writers on writing

from the 'Introduction' to Women Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews

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.... For (these writers), writing is not an offshoot; it is the one thing that includes all the other aspects of their lives. Thus Maya Angelou:

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'When I am writing, I am trying to find out who I am, who we are, what we're capable of, how we feel, how we lose and stand up, and go on from darkness into darkness. I'm trying for that. But I'm also trying for the language. I'm trying to see how it can really sound. I really love language. I love it for what it does for us, how it allows us to explain the pain and the glory, the nuance and delicacies of our existence. And then it allows us to laugh, allows us to show wit. Real wit is shown in language. We need language.'

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Reading through these interviews, I was struck again and again by the intensity of the writers' dedication: their commitment to craft, the informed admiration for the work of other writers from whom they have learned, the insistence on the importance of what has been done, and what can be done, through the art itself. Thus Toni Morrison:

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'It is not possible for me to be unaware of the incredible violence, the willful ignorance, the hunger for other people's pain... What makes me feel I belong here, out in this world, is not the teacher, not the mother, not the lover but what goes on in my mind when I am writing. Then I belong here, and then all of the things that are disparate and irreconciliable can be useful. I can do the traditional things that writers always say they do, which is to make order out of chaos.'

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In no other art is the relationship of creation to creator so complex and personal and thus so potentially damaging to self-esteem: if you fail, you fail alone. The dancer realises someone else's dance, the writer her own. The relationship of any writer toward a vocation so exacting in its specificity, so demanding of love and energy and time, so resistant to all efforts to define its essence or to categorise its best effects, is bound to be an edgy one, and in these conversations the edginess shows through. Some disclaim ego, remarkable in a collection of such strong, assertive, individual voices; others keep secrets; others fence with their considerable intelligence; others have recourse to mysticism; others protect themselves with wit...

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To write is a solitary and singular act; to do it superbly, as all of these writers have done, is a blessing. Despite everything that gets said about the suffering and panic and horror of being a writer, the final impression left by these remarkable voices is one of thankfulness, of humility in the face of what has been given. From Joyce Carol Oates, one of the youngest writers in this group:

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'I take seriously Flaubert's statement that we must love one another in our art as the mystics love one another in God. By honouring one another's creation we honour something that deeply connects us all, and goes beyond us.'

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And from Dorothy Parker, one of the oldest:

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'I want so much to write well, though I know I don't... But during and at the end of my life, I will adore those who have.'

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