Rachel and I are doing some work at a cafe. We got the best seats, against a wall of windows, and our friends behind the counter are playing only good music. In between reading and writing we’ve been talking, mostly about reading and writing, and about how hard writing can be. And how finding a way to write (outlines? notes? a pile of articles? one perfect sentence at a time? pages of mess to be dealt with later?) is as big a struggle as figuring out the ideas. And maybe different ideas require different kinds of writing to reveal themselves.
Joan Didion, from “Why I Write”:
I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
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My sister always says that we write our way to the beginning which, as she also says, is no small thing. I resist and resist and resist, and am always surprised at what a pleasure it finally is to see what’s in my brain. But I don’t remember this at all, and resist the next time too. I hear the trick is to write a little every day. My brother wrote a book in a house full of toddlers and tenure struggles and claims that it can indeed be done, this writing thing, but it happens in moments, not in long stretches. This does not mean I write that way, but I think I might like to.
I sent six hundred words away this morning. It took me six weeks to write them. And to read them you’d think I dashed them off over coffee. Ridiculous.
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