Let The Espresso Martinis Speak!

Writing Life

A couple of days ago I finished a draft of my novel — a long, complicated monstrousness, probably the most difficult work I’ve ever done. I put on some music, formatted the text, went out and had several espresso martinis in a row (including the one at the end that Katie and her trainee Ivan were making together as an experiment — thank you!), and somewhere in here jotted down a few semi-coherent thoughts on what I learned about writing and about myself in the months focused in on the novel. 

Since I stopped drinking a while ago, I’ve been dealing with the ramifications of my private celebration, and of Katie and Ivan’s generosity, for about a day and a half, but, nonetheless, I wanted the espresso martinis to have their say before I thought better of it — to capture a bit of the state of mind of getting to the end of something challenging.

-My belief is that writing needs to be intense and is, in the end, a form of risk-taking on the part of the writer. This risk-taking is far more important, actually, than the craft or even the quality of the work — and, ultimately, it’s what we sense about a work when we decide whether we ‘like it’ or not. We can tell when a work is ‘just technique’ — when the writer is doing what they already know how to do, with the skills that they already possess. It may be very good, but in the end it’s basically just finger exercises — and, in making a life for oneself in which writing is central, it’s necessary sometimes to push into these projects that you really feel (often with good reason) are beyond your own capabilities. That’s a misery-inducing process — since you’re constantly drifting further than you want to go, making the structure more complicated, writing characters who are out of your own experience, etc — but it’s at the heart of what this whole exercise is supposed to be, this feeling of getting lost in the deep woods, this feeling of losing a degree of contact with the familiar boundaries of yourself.

-A piece of writing is pretty much just the expression of some initial idea. In the case of this novel, there was a scene that I read about somewhere — an image of a group of intelligence officers waiting to hear the news of a battle that they had organized and now had no power to control — and, although that scene and those intelligence officers don’t show up anywhere in what I wrote, everything in a way goes back to that initial idea, that feeling of agonized waiting. A lot of writers talk about how their characters get away from them, how their fictional world takes on a life of its own, and there’s some truth in that, but I’ve come to feel that, for the sake of coherence, it’s important to be anchored in the initial impression, the initial idea. That’s what’s really trying to be said, and everything else is just you bringing your technique and capability to the service of whatever the idea was. 

-Writing is about intuition much more than it’s about thinking and is, in the end, a kind of performance. I’ve heard about these different famous writers who spend every minute of every day thinking about the project that they’re working on, but I actively try not to do that and have come to believe that that level of obsessiveness is counterproductive. The more you think, and brood, on a piece of writing, the more ornate the scaffolding of it will tend to be and the greater the likelihood that extraneous thoughts will enter into it. My belief — or what I’ve noticed — is that once a piece of writing comes into your system, it just lives there, in your subconscious or working memory or whatever you want to call it, and then the process of writing is largely about turning off your brain, letting your fingers do the work, and then being pleasantly surprised at how your fingers find the connections between the underlying ideas of the piece (or, alternatively, being exasperated when they refuse to cooperate). The time in which this happens is really special and really mysterious and has a great deal in common with live performance where you rely on nervous energy as much as anything else to drive the momentum of the work. This is part of why I’m so suspicious of editing, and of the prejudice in favor of editing in how the literary world tends to talk about writing: I find it very difficult to imagine how, in editing, you can get back to that experience of flow and of activating the subconscious.

-The actual work that you have as a writer is mostly about just moving your body around, putting yourself in position to write, noticing when it’s time to eat, when the conversations in your coffee shop are getting too annoying and it’s time to move to a different spot, when your lucidity is flagging and it’s time to quit for the day. You yourself seem to become a concerned parent or sideline coach and your function in life becomes mostly about protecting and encouraging this other, strange entity that has taken root somewhere in you. 

-The hardest part about writing is dealing with other influences and other inputs. That was magnified in the project I’ve recently been working on, which is heavily research-based. I’ve been suspicious of research in the past — my belief is that it tends to give you a crutch, to take you outside of yourself — but, in this case, it seemed sort of ok, and the process of research, of diving into a historical world, felt integrated with the writing itself. What’s hard is when you come across something that’s in your own domain but is better than what you’re doing — and, usually, the best approach (I think) is to read it early and get it out of the way, to take the hit to the ego but also to recognize that even if that other work brilliantly carved out a great deal of the subject matter there’s still probably room somewhere for you to say whatever it is that you want to say. What’s harder still is dealing with other writers, especially writers who are currently alive — and I haven’t figured out how to handle that. The sense of competition is too much, as is the feeling of somebody else’s voice and consciousness invading your own. Instead, I found myself just watching a British spy drama again and again — not a sustainable, long-term solution but it seemed to be necessary for a project in which I felt as insecure as the one I was working on. 

-As I’ve written before on this Substack, writing, more than anything else (more than the quality, more than the entire connecting-with-readers aspect), is a matter of handling one’s own solitude — which is really important given how much time, ultimately, everybody spends being alone. It’s deeply humbling. You take so many blows to your own ego — you’re aware that you can’t write as well as people you admire; that you can’t write as well as other people on the same subject; that no matter how much you search your imagination, how much you try to stretch yourself, in the end you always sound like you, and you just have to accept the rhythms (and the limitations) of your own voice. But as much as I was muttering at myself, disillusioned with myself, there was also this feeling of something else going on that was separate from ego — a story that seemed to have its own organic life, that kept taking on surprising shapes and moving in surprising directions. It was a very lonely experience, very neurotic, a little crazy-making, more than a little self-lacerating. But none of that was so important. What was important was that — at least when the novel was moving, when I had confidence that the strands would somehow cohere together, when I believed that I would actually reach the end — when that was happening, I liked my own company.