The Dark Boquet of Doubt

Josh,

Gabriel García Marquez was once asked, "Does a blank piece of paper distress you as it does other writers?"

"Yes," he answered, "It's the most distressing thing I know next to claustrophobia."

I agree with García Marquez, although the terms of my distress are distinctive. Garcia Marquez sees a blank page and possibly envisions himself trapped underwater, in an iron box; when I see a blank page I envision myself standing on the minuscule summit of a mountain peak, looking out. I'm standing on my toes, and of course, I'm naked. I have no idea how I got here, no idea how I'll get down. When I look out, I see a voluminous wall of glacial white. When I look down, I see an enormous abyss, looming under my feet.

"When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you," writes Nietzsche.

This is the blank page: the abyss that looks into you.

So I stand there, looking in, being looked in. I consider my options.

I consider leaping over the abyss. (But what if I miss the other side?)

Then I consider building a bridge across the abyss. (But what if the structure of the bridge fails?)

So I peer over the ledge. Every now and then I call out some name, a few nonsense words. The words come back to me, disembodied, like intonations from a distant, unknown twin, peering from the bottom of the abyss, and calling up. Suddenly, I want to meet this man, this alluring dopplegänger. So, finally, I jump.



Of course, if you're a writer, sooner or later you jump--you jump everyday, sometimes numerous times a day. It's scary (What the fuck is down there?) You're utterly full of doubt (What if my parachute fails?!) And you're alone out there (The only echo you hear is yourself.) So it's natural to question this situation, to doubt.

But still, you jump...

It's a long fall, fraught with the silence of swift air. You engage your chute.

You hit land.

Suddenly, you're standing again, high on a dune. There above you is the blue sky, in which two or three clouds, patterned by some crafty god to look like seashells, drift. Intoxicated by the scene, you raise you hands high and exhale deeply. A light breeze amuses your skin.

You survived! The freedom is so fresh you feel utterly overjoyed.

You're so overjoyed, in fact, you fail to see the enormous abyss, looming under your feet.

***

In his biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Andrew Turnbull notes that before beginning The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald re-read Joseph Conrad's preface to Nigger of the Narcissus which states that a work of art should carry its own justification in each line. Then, while writing his novel, Fitzgerald kept his ambition clear: he wanted to create, line by line, a work of art. In doing so, he later wrote, he "tread slowly & carefully at times in considerable distress."

I've been working on a novel and I must admit: I've been experiencing considerable distress. I'd like to think I am making a conscious effort, like Fitzgerald, to produce, line by line, a work of "art." But this is not my ambition. In fact, my ambition seems to oppose Fitzgerald's ambition entirely: I simply want to finish the novel, quickly.

***

Gabriel García Márquez speaks similarly of Fitzgerald's type distress: "At the beginning, when I was learning my craft," he says, "I wrote jubilantly, almost irresponsibly. I remember, in those days, I could easily write four, five, even ten pages of a book after I'd finished work on the newspaper...Once, I wrote a whole short-story at a single sitting…Now I'm lucky if I write a good paragraph in a whole day. With the passage of time the act of writing has become very painful."

So, is writing inherently distressful? Or, is this a burden that comes only with age, with experience? I admit, for me, writing is often quite distressful. I plod, from sentence to sentence, torturing myself over each word. And yet, still, I am doubtful.

Then there are those rare moments, those titanic instances, when I feel inhabited by the muse, utterly overwhelmed and inspired. Then, I literally gush words. I am confident!

***

I'm a whimsical, moody guy. I change, day to day. Carried along by my changing moods, I feel exhilarated one day, mopey the next. For example: I sit down on Friday, start writing a story. I'm full of confidence. I'm certain the story will be published. It's my best yet.

Saturday morning, I wake up, hung-over, and read my story. Suddenly I see the truth: It's actually terrible! It will never be published. I'm full of uncertainty.

What do I do?

I like what Uncle Deano says (in a letter he wrote me when I was 21):

"Allow yourself to be uncertain but don't let your uncertainty turn to despair because it can be wonderful to write when you're sad and full of the dark bouquet of doubt, but misery lends itself to silence and one must get out of bed every morning and prepare for the great celebration of one's own imagination, even if it doesn't happen that day."

So I sit down, full of doubt, and write.

***

I suppose this is just a ridiculously convoluted way to get to this point: You have to just sit down, full of doubt, and write. Everyday.

This is the only thing you can do. You write. You write, with wild ambition; without undue expectation. This is what writers do, obviously.

And each of us is all alone on the edge, looking down, with only one parachute: me, you, Fitzgerald, García Marquez, Uncle Deano.

Everyone feels doubt: everyone.

I think you need to make a distinction, though.

When you're on that ledge, feeling doubtful, the doubt is something, isn't it? It's a beginning. It's a challenge. Maybe you need that doubt. After all, certainty is for the mathematician; the technician. But writers just might need uncertainty in order to work. To me, at least, writing's not fun unless it's something to figure out, a way of figuring out something. I think you'd agree. Nobody wants to write the story already written (except, of course, Pierre Menard.)

To me, doubt is a sort of wonderful, weird fuel. I suspect it's what skydivers call adrenaline. And it's pretty much what makes every single thing in life interesting.

(Will Federer beat Nadal in the Wimbledon final? Will I like Wall-E?)

The distinction you might need to make, then, is between doubt and despair.

Do you want to write? Do you believe in writing, as a life? Do you sense the celebration, looming?
Sky-diving, after all, is fun. It's risky, too. It's not fun, though, if you're sure you're going to die each time you jump. Odds are, that won't happen.

So, if you don't like these odds, why are you standing at the edge, looking over?

Josh Bares Heart, Soul in Response to Seth's Callous Critique

Seth,

Like a cartoon octopus at a singalong Disney barn raising, your post simultaneously hits a number of nails squarely, and impressively, on the head. Again, I am amazed at how transparent writing is, especially unsuccessful writing. So often I try to hide behind what I'm doing - images, mirrors, devices - but in the end it's all laid out there on the page, waiting for a perceptive passerby to pick it up and be like, "Wait, this isn't a quarter...?"

Nail 1: My inability to have fun while writing. Yes, this is the heart of the debilitation and something that makes me want to run to some reservation where I can sit under a smoke-filled canvas until suffocation forces me to claw my way back into the panther-colored night. The question, then, is how to bring the joy back, and I take your point about the eighty page story seriously because I think it's right on target. For a long time I've been bucking the story form (as I, barely, understand it) in the interests of being original - but by doing this, I realize, I'm forced to rely, as you say, on my talent only. It's like I've got this beautiful, incredibly comfortable sock, but for some reason I spend all my time trying to amputate the foot it should be going on. I'm at sea, in other words, which is one of the reasons, I think, that the language of these pieces feels so disconnected and straining. There's no repose in them, because they don't know what they are and therefore can't settle into themselves. They haven't got a story to fall back on.

(sub-nail 1A: Why can't I write a story? Why do I fear writing stories? Lately, I've come to realize that it has a lot to do with my fear of failure - that is, of "falling" into the normalcy that using a shared form (let alone medium) entails. In other words, instead of solving the problems that everybody's got to solve, I want to find a stretch of beach with no one on it, where I can just fuck around to my heart's content. Which is probably why so much of this shit feels like just that: fucking around. Plus, you've got the idiotic reversal of beginning with the desire to be different, as opposed to beginning with a legitimate difference and then expressing that, via the shared form of the story, in a way so true to your experience that the end construction can't help but be unique.)

Nail 2: Blog/emails vs. "Writing." I think this may be a more mundane, process-type question than it at first appears. In both the blog and emails, I have a goal, an "objective", something I want to communicate. For example, right now, I'm thinking, I want to respond to Seth's comments, and while responding, I want to use the English language as a way to think through what my actual response is (this is, I think, a weirdness of my brain...one you might share, or might not: I literally CANNOT THINK about a story outside of when I'm actually writing it. It's like the story doesn't exist outside of the words in which it's written). The solidity of a goal makes it pretty easy to write - it gives me a poise and balance (between making my point and having fun with the writing itself) that is much difficult for me to achieve in an actual story. In a story, I can never tell what's necessary and what's not. When I try to be shapely, I end up underwriting, and when I try to elaborate, the fabric becomes slack and fetid. You say you spend hours, days on sentences, and I do too - but then the sentences I spend hours and days on inevitably end up feeling stupid and overwrought: like when you're talking to someone about basketball and he suddenly starts referencing the Nichomachian Ethics. I mean, it could very well pertain, but there's a breach of manners - manners here meaning, not just surface courtesy, but the deep fabric of people communicating. Something throws the whole conversation out of whack, and the guy's embarrassed, not necessarily because he tried something different, but because he tried something different and then allowed it to sit there, out of context.

Nail 3: Fear of the mundane. This is very true, and I wonder if, again, I'm not just trying to make prose do something it's not supposed to do: exist as language before it exists dramatically. As D'Ambrosio says, poetry is inspiration, but prose is work. You've got to sweat it out. But I fear sweat as a sign of my own imperfection as a writer and human being. You know what it is? I want to be Mozart. And I'm not Mozart, and I realize that, but even realizing that, I find myself secretly wanting to believe that I'm secretly secretly Mozart, and that all the demands that art makes on me are really just affronts to my genius, and what Writing should really be doing is bowing before me, its lord and master. Immature, right? A sure fire way to never write anything worthwhile. Ever. Unless you're Mozart. Which I'm not. But I could be. No, I couldn't. It's so fucking WASP/Puritan/Calvinist, Seth: I recognize the lineaments of my sick and wasted ancestors in each of my sentences, their faces and anxieties. The desire to be a member of the Elect, which used to mean God's Children, but now means An Artist - proven by faith, though, rather than actual work. Ugh. It's embarrassing, sometimes, how persistently I seem to be trying to destroy myself as a writer.

But, there's always hope... After all, this is what we're all going through, right? One thing that Warren Wilson has convinced me of is that, though we each have our variation, the spectacle of another writer's struggle to become something real is valuable, maybe even heartening. And yes, one thing the Puritans got right is that life really is an allegory. My story (I have the arrogance to believe) is your story in the same way that my fork is your fork, or my car is your car.

Anyway, I wanted to answer your generosity with generosity, and I will. I've been trying to decide how to take on your story. Before I got to that, though, I had to try to communicate all this to you, because I was really pleased and happy that you took the time to read my stuff and give me comments on it. As I've said before I think, I admire and envy your joy. If we're similar in general, we're certainly different species, and it's bracing and important for me to get your point of view on this stuff. I certainly think we should keep swapping stuff.

Anyway, 'nuff said for now. Let me know if any of this hits home, resonates, works for you. Again, for all my obsession with my version, what I really want and need to hear is your version.

And then I took a shit...