We Look on in Fascination

For my 73^rd Birthday

Last Tuesday as I walked around Duke’s East Campus I saw the freshmen moving in (when I was at Duke, East Campus was for women; now it houses freshmen), all these fresh-faced, anxious, unformed young adults, and realized to my astonishment that it was fifty-five years ago that I did the same thing.

In those days all I wanted was to be a writer, I ached to be a writer, I wanted it so much I could hardly talk about it (I did find one friend that year that I could talk to—he felt the same way—and that made a huge difference).  I took my one and only creative writing class, with Reynolds Price.  I can still remember the feeling of sitting around the long table in that room, twelve disciples and one master (who happened to be 33 years old at the time).  Our names were on computer cards, and he went through the cards and read our names, staring at us when we answered, then went through the cards again and didn’t say our names, just stared at the appropriate person.  The man was proud of his memory.[1]

I studied during virtually all my free time in those days, and for the first couple of hours of study time every day (I thought it was as much as I could spare), I worked on my writing.  I’d become enamored of elaborately rhetorical writers—Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe (I’d actually made my way through every laborious page of Of Time and the River), Duke graduate William Styron, who had been taught, as had Price, by William Blackburn, who was still at Duke—and I hoped to become such a writer myself.  With that in mind I went to the library every afternoon (I soon discovered the Medical School Library—where you were allowed to smoke!—and haunted it as much as any first year med student) and wrote an enormously long sentence, the longer the better, and then wrote it again.  Then wrote it again.  I didn’t revise and make minor changes.  I wrote the sentence over again.  Then I wrote it again.  I kept writing it over and over again until I “got it right” or had to quit.  The next day I’d look at the sentence and think, it’s still not right, and write it again.

I don’t know what, exactly, I thought I was doing.  I’d heard that James Joyce, Gustave Flaubert, famous writers like that, had spent hours, days, on a single sentence, and since I wanted to be a great writer like them, I had to spend that kind of time too.  Price gave us a reasonable amount of time to work on our stories, and I worked on mine every day, but as the deadline approached would have written only one or two pages (several dozen times).  Then—because I had to—I finished the story and handed it in.  What I really wanted was to keep working on it.[2]

I wrote that way all through college.  My senior year, I scheduled all my classes after 11:00 AM, got up early, and spent my mornings writing.  After I graduated I got a job teaching secondary school, and spent all my vacation time writing; in my third year I began to get up at 5:00 AM so I could work on a novel, and by that time I was writing a rapid first draft of a chapter in a day or two, then spending a couple of weeks working on it, polishing the sentences.  I would get one chapter completely finished before I moved on to the next.  I had also written a rapid draft of that first book before I began; I was terrified that I’d write for months or years and then not know how to finish.  I thought I needed a plan.

That first novel was never published.

The next novel I wrote—and the first one I published—Football Dreams, was so closely based on my life that I knew what happened.  I just had to figure out how to tell the story.  But by that time I could see that, even though I “knew what happened” in an upcoming chapter, what actually happened might be quite different.  I saw the advantage of that.  It often produced a better chapter.  When I wrote my second novel I used that same general method—rapidly writing the whole chapter, then slowly polishing it—but trusted the process much more than before.  I wrote the first chapter with no idea what would happen in the second.  I figured that if I wrote through the chapter I was working on, imagined it thoroughly, the next chapter would come to me.  That proved to be the case.

My writing career had major ups and downs through the years, big swings this way and that.  By the late nineties I’d published four novels and one book of non-fiction, two non-fiction books with my meditation teacher Larry Rosenberg, also did a fair amount of writing that never saw the light of day[3], but in my early fifties I spent months, probably years, working on a project that I believed deeply in but that never found a publisher.  When my agent said he couldn’t do anything more with that book, I called my first wife—who I felt would understand, because she’d been with me through my early struggles—and said, “I’m finished.  This is it.  I’m finished.”  Meaning that my writing career was finished, but also that I was finished as a person.  I’d hit rock bottom.  I saw no way out.

At that point, out of the blue, I got an opportunity to teach writing in the graduate School of Public Policy at Duke, and said to myself, this may be the end of my writing career.  I’d spend the academic year working with students, have only the summer to write, and didn’t see how I could continue to write at my slow to moderate pace when I had only the summers.  But by that time I’d read the autobiography of my great hero Anthony Burgess, who when he was diagnosed with a fatal brain tumor (turned out to be a false diagnosis) determined to write 1500 to 2,000 words per day, and wrote five and a half novels that first year (including A Clockwork Orange).

I figured that if he could do it, I could do it.  I had nothing to lose.  Either I’d learn to write this new way or my career was over.  I’d been writing sentences every day for over thirty years; surely I’d learned something in that time.  That first summer I wrote a strictly personal project, a short biography of the Buddha[4], and managed to finish it.  Seemed okay.  The next summer I wrote what became my fifth published novel, Jake Fades.  I’ve continued to write in this new way.  It’s nothing for me to write 1500-2000 words in the space of ninety minutes.  I do plenty of revising, but I can do that anytime, morning or afternoon.  I pick up a piece and work on it when I can.  Even after retiring seven years ago, I’ve continued to write rapidly.

I’ve never regretted those early years of painstaking writing.  I learned what a sentence was and how to write one.  I saw sentences from every possible angle.  And now I trust in the sentence, trust in the English language I’ve worked with for so many years, I trust the natural human ability to tell a story—which has been my vocation all my life—and trust that, if I just let it happen, it will come out in some coherent form.  The story will shape itself.

In a book called Speaking and Language: Defence of Poetry, Paul Goodman speculated on what produces a piece of writing, and came up with the fascinating statement that it is the literary process itself.  The process does the writing.  That is a kind of writer’s koan, but I’ve found it to be true.  Years later, I found the words of poet Diane DiPrima to be just as fascinating and inspiring.  By this time I had started to practice Zen.

“What then appeared to us to be a Zen point of view was soon taken for granted as the natural—one might say axiomatic—mind-set of the artist.  A kind of clear seeing, combined with a very light touch, and a faith in what one came up with in the work: a sense, as Robert Duncan phrased it years later, that ‘consciousness itself is shapely.’  A kind of disattachment (sic) goes with this aesthetic: ‘you’—that is, your conscious controlling self—didn’t ‘make’ the work, you may or may not understand it, and in a curious way you have nothing to lose: you don’t have to make it into your definition of ‘good art.’  A vast relief.”

I would guess that most artists try to control things early on—this is my work and I want to do it my way—but learn eventually to trust the process.  Zazen does zazen, as Suzuki Roshi used to say.  The process does the writing.

The writer is as fascinated by what emerges as anyone.

[1] I knew him for the rest of his life, and he once told me, when he was roughly the age I am now, that he could remember every child in his first-grade class, also remember where they sat.

[2] Styron was apparently a slow, painstaking writer, and Reynolds Price was too, at the time, finishing a single typed page in a whole day of work, but my great heroes Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner wrote at a ferocious speed.  Somebody once heard Wolfe walking along the street repeating, in a sing-song voice, “I wrote ten thousand words today,” and the speed of Faulkner, as reported in the Library of America volumes, was prodigious.  He wrote the novel Pylon, 212 pages in the tightly printed LOA volume, in two months.

[3] I once estimated that I’d written as many books that hadn’t gotten published as books that had.

[4] I’d been asked by Shambhala to write a Young Adult life of the Buddha, but I’d only did a couple of chapters before we could see that it wouldn’t work out.  I couldn’t resist going into too much detail, speculating on things.  But when they pulled back from the project I decided to finish it anyway, even though it would never be published.  I hated to leave anything unfinished.