insights greater than we could ever imagine we could obtain. It takes a while, but one you get going there is a happiness to it. The ideas flow. Characters react. Settings expand. Plot moves forward. Humanity comes out. The world unravels in front of our eyes. That's when it starts to take over your life, when nothing become easy anymore, because easiness is dull compared to the insight of writing. The writing world becomes your world, and the empirical world, the reality down to the pub and in front of the TV is no longer enough. It is the world that becomes difficult, because it is so easy.
The other difficulty of a novel is that it is never finished. It never feels like that's it, that it is perfect, that it's done. It's never complete, we never gain the reward for all our hard work in the first place and yet we never want to stop. We have to keep going, keep trying, keep journeying towards that light at the top of the well. It is that difficulty that makes us start and difficulty that makes us not want to stop.
No awards will make a difference. No accolade will ever be enough. That is the curse and the beauty of writing.
Comments
Post a Comment