One thing that’s vital in sustaining your career
as a writer is to keep a balance between your engagement with the world, and
your distance from it. Virginia Woolf famously argued that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write
fiction…” By that I think Woolf meant that a writer needs solitude and time to
create, two things that are extremely difficult without money and space.
Virginia Woolf
Solitude and time are often hard to come by in a world filled with jobs, debts,
searching for jobs, crowded housing, children, aging parents, problematic
relationships, health challenges, and so many other important things to pay
attention to. Giving yourself and getting the time to work on your writing is
sometimes a matter of complex negotiation with your boss, or your loved ones,
or yourself—sometimes the most difficult person to work out a deal with. We
risk being accused of selfishness if we demand time for our writing, at the
expense of any of our other commitments. There is no easy way to cross this
narrow log over the rushing stream. You just have to keep your footing and look
straight ahead at the opposite bank.
But distance from the world is not the only thing important to a writer.
Immersion in the world is equally important for an author. The things that may
be pulling you away from your writing today will be the material for your work
in a few years, whether it’s the ones you love, or used to love, or would like to
love if only they’d realize how much they need you. It could also be a political
cause, your students, or the neighbor you shop for occasionally—all the ways
you are knotted to the world are important, both on their own and for your soul
as a writer. As Ezra Pound says in ABC of
Reading, “More writers fail from lack of character than from lack of
intelligence.” And he should know, right? Pound was notorious for being a great
stylist with a feeble sense of humanity. Any engagement with the world that
builds your character and your soul can ultimately be good for your writing,
even if it takes away from your writing time in the short run.
It is possible to go
too far into the room of one’s own, to become so involved in one’s own thoughts
and struggles that engagement from the world is weakened. Writers are seekers,
aren’t we? Seekers of truth and beauty. But not all seekers are writers, not by
a long shot. We’ve all known writers and/or seekers, talented and sensitive
souls, whose knots to the world become unraveled because they have gone too
deeply into their own thoughts, and their own internal worlds. It’s a real danger,
particularly for writers who are among the most visionary and daring, since
their minds crave that solitary and unique undersea world of the imagination.
It’s best to dive into that world for limited times, to come up for air
occasionally, and not resurface too quickly. There is such a thing as getting
the bends from a literary standpoint, or having your lifeline cut, and humans
can’t live long in the domain of chameleon squids and bioluminescent fish.
That balance between
immersion in the world and distance looks different for each person. The
Japanese poet Yosano Akiko raised eleven children and helped found a school for
girls, but she was still able to write more than 20,000 tanka poems and eleven
books of prose, not to mention translate the classic Tale of Genji into contemporary Japanese. For Yosano Akiko, deep immersion in the world was what she needed to harvest
the material for her writing.
Yosano Akiko (holding baby) and her family
The poet Frank O’Hara
was known for writing his poems in crowded cafes, surrounded by chattering
friends.
For a writer such as
the French novelist Marcel Proust, the opposite was true. Proust had only a
passing involvement with other people, though he avidly attended Paris salons
and entertained guests at the Ritz Hotel, where he lived. He seemed unconnected
to people and superficial to many, even to the perceptive. This seemed to be so
true of Proust that when he submitted the first volume of his novel, Swann’s Way, the great novelist André
Gide rejected the book out of hand for the publisher la Nouvelle Revue
Française. Gide just assumed that the Marcel Proust he knew socially could
never write a serious book.
Marcel Proust
Ultimately, Proust lived primarily for his writing,
even to the point of befriending people because he thought they would make good
characters for his novel In Search of
Lost Time, which he spent his whole life writing. The human being Proust
may have been closest to was his housekeeper.
From what I’ve heard
about him, the Alaskan writer John Haines was most at home as a writer when he
lived in a cabin on a homestead far from any city or town.
John Haines outside his cabin in Alaska
On the other hand, Haines also found time to marry five different women, so he did
achieve a counterpoint of his own sort between solitude and engagement.
The balance looks
different for each writer, but you have to find that balance for yourself, the
one that allows you to be at home both on land and in the kelp forests. Emulate
the sea otter, which swims like a fish but breathes the sweet sea air.
Other recent posts about writing topics:
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry?
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry?
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
