Goofing Off While the Muse Recharges - Richard Ford

Sometimes Dead Beat entertains himself by pretending that he is Richard Ford... Anyway what follows is quite long, but I couldn't bear to leave anything out. As Richie tells it:

Sometime in the middle of June I sat down to a ritual that, as much as any other, has typified my writing life: At the end of a very lengthy period during which I did basically nothing whatsoever of any good to man nor beast, I got back to work. That is, I started writing again.

I don't mean to make this event seem momentous. There was no drum roll. The soundtrack was not the theme from "Rocky." There was no soundtrack, just the quiet, scarcely noticeable shiftings in a man's daily protocols from one set of digital, inward habits to another.

No more solitary morning TV, no more taking my breakfast out, no more reflexive telephone communiques; instead, just the usual soup of things that continually wash through my brain suddenly beginning to need sorting out for use in a story. It was a bit like Army recruits who instantly become soldiers just by standing in a line wearing their street clothes. And as with the recruits, my re-enlistment to writing was accompanied by an unwelcome feeling of purpose.
Stopping and then starting up again is of course what all writers do. It's what any of us does: Finish this, pause, turn to that. Over time this repetition is one of those markers that cause us to say we are this, not that: EMS attendant, lawyer, car thief, cellist: novelist.

More than for most of my writer colleagues, this ritual -- cease in order to resume -- has always seemed to me to be an aesthetic, possibly even a moral postulate. Many of my acquaintances, however, simply can't wait to get on with writing, as if nature also abhors a motionless pencil.

One friend (until I barked at him) regularly called me at about cocktail hour simply to say, "Did you write today?" Others seem to eye the horizon line anxiously from the deep interior of whatever they're doing at the moment, trying, I suppose, to catch a flickering glimpse of what they might plunge into next. To them the stop preceding the start, the interval, is at best a needless blink in a life devoted to constant gazing. At worst, it provokes a worry, even a fear.

"I'm not writing," a close friend in Montana told me recently. "It's so depressing. I just wander around the house without knowing what to do. The world seems so drab."


I advised: "Try turning on the TV. That always works for me. I forget all about writing the second 'Sports Center' comes on."

And I mean it. In these 30 years I have made a strict point to take lavish periods away from writing, so much time that my writing life sometimes seems to involve not writing more than writing, a fact I warmly approve of.
Admittedly, over this time I've only written seven books, and about these seven there has yet arisen no unanimous critical huzzah. And undoubtedly some smarty-pants will argue that if I'd only written more, been more obsessed, driven myself harder, ground my molars lower and paused less, I'd be a better writer than I am.

But I never imagined I was in this business to break the writers' land speed record, or to put up big numbers (except, I've hoped, big numbers of readers). In any case, if I had written more and stopped less, not only would I have driven myself completely crazy, but almost certainly I would have proved even less good at writing stories than I am. Anyway, it's my business what I do. There are finally some things about ourselves that we know best.

Most writers write too much. Some writers write way too much, gauged by the quality of their accumulated oeuvre. I've never thought of myself as a man driven to write. I simply choose to do it, often when I can't be persuaded to do anything else; or when a dank feeling of uselessness comes over me, and I'm at a loss and have some time on my hands, such as when the World Series is over.
I would argue that only in this state of galvanic repose am I prepared to address the big subjects great literature requires: the affinities between bliss and bale, etc. Call it my version of inspiration, although it's entirely possible that my reliance on this protocol still causes even me to write too much. It's hard to write just enough.

Clearly, many writers write for reasons other than a desire to produce great literature for others' benefit. They write for therapy. They write (queasily) to "express" themselves. They write to give organization to, or to escape from, their long, long days. They write for money, or because they are obsessive. They write as a shout for help, or as an act of familial revenge. La, la, la. There are a lot of reasons to write a lot. Sometimes it works out OK.

Maybe my seemingly lax attitude comes from having had working-class parents who slaved so that I could have a better life than they did -- wouldn't have to work as hard -- and my life is just a tribute to their success. But whatever the reason -- piddling around doing something else, like driving from New Jersey to Memphis and then to Maine just to buy a used car, which I did last month -- life comes well before writing to me; whereas writing, at least doing an awful lot of it, feels too much like hard work. I know my mother and father would give me their full support in this.

Not, I hasten to say, that writing is ever all that hard. Beware of writers who tell you how hard they work. (Beware of anybody who tries to tell you that.) Writing is indeed often dark and lonely, but no one really has to do it.

Yes, writing can be complicated, exhausting, isolating, abstracting, boring, dulling, briefly exhilarating; it can be made to be grueling and demoralizing. And occasionally it can produce rewards. But it's never as hard as, say, piloting an L-1011 into O'Hare on a snowy night in January, or doing brain surgery when you have to stand up for 10 hours straight, and once you start you can't just stop. If you're a writer, you can stop anywhere, any time, and no one will care or ever know. Plus, the results might be better if you do.

For me the benefits of taking time off between big writing projects -- novels, let's say -- seem both manifest and manifold. For one thing, you get to put lived life first. V.S. Pritchett once wrote that a writer is a person observing life from across a frontier. Art after all (even writing) is always subordinate to life, always following it along. And life -- that multifarious, multidimensional, collisional freight train of thoughts and sensations you experience away from your desk, when you walk down 56th Street or drive to Memphis -- can be quite bracing (if you can just stand it) as well as useful for filling up the "well of unconscious cerebration" that Henry James thought contributed to the writer's ability actually to connect bliss and bale.

Time frittered away can also just seem like a nice reward for the grueling work you finished. Sometimes it's the only reward you get.
Most writers' work habits date from the days when they were beginners, and at some base level one's habits always involve a system of naive appraisal. You proceed in ways that let you figure out if what you're doing is acceptable to yourself.

Stopping and starting during any one day's writing invites you to judge what you just wrote. And enjoying a long interval between weighty endeavors invites such useful reassessments as: Do I have anything important left to add to the store of available reality? (Kurt Vonnegut decided he didn't.) Do I still wish to do this kind of work? Was the last thing I wrote really worth a hill of beans? Is there not something better I could be doing to make a significant mark on civilization's slate? Does anybody read what I write?
I mean, aren't such inquiries always interesting as well as being merely fearsome? Isn't there a measure of coldly cleansing exhilaration involved in appraising one's personal imperatives as though they were moral matters? Isn't that, as much as anything, why we became writers in the first place?
My view of the writers I admire is not that they are sturdy professionals equipped with a specific set of skills and how-tos, clear steps for career advancement and a saving ethical code; but rather that they are gamblers who practice a sort of fervidly demanding amateurism, whereby one completed, headlong endeavor doesn't teach the next one very much. And in the case of writing novels, one endeavor consumes almost entirely its own resources and generally leaves its author emptied, dazed and bewildered with a ringing in his ears.

Therefore a good spendthrift interval lasting a couple of seasons if not more, or at least until you can no longer stand to read the headlines of the newspaper, much less the articles that follow, can help to freshen the self, to reconfigure the new, while decommissioning worn-out preoccupations, habits, old stylistic tics -- in essence help to "forget" everything in order that you "invent" something better. And by doing all this, we pay reverence to art's sacred incentive -- that the whole self, the complete will, be engaged.

Finally, what seems hard about writing may not be what you think. For me what are testing are the requirements of writing that make a sustained and repeated acquaintance with the world an absolute necessity; that is, that I be convinced that nothing in the world outside the book is as interesting as what I'm doing inside the book that day. What's most demanding is to believe in my own contrivances and to think that unknown others with time on their hands will also be persuaded. To do that, it helps a lot to know what bright allures lie just outside your room and beyond the pale of your illusion.



Dead Beat concurs. Listen to the wise one.