On writing's "hardness"
"The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe" -Flaubert
My family and are I renovating our house, and last week a very friendly woodworker and I got to chatting. I mention it because he said something unexpected, something I rarely hear from people or say to myself, and it hit me in a strange way.
Woodworker: What is it you do?
Me: I’m a writer.
Woodworker: Really? Wow. Writing is so hard.
Me: Yeah. It is.
Writing is hard. Though, too often, I forget this.
Gustave Flaubert, who wrote Madame Bovary and many other literary masterpieces, was well-known for taking days to write a sentence. Months to draft a single scene.
3 of my favourite novels lay on my desk to remind me of how story and language are powerful beasts changing the way we see and experience the world.
Two of them took 7 years to write; the other, the Pulitzer winner All the Light We Cannot See, took 10 years.
The crafting of story and illuminations through language is painstaking and slow.
Yet, I assume the pain I feel to find the words, the meaning, the tone, the structure means I’m failing, I’m simply doing it all wrong.
“When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.” - Enrique Jardiel Poncela, Spanish playwright & novelist
Chuck Wendig explains it this way…
“Why is it hard digging ditches? Why is it hard being a god? Writing is somewhere in between both of those. You’re the god of digging ditches. You’re navigating this interstitial terrain between art and craft, between self-actualization and commerce, between empathy and evil. It has all these rules, and almost none of them are true….The short answer is, again, I don’t know. Maybe it’s hard because it needs to be hard, because if it were too easy, it wouldn’t really matter.”
And this reflection from Vivian Gornick couldn’t be more true…
“One day not too long ago I sat down at the desk, determined to sit there until at least one thought clarified itself sufficiently to serve the essay I was writing. I failed. Next day I sat down again. Again, I failed. Three days later, same thing. But the day after that the fog cleared out of my head. I solved a simple writing problem, one that had seemed intractable, and a stone rolled off my chest. Once again, and perhaps for the 4000th time since leaving analysis, I thanked the daily effort, my gratitude profuse. I saw what by now I’d seen many times before: It wasn’t the writing itself that was everything, it was sitting down to it every day that was everything.
The idea of doing something everyday to exist within the paradoxical space of aimless and specificity, a kind of specificity that illuminates, is wild.
It’s truly wild.
I expect that’s the true texture of creativity, that it’s supposed to be wild. It’s supposed to help me enter into the wild and find the animal self, the ancient self, the accepting self, outside of my address, my job, my name.
Back to Flaubert. He said: "The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe." And, without question, what you are.
Loved this so much Nadia! Self-doubt and impatience—-
Love all your posts, Nadia, and this one particularly resonated with me - thank you 🤩 xx