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Here is the 6th and final – for the moment – rationale for devoting a decade and 47 drafts to my story, Water Under Water.
Why I Wrote 6: Pleasure. I loved every minute of it. From those afternoons in a French hotel garden among the rabbits and peripatetic poppies (in the pic below, oui, c’est moi), to rainy Saturdays, to late nights propped up in bed with my laptop, writing was pure, unadulterated pleasure.
Joan Didion wrote that she was one of those ‘whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper.’ And Oscar Wilde, asked once how he had passed the day, replied that he had spent the morning putting in a comma, and the afternoon taking it out.
That is it. Even in this highly visual and aural world, writing has value, but it is not a cure for cancer, nor is it going to initiate world peace. It will most likely not earn you a decent wage, and will provide fewer opportunities for ego enhancement than damage. Why write, then? Because at almost any time, any day, writers write because they like to.
Writing makes me smile. It nurtures and nourishes me as nothing else I have found. For the rest, the money and ego-boost, enlightenment, crafting the impossibly beautiful sentence, let them come, or not.
I wrote, and will continue to write, because I like to. And you?
Why I Wrote – I’m up to reason 4 on my list.
Why I Wrote 4: The self-sacrificing search for truth. In the Paris of Pound and Stein and Hemingway, it certainly played well, the writer as aesthete, devoting body and soul to the pursuit of that heroically unattainable perfect story. And oh, how that crowd loved to show us the cuts and bruises, the scars of their purity. For me, though, it hasn’t rung true for yonks, not at least since the ‘60s. And then came our real-time, graphic exposure to Rwanda, 9/11, Black Saturday and all the other story truths, to render the idea of people making up stories slightly absurd. Indulgent even. These days you still hear writers speak of the pain of writing, the agonising search for the word or phrase that will bring them closer to truth and beauty…give me a break. Jumping from the top of the twin towers, watching your baby die of diarrhea induced dehydration, losing your home and family to the bushfire, these are painful. Not writing.
I worked hard on my story, Water Under Water, but I reminded myself constantly that the pursuit of the story was a privilege. Let’s face it, anyone who has the time and space and peace to sit and write, is light-years ahead of the vast majority of their fellow beings.
I’m working through an unreliable list of reasons for writing.
Why I Wrote 3: Something really important to say. You think you have something that people really, truly do need to hear. Of course you do, just like the rest of us. No, no, you protest, mine really is important…you must listen. It’s precocious, isn’t it? Like a shrill four-year demanding his mother pay attention to his observations about the doggy peeing on the lamppost. Let’s face it, most of the time most of what most of us have to say, is mostly important to us, and that’s about it.
My story, Water Under Water is about a boy with an intellectual disability and his attempts to win his father’s love. I can’t tell you the number of times I found myself crafting a scene or a piece of dialogue, and then, on reading that first draft a few days later, having to go back and delete all the informing stuff, the educating, the lecturing. The really important stuff.
Orwell listed ‘historic impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ among his reasons for writing. And, yes, there is a growing community interest just now in disability – hey, we even get a gig in Summer Heights High and Glee! Sure, write into what is topical. In my case, though, I wrote about intellectual disability because I knew from direct experience it would make an interesting story. So, if the motivation is to say something, start a protest movement, and leave ‘importance’ out of story telling.
btw: others will disagree, but for me, Ian McEwan’s Solar is his weakest novel, because the story got lost against the background of the big-picture, important issue.
Why Does Anyone Write a Novel? Why did I?
Why I Wrote 1: Money? Listen, I could be the next Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling. Sell a few million copies and sashay off to the south of France for the winter. And how cool to be able to do it all from home, with the odd wander up to the coffee shop or down to the pub? Trouble is, I’ve done the numbers. (For a brief, rebellious period in my early years I was actually an accountant.) In this country, a ‘best seller’ is 5-10,000 copies. And $15,000 is a good advance. So, for my writing to earn the national average wage of around $50,000, I need to churn out three successful books this year, and the next, and again, and…
Take all the hours spent writing, put them into a proper job and buy lottery tickets; less effort and the odds are about the same.
Why I Wrote 2: Ego? Fame is a drug, that’s what they say. Okay, so far my novel, Water Under Water, has given me a feature piece in Women’s Weekly, reviews in the major newspapers, radio interviews, a couple of hundred people and a government minister at the book launch, saying, ‘Who’s a clever boy, then.’
Guess what, it feels good. But where to from here? A fellow author told me once of the embarrassment, shame and desolation he felt to see his book buried in a remainders bin out in front of a bookstore: ‘$2! They were flogging my soul for two lousy dollars.’
And for me, somehow, with the first story published (the easy one, because we all have one good story in us, don’t we?) the possibility (probability) of the next manuscript earning me only a mailbag full of rejections, is even more potentially ego-damaging than if it had happened this time.
Orwell cited ego as one of his four reasons for writing. Back in the day, ‘ novelist’ no doubt had plenty of cocktail party conversation cache. Today’s fame is visual. You have to be a ‘face’. Footballers and actors in TV commercials get ego-stroking recognition, not writers. Try this quick quiz; at your local bar, who you going to recognise, McCarthy, Malouf, Garner…or the Channel 10 weather guy or gal?
What else then?
What got me thinking about why I wrote a book was that I never had. Not really. That, and my mate, Fred Fink.
What Fredie actually said, over our second coffee on a wet and miserable afternoon, was; ‘I’m not even sure I want to write.’
Fair enough question for him, seeing as how he’s in the middle of an intensive, and expensive, creative writing course. But, it hardly applied to me, did it? After all, I’d devoted a full decade (well, off and on) to the completion of my first novel. (Water under Water, Random House, June 2011). Ten years, forty-seven drafts and revisions, a two-year university masters program…
My motivation was not in doubt. Was it? Fred did not ask, but might have, ‘Yes, but why? Why did you write it?’
Many have asked the question before. In 1946 George Orwell suggested four reasons for his own motivation (and was then big-headed enough to suggest they applied to all writers.) But he penned his essay when smoke from WW11 had not yet drifted over the horizon, and the way he saw the world, and writing, must have been very different. And even Joan Didion’s version thirty years later, is ignorant of the Internet and the torrent of ‘stories’ it brought sweeping through to us. This is a new age, surely giving rise to a whole new set of reasons to write.
So, how to answer my mate, Fred? Why did I write? Money, ego, the need to be heard, or Orwell’s ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’? What else?
Watch this space…or better yet, do a quick count of the number of authors crammed cheek by literary jowl into your local bookstore – heads on ‘em like rabbits – and suggest your own reasons why so many otherwise ordinary beings, have at some point in our little lives said, ‘I think I’ll write a book.’
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