A Letter to a Young Writer
Thomas Ogden
Dear Fellow Writer,
In response to your letter, I can offer some thoughts about writing with which you might create something of your own. I do so with some trepidation because I worry that you will take what I say as instruction concerning how you should write instead of reflections on my own experience of writing.
What has been most important to me in my efforts to write is the knowledge that I cannot write like anybody else and no one else can write the way I do. To try to write like someone else is to destroy what is unique to my own experience, my way of talking, my way of thinking, my way of writing, my way of being. Knowing this with certainty has been indispensable to me as a writer.
Being a writer is not a part-time undertaking. I think about writing all the time: when taking a shower, when driving to work, when eating lunch, when waiting in line at a movie theater, when seated in an airplane, when falling asleep. There isn’t a moment, day or night, when I am not in some way thinking about writing. Writing isn’t what I do, it is who I am. The first question Borges needed answered after his dozen days of septic coma was: “Am I still able to write?” Being a writer was who Borges was. In his attempt to prove to himself that he was still able to write, Borges posed the challenge of writing in a genre he had never been able to write: the short story. In this effort to determine if he was still the writer he was, Borges did not simply write a short story, he invented a new genre of short story. He wrote “Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote,” the first of his astonishing ficciones.
Camus describes the importance of one’s dedication to the task of writing: “Works of art are not born in flashes of inspiration but in a daily fidelity.” To persist in writing when one feels unable to write is an act of courage. Philip Roth, when suffering from writer’s block, spent weeks at a time in his study trying to detect his pulse as a writer. Franz Kafka wrote in his Diary: “[11 March] How time flies; another ten days and I have achieved nothing. It doesn’t come off. A page now and then is successful, but I can’t keep it up, the next day I am powerless.” Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary: “And I ought to be writing Jacob’s Room; and I can’t, and instead I shall write down the reason why I can’t—this diary being a kindly blankfaced old confidante.” And Iris Murdoch: “Do I write? I’ve written only three poems & no prose in the last year ... but at the moment I’m writing nothing nor do I feel the urge to write.” I put my soul into writing; writing is an aggressive act in which I dare to take my own bite out of the apple.
I will mention briefly some other thoughts about writers and writing that may hold some value for you as a young writer:
Everyone who takes his or her writing seriously is a writer.
A writer is a person who writes, not a person who publishes.
A young painter does not study with an experienced artist to learn how that artist paints; he studies with the experienced artist to learn how he, himself, paints.
A writer writes to become a better writer.
Essays of every sort, from scientific papers to political manifestos, are art forms, genres of creative writing, that are due the full respect given to other genres of writing.
There is no magic associated with writing; writing is not a gift of the Muses. It is one’s own act of independence.
The more natural writing appears, the more work and talent has gone into it.
A piece of writing is never finished. All I can say about a piece of writing after many drafts is that it is as good as I can make it at this moment. I am never satisfied with what I have written. I do not read what I have published, because I am reluctant to see how poor the writing is. Alfonso Reyes, a friend of Borges, said that he “published what he had written to avoid spending his life correcting it: one publishes a book in order to leave it behind, one publishes a book in order to forget it.”
I read philosophy as a writer and have found Hegel’s allegory of the master and slave to express one of the most important ways in which writing sustains me. In Hegel’s allegory, the slave does everything for the master: he grows the food the master eats, he builds the house in which the master lives, he weaves the clothes the master wears, he constructs the chair on which the master sits. The master does nothing. The upshot of this arrangement is that the slave achieves consciousness, the capacity for self-reflection, the capacity to talk to himself, the capacity to be both subject and object, I and me. The master never achieves consciousness. This is because, while the slave sees himself reflected in the things he makes (in the crops he grows, in the house he builds, in the fabrics he weaves, in the chair he constructs) the master makes nothing and consequently has nothing in which to see himself reflected. So too, the poem the poet writes, the essay the essayist writes, the novel the novelist writes, are mirrors in which the writer sees himself reflected.
I have spent a good deal of my life writing. This is true not only in terms of the number of hours I have spent writing, but also in terms of the way every experience I have lived, real and imaginary, has become part of who I am as a writer. I read as a writer, I dream as a writer, I see films as a writer, I teach as a writer. I am the sum of the impressions my lived experience has left on me, and these impressions are the quarry from which I mine the characters, stories, essays, and poems I write. This is not to say that I am a step removed as I engage in reading, viewing a film, or falling asleep. Quite the opposite. The experiences of reading, dreaming, watching films, working at my profession, talking to my mother, my wife, my children, my grandchildren, the checkout clerk at the grocery store, all become more immediate and intense when I am at the same time experiencing these activities in all their shifting hues and shades from the perspective of a writer.
As I read, I am cognizant of the structure and length of sentences, the qualities of the voices of the narrator and characters, the way metaphor is used, the way first person and third person narration are used, the way music is made in a poem and good prose, and so on. As I read a novel, I am revising the text in my mind as I would revise a draft of my own writing: I rewrite sentences, alter the narrative voice, consider whether a metaphor works. The authors of books I’ve read have been my most important teachers of writing.
I maintain my connection with writing as I work in my profession. I am all the time engaged in writing from (not about) the experience I am living as I do my professional work. Without the opportunity to give expression in writing to the thoughts and emotions I experience at work, I think I would lose interest in my profession and perhaps come to resent spending my time doing it. I have learned that it is possible to respond as a writer to experiences while working by transforming these experiences, giving them expression as a detail, a metaphor, a sotto voce remark, a turn of plot in what I am writing at the time.
All of us are writers. We write a good deal every day: emails, texts, birthday cards, reminder notes to ourselves. To become a better writer, I take all of my writing seriously, even seemingly trivial sorts of writing. This is nowhere better illustrated than in William Carlos Williams’s “This is just to say”:
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
I try to keep in mind the way Williams’s poem, and many other poems like it, transform the ordinary into art. A written account of one’s experience is not always art. Art is what we do with our experience in the act of writing. The possibility of creating art presented itself to me today in the form of responding to an email from my wife asking what time I will be finished with work; a note from a member of a seminar saying she’s ill and won’t be attending the seminar today; a brief story my eight-year-old granddaughter sent me; turning down a request for an endorsement of a book; a thought for a short story I jotted down (as I waited in line at the post office) on a ragged piece of paper in my wallet which I keep there for just such occasions. In each of these instances, I tried to write well, to write phrases and sentences with some life to them, sentences free of cliché, sentences that may have a bit of humor or irony and a bit of music to them. It is satisfying to write even a few words that feel sincere and personal and thought-provoking. An imaginative note is a precious gift to give or receive.
I will focus for a moment on the way I read as a writer. I marvel at the way writers create effects in writing, effects that transcend the symbolic meaning of words. I find that the meaning of sentences lies less in the symbolic value of the words, and more in the mysterious ways they affect me.
As I read, I ask myself: How did he or she do that? How does William Maxwell, in So Long, See You Tomorrow, manage to narrate a portion of the book from the point of view of a dog: “The leaves started falling, and the dog could see stars shining in the tops of the trees.” For the dog, the stars are not shining through the tops of the trees, they are in the tops of the trees. And the dog is witness to the change in the boy she loves, a boy whom she knows has lost everything—his home, his horse, the smell of washday, his books, his work clothes, and so much else. “Take all this away and what have you done to him,” the dog wonders.
There is a sentence from Eudora Welty’s short story, “The Wide Net,” which I return to again and again. In this long sentence, Brucie, a six-year-old Black boy in Mississippi in the first quarter of the twentieth century, watches his older brother Grady count the cars of a freight train passing in the distance:
It seemed like a little festival procession, moving with the slowness of ignorance or a dream, from distance to distance, the tiny pink and gray cars like secret boxes, Grady was counting the cars to himself, as if he could certainly see each one clearly, and Brucie watched his lips, hushed and cautious, the way he would watch a bird drinking.
This sentence is made up of a series of ten descriptive phrases moving along like the cars of a freight train. In the first part of this sentence, the pace of a freight train is likened to the torpor of “ignorance or a dream.” The words ignorance and dream are haunting in their pairing of all that is vacant with all that is possible. The narrator is speaking of a distinctive quality of Southerners: most everything about Southerners seems to move languorously, including their ignorance and their dreams. Welty once commented that because she’s a Southerner, she doesn’t have to make up anything.
The sentence reaches a crescendo in its final two phrases describing the way Brucie watches his older brother counting: “hushed and cautious, the way he would watch a bird drinking.” How better to describe the way this younger brother watches his older broth- er’s lips moving as he counts the cars? The music of the words is tender, deriving from the joining of two soft shh sounds (“hushed” and “cautious”), followed by the alliteration of three soft w sounds in “the way he would watch.” These alliterations were almost certainly unplanned. They “just happen” in the hands of a writer writing well.
“As one matures as a writer, one accrues a background sense that one’s writing is a part of a whole to which no individual may lay claim.”
In a relatively short sentence by Patrick White in The Solid Mandala, the narrator describes Waldo overhearing his mother and younger brother talking: “It was about this time that Waldo decided every member of his family was hopeless but inevitable.” The linking of the words hopeless and inevitable captures a truth about families: they are hopeless in the sense that they will never be what one wishes they were; in fact, they fail in every respect, and yet one’s family feels inevitable, inescapable.
I write notes and page numbers on the inside of the back cover of every novel, and every collection of short stories or poems I read. I do not feel I have read a book if I have not left these notes about a particular word choice, the delicacy of a metaphor, a change in the voice of a character, a long sentence that moves with all the grace of a butterfly unfurling its wings. I should add that I never return to those notes, probably because I am no longer the reader or the writer who read that book.
T.S. Eliot distilled into six words the remarkable statement: “Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.” To say that immature poets imitate is not a dismissal of young poets, for we all begin as immature writers and make our way into writing in part by imitating the voices of the writers that have inspired us. In my own immaturity, I wrote by imitating Melville in Moby-Dick, which proved a heavy mantle for a sixteen-year-old boy to carry.
The “thefts” by mature poets, to my mind, are the lines from other poets’ poems one installs word for word into one’s own poems (a practice Eliot subscribed to). But more important than that, as one matures as a writer, one accrues a background sense that one’s writing is a part of a whole to which no individual may lay claim.
It has taken countless experiences in reading, beginning in grade school, to awaken me to the fact that the words on the page are all there is. There is nothing beneath them or behind them. Reading as a writer involves looking into the words, listening to the sounds they make, seeing how the words work together to create wondrous effects. That is the art and the craft of writing.
I am always writing. In the period between completing one piece of writing and beginning the next, I am a person who is preparing to write. When the beginnings of an idea occur to me, I feel that I have somehow had this idea all my life and only now am finding a way to think it, and possibly write it. A friend, who is an artist, tells me when he shows me a new painting: “It has taken 75 years to paint this painting.”
From the time I was an adolescent, I have been intrigued by the way words work, how they convey meaning, how they create meaning, and how meaning can be stripped from them. While in high school, after dinner, I began repeating to myself the name given to the piece of cloth in front of me on the table. I decided to see what happened if I repeated the word napkin to myself. After fifteen or twenty repetitions of the word, the name for the object dissolved into a sound that was no longer a word. The object no longer had a name, it had a sound that could be replaced by any other sound because there was nothing intrinsic to it that connected it to the object. I became frightened that every name I had for objects could be reduced to a sound that was impossible to remember. If this were to occur, I would lose my sanity and become unable to speak or even think. This experience revealed to me one of the dark secrets of language: its power to create me and the world in which I live, and its power to strip that world of meaning.
I will mention aspects of the way I go about writing both fiction and nonfiction, not as advice concerning how you should write, but as a description of the way I write. I try to claim certain hours of the week in which to write without outside interference, but this is not always possible, especially when my children were young. When there is no time to put aside for writing, I use scraps of time, seizing minutes during the day or night in which to write. For example, I write during the minutes when my wife is reading a bedtime story to our children, during minutes or hours spent waiting to board a train or plane, during the minutes waiting for a client or colleague who is late for a meeting.
I avoid reading the work of others on the subject about which I am writing. I have found that if I read what others have written on a subject, I am inclined either to argue with them (which is not interesting for me or the reader) or surrender to them with the feeling that my ideas have already been written and need not be written again. I am not alone in feeling this way. Winnicott (1945) elegantly states in the opening sentences of an essay:
I shall not first give an historical survey and show the development of my ideas from the theories of others, because my mind does not work that way. What happens is that I gather this and that, here and there, settle down to clinical experience, form my own theories and then, last of all, interest myself in where I stole what. Perhaps this is as good a method as any.
Getting out of my own way while writing—refraining from being excessively critical of what I am saying—is both necessary and difficult. I find reviews of my work to be particularly uninstructive for me. I no longer read book reviews, because in the decades when I did, I kept the reviewer in my mind as a voice urging me to write in a manner he or she would have me write. This was so regardless of whether the review was laudatory or damning. Neither do I talk with anyone about what I am writing, for there too, an enthusiastic response or a critical one lingers as a bias that interferes with my own writing process. Paul Klee wrote that when he was young, his studio was filled with the artists he most admired, but as he grew older, the room emptied, until finally he was alone as he painted.
I find that one of the most reliable ways of improving a piece of writing is deletion of text: deleting every extra word, extra phrase, extra sentence, extra metaphor, extra character whose presence is not necessary to the movement of the story or essay. I am reminded here of Tom Stoppard’s definition of poetry: “the simultaneous compression of language and expansion of meaning.”
I have learned that there are many times when my writing seems “unproductive” in that it is not yielding an organization of sentences in which I am creating a structure of thinking or storytelling. But I discover again and again that writing has to be “unproductive”—without shape or direction—before it becomes part of a larger, more defined structure of meaning. The previous ways I have conveyed meaning must give way to new ones if the writing is to feel fresh and original to me.
If I go chasing after an idea or a narrative twist, it eludes me. If I am quiet and simply write, it may come to me. I can imagine a response to what I have just said: “It comes to you because you are an experienced writer, and I’m not. I am a newcomer stalled in the ante room of writing.” I would reply, “Like everything else one does—driving a car, baking a soufflé, playing tennis—it takes a great deal of practice to do these things well. And even after a great deal of practice, it takes time and patience, and there is no guarantee it will ever come out as you would like it.” I have thrown away essays, short stories, and novels that have died on the vine. Those false starts may not ever become parts of my later writing, but they all contribute to my becoming a better writer.
When writing, I persist until I hear the sound of good sentences. I read Melville and Shakespeare in high school. Their writing was “good,” because I was told it was good. I had not yet developed an ear for good writing. I first began to be able to hear good sentences —sentences that make sense in their own way—when taking a freshman writing composition course. Halfway through the semester, the professor read a paragraph written by a student in response to the prompt: “Describe a situation in which you were feeling good.” The student described stepping down the front steps of his house, walking down the sidewalk, and saying hello to a dog as he passed by. I was struck by the detail of saying hello to a dog. I was able, for the first time, to hear the sound of good writing.
I find the difference between fiction and nonfiction to be imaginary. All autobiography is fiction, and all fiction is autobiography. Fiction is not a falsification of reality; it is the most reliable medium for the expression of the emotional truth of an experience. Writing dialogue is one of the most fertile ways I have of conveying who a character is at a particular point in a story. As narrator, I could say that the character is diffident or caustic or grandiose, but those qualities are better conveyed by the voice with which the character speaks.
In writing about experiences of any sort, I try to describe, not explain, for I do not have explanations for something as complex and mysterious as human emotion and behavior. Life is not comprehensible; it is not even plausible. When we write, we do not record life, we create life.