Greetings, writers—
Today, please consider the questions that the brilliant Denis Johnson asked himself whenever he was working on a book:
“When this is done, won’t the fuckers wish they’d treated me different. Will this ever get done? How can I get it to get done without my having to be the one who gets it done? Is it any good anyway? Who can I find to tell me it’s good before it exists, so I can write it with absolute confidence? What will I say at the National Book Awards? What if I mispronounce “Pulitzer” at the Pulitzer Prize ceremony? Should I actually accept these awards? — I mean, don’t they actually mean nothing to me? etc. — the minute I take my fingers from the keyboard. Put my fingers back down, the questions go away.”
Who can I find to tell me it’s good before it exists, so I can write it with absolute confidence? I mean, yes. That’s what I want to know, too.
Put my fingers back down, the questions go away.
Sure, it’s hard to ask a bunch of questions when you’re typing. But what about when you sit down, first thing in the morning, with your pen and paper and your imperfect ideas? What about when you don’t know what should happen next in your story, and it seems like you’ll never get to the end of it?
Then maybe it’s good to turn to to Maeve Brennan, who wrote the following letter to Tillie Olsen.
“I have been trying to think of the word to say to you that would never fail to lift you up when you are too tired or too sad not [to] be downcast. But I can think only of a reminder—you are all it has. You are all your work has. It has nobody else and never had anybody else. If you deny it hands and a voice, it will continue as it is, alive, but speechless and without hands.”
You are all your work has.
I love that line—its encouragement, yes, but also its hint of a threat. You owe your work your attention. And if you abandon it, Brennan suggests, your lonely, half-formed ideas will float around for eternity, and they’ll be really, really sad about it, and you don’t want that to happen, do you?
You are all your work has.
You are all your work has.
What are the questions you ask yourself when you’re writing? More importantly, what are the answers you can give yourself that make you keep going? Write them down. Keep them close.