Translating the Ordinary

It is hard to sit still when the expectation of writing is upon you. The moment you arrive at your chair, pen in hand or fingers at keyboard, is precisely the moment you become the most fidgety person alive—no matter that, in general, you’re a person much inclined to slowness and rest. How to describe the feeling? A great unease, a sense of being bound to your seat by some invisible hand that makes you shift all the more wildly, a wish to be anywhere besides this terrible writing table. Then what happens? Aware that you can’t make a proper escape (well, you can, but you know where that leads you—to the uncomfortable place where you end up being a writer who happens not to write), you try to master the art of small escapes, invisible digressions that take you away, at least in thought, from the thing that’s being asked of you. So you reread what you’ve written the day before, or the year before: once, twice, ten times over. Or you check the time from the clock in the corner, minute by minute. Or you start wondering whether you shouldn’t really be doing the dishes right now. Such anxiety in being where you are! It seems so unnecessary, needless, avoidable. An avoidable avoidance—quite simple, but yet the pattern continues time after time. Why?

One factor, I think, is the great sense of responsibility that permeates the writing process. A person who writes wishes to sit down and capture her thoughts exactly as they occur to her, to record them in a way that makes sense to someone who knows nothing of her mind except what she lets slip through the words she speaks or writes. But thoughts are squirmy, intricate, and fast-footed creatures which elude capture more deftly than the best of criminals; so any attempt to scoop them up in your net and arrange them neatly, one by one, into your essay, will always be colored by some amount of failure. How can the contents of the mind be perfectly transmitted to someone who lives separate and apart, in his own realm of understanding and imagination? It is a difficult task. Stream-of-consciousness may come close to replicating thoughts in real time, but the chaos and disorder of such prose often fails to satisfy; one is easily tired by reading such jumbled narratives and lost by the lack of context. There must be some unity, some structure, to give the reader (and the writer) a pleasing sensation of fullness. You can readily detect the difference between sitting down to a wholesome meal—well-cooked, nicely served, and shared among friends—and standing all night near the hors-d’œuvre table, reaching over and picking at random bits of cracker and cheese. Not that there isn’t a place in one’s life for grazing (indeed, I am quite fond of my little afternoon snacks); but the body can’t be nourished on a daily diet of mere odds and ends.

But take comfort, dear heart—even the great writers struggled with themselves to stay put. Yes, even they felt the anxious rush of being unequal to their task, charged with the fear of needing to put down in perfect fullness the traces of their thoughts, the echoes of their inner chambers of reason and passion. It is fine that, at first, your thoughts are scattered in a hundred directions. What’s needed is simply to put the words—any words—on the page, and then return to them in a more level-headed state of mind, from which you can cull the similarities and arrange them into a sensible message, more streamlined and precise. It is often easier to edit and refine; the monster of fear is at his worst when faced with a blank page, in the absence of material to work with. If you stay with the discomfort a while, it will fade; just give it enough time. As your habit of writing deepens and becomes a dependable daily routine, the interval of time from scattershot to focused will shrink, and the ritual will become more familiar, easier to slip into and out of at will.

I’m sure you’ve experienced this in other areas of your life. For me, the act of prayer offers a simple analogy. Sometimes I’m still reluctant to get around to praying—there may be some mental or practical obstacle to beginning—but the activity is usually easy and free and rewarding soon after the initial effort has been made. It has become, over time, a habit of being, an unconscious state of heart. I suspect that the act of writing, if undertaken consistently, follows a similar course and leads to similar ends. A person who keeps praying becomes, by the operation of grace, a person of faith. (Or is it, rather, that a person of faith becomes a person who prays? Which comes first is a tricky question to sort out.) Likewise, a person who keeps writing becomes, by the discipline and magic of her craft, a writer. (Or is she perhaps a writer even before she begins to write; and it’s merely that she can escape her vocation no longer, so she starts putting pen to page?) Whatever the underlying mechanics, the fact remains that there is a choice to be made—you will sit down to do the thing your soul is calling out for you to do, or you will walk away and leave the work for another day. The good news is that, each time you choose in favor of your soul, the natural energy and inspiration of your calling will meet you halfway. When you offer what you can (your time, your energy, your presence), the other intangibles will be supplied to you. And any time you refuse to give counsel to your fears and procrastinations is, in my opinion, a moment of pure, sweet victory.

Now, some of you may be among the lucky few who have no fear at all when sitting down to write. Such fortunate souls should feel free to forget the half-baked wisdom borne from those crazy bouts of panic from which they’re spared—and rejoice in the fact that they haven’t embarrassed themselves mixing metaphors of prayer and food to explain the whole messy and unsettling affair.