The W’s: WHY WE WRITE or WHAT WORK IS

In 2004, Nimrod International Journal published an issue entitled: Fabulae! What Work Is. The issue included poems and stories about bricklaying, science, planting, cooking — the music of the hammer and the lure of the coal mine. Not what one would expect in a poem especially – and yet . . .

The performance script that emerged from the issue relating work and literature was presented at the meeting room of the Carpenter’s Union 205, amongst other places. The script developed the theme of work and writing further and included excerpts of poems and stories by well-known writers like Vachel Lindsey, who was a carpenter,  Richard Hugo, an airplane factory worker; from doctors like William Carlos Williams, insurance salesmen like Wallace Stevens; from Richard Eberhardt who sold Johnson’s Wax door to door and from farmers like Robert Frost; from B.H. (Pete) Fairchild’s award-winning book of poems The Art Of The Lathe, and from mothers like brilliant Lucille Clifton who always worked at several jobs simultaneously and  . . . so forth — all demonstrating the dynamic link between the written word and physical labor.

         But what of the writers who never met a machine, wash tub, or currycomb?  Do they work? Can we call it work that high precision mental labor of writing?  Or is it all inspiration, as so many people think, the prophetic, the vatic voice bursting forth — without a sweat?

And if it is work, hard work, why do we do it?  Why do we write a poem, a story, a memoir?

Trying to sum up a subject everyone who has ever taken pen to paper or fingers to keyboard or arrowhead to stone has wrestled with — makes one tremble.  But I am stuck with my subject and awed by it, just as awed as I am by the passion of my fellow writers, by the commitment to the difficult and obsessive task that we have embraced.

 So, I’ll start with the obvious: the job we writers do is not easy; it is not often financially rewarding.  It is seldom star-lit.  It is often disheartening . . . if not plain painful. While writing we often break a sweat, our muscles ache, our metabolism races. In other words, we are at work and as Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stanley Kunitz said “a poem without the body in it lies dead on the page.”

All this mental and physical effort!  Why do we do it? Are we all masochists?  Surely, we must love our chosen task; surely it brings us joy as well as pain? Indeed!  I believe that part of that joy is right there in the traditional 3 W’s: Who, When, Where.  However, in composition class we are asked to enunciate these 3W’s before we write.

 Professional and would-be professional writers acknowledge that we usually discover the who and the when and the where — as we write the first draft and perhaps even the second or third.

We write and read to discover Who we are, to balance the risk of reaching out into the unknown by finding ourselves. In that process of discovery, we are of course writing to unburden our minds and hearts just as we read to embrace the stories and the burden of others.

We write to create the moments When we are more than we are in our everyday lives.

We write and read to discover Where we are; to plant our feet in the land of our ideas and the home base of relationships and the very earth we need to stand on.

Additionally, and ironically, we write in order to plant us firmly in our dream space. And this brings us “joy” . . . and this makes us fall in love with the process. 

Though our search is not as calculated as it sounds, though often we do our best work when we don’t know what we are doing, even when we experience the shock of inspiration, of momentarily breathing in the essence of what is out there — there is also and always the search to go deeper. And in that search and struggle to clarify, to find the exact words, sounds, rhythms, to set down what we breathe in, what we think, what we feel — we acquire technique.  Then as Mark Shorer said, “technique becomes discovery.”

And so we not only write but we read and encourage reading; we not only write but we re-think and re-write, and develop technique. We Wright, employing another W—

W R I G H T— to wright, like wheel-right and plough-wright and  playwright.  

It is a risky process, it is work, but it is worth it .

Above all, we write not only to discover but because in that process of discovery we breathe in new fresh air.  That, I suppose, is the real meaning of inspiration, the power of the breath that underlies all work and play (which in the best scenario is the same thing.)  But to go on:

We write and read to breathe, to discover and to record not only what is new, but the past, history (his/story and her/story), to record past lives and the spirit of a time and place.

We also write to refresh history, to “make it new.” For the past is also subject to change.  Each generation looks at the past from a new angle, in the light of new discoveries: a letter once buried; a scientific finding; eyewitnesses coming forward — to capture, as historian Richard Hofstadter said, the “fly in the inkwell.”

We write to exercise and develop skills of enunciation of the past and present but also to expand our imaginations, to extend the gesture, without which relationships amongst disciplines — science, business, medicine, law, as well as relationships amongst people — falter and fade.

We read and write because we have a dream, a need, something we must say, and we are in love with people and places and emboldened to reach out for the words, their power, rhythm, sound and sense, the words that may approximate in some small way — but never entirely — the wonder that is out there.

We write and read to preserve our dream space as well as acknowledge our responsibility space.  (I believe I read that somewhere; it is not my original concept.) And yes and yes and yes . . . it is true, we already do so much that acknowledges that “responsibility” space, we responsible ones, we who “respond” to family and friends and state and country, but also to principle and history and tradition.

However, we remind ourselves, that despite Shelley and others, creative writers are not “hierophants,” are not prophets nor didactic teachers nor systematic philosophers.  That is our strength.  We don’t have to be.

Yes, we do at times engage the mystery; a poem or story comes to us as if from nowhere. While at the same time we do often come to a moment of clarity, “get it together.”  And then, all we have to do is re-write, share, give the gift of poem or story or painting or bread . . . offer, extend the gesture . . . no strings attached.  Take it or leave it.

It is a risky process, it is work, but it is worth it.

That is why, as Thomas Merton wrote, “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”  You practice your craft, you exercise, until you tap into the mysterious center of things . . . what playwright Pirandello called “the secret room where dreams prowl,” where the “Where” is and the “When” and the “Who”.

         In October 1973, in a letter accepting a position on the advisory board of Nimrod International Journal, Katherine Anne Porter, famous short story writer, novelist, and teacher, wrote: “Practice an art for love and the happiness of your life — you will find it outlasts almost everything but breath!” And then she added a line from Pascal: ‘The heart has reasons that reason does not know.’”

I guess it boils down to that . . . to the heart and the love of craft and words and speaking in a way that will outlast . . . “even breath.”  For the writing and the reading of that writing is there to be discovered again and again . . . to make us new, to preserve the old, to expand life, giving us Who we are, where we are, and those precious moments When we are more than we are in our everyday lives.

But all of you know that . . .