The Writing Life Too

I you write about matters to you, then you’ll organically and naturally bring all of your talents and attention to it. Ron Carlson

The clouds have a silver cast to them this morning but will likely break up as the afternoon wears on. When I’m home at night I sometimes tune into my favorite public television programs such as Frontline. On Friday night there is the wonderful Bill Moyers who always manages to interview interesting people and who opens his show with sharp-edged commentary. Then there is The McLaughlin Group which this week featured Pat Buchanan siding with the law with his opinion that Skooter Libby should actually go to prison for his many acts of perjury and obstructing justice. Then Austin City Limits came on and I watched James Blunt, the English singer. After his concert he was briefly interviewed about his songwriting and he said, “the mind is a lonely place.” I was so struck with his comment because lately I’ve been thinking about the loneliness of the writing life and how sometimes loneliness is as familiar to me as my breath.

I think the way to face the isolation is to meet it head on as when you’re forced to wrestle with any problem you’d rather ignore. Because a writer is a person who needs to get comfortable with vast amounts of time spent alone, who has the patience to explore the loneliness and labyrinths of the mind. And it seems to me that these days everyone is bent on never being alone. I marvel at people who need to chat on their cell phones as they walk their dogs or squeeze tomatoes in the market. What’s wrong with simply paying attention as the day unfolds instead of filling it with the bric-a-brac and noise of diversion?

As I was thinking about this I ran across this quote by Ron Carlson in the July issue of The Writer. Carlson is perhaps best known as a short story writer and his newest novel, Five Skies has been garnering favorable reviews. In advice to writers he says, “A writer is a person who stays in the room. So you do your work, and when you’re tempted to leave, you don’t. You push on, even if it’s for just a few minutes. On one level, it’s about you, the person, being alone with your writing, away from all the temptations of the marketplace, away from all of the fun you’ll have with your friends, and away from all of the terrible noise on e-mail….The world is addictive. It wants us away from the desk, and a writer is a person who likes her work so much, wants her work so much, that she’s going to go get it. You’ve got to go upstream. It’s against the tide to get this kind of work done.

“The second level is, as you’re writing the story, don’t hurry. When you come to a scene, say there. Stay there long enough to find out what might happen. I’m just pleading for patience, because people do not sit still in a place anymore. There’s almost no here and now in our country, because of the computer, because of cell phones, and because of iPods. We’re all someplace else.”