Over the past weekend, the writers still left on Twitter let it ride one more time, debating a question so tautologically simple that only the internet could’ve produced it: does a writer have to write a lot to write? Kevin Maloney, a novelist, kicked things off with a thread about being young and that realizing that his friend Clark wasn’t hanging out at a bar with everyone else because he was at home painting instead. That led to the realization that he, too, had to be like Clark and Work at Being a Writer:
Two contrary factions opened up in response to this: people maintaining the importance of a social life1 and aghast at the thought of someone missing a party, or people taking the time to performatively broadcast how much time they’ve spent and continue to spend writing. Why let the work speak for itself when you can drone on about your work habits instead? In any case, they argued about it on Twitter, which means they weren’t writing.
Or were they? More interesting than the actual question of how committed one has to be a good writer – mostly contingent on your economic situation and the scale of your project, as well as, we hate to say it, a level of natural talent that one cannot 10,000-hours their way into, and the final product will generally bear out the amount of care and work that was put into it, give or take some of that god-given ability – is the question of how much besides the actual typing goes into the final product, how much of a writer’s life outside of their desk / cafe-table / couch / library carrel and off of their laptop / notebook / annoyingly precious typewriter creates the work, and how productive a long period of writerly silence can be.
Research is writing and editing is writing and revision is writing and in some ways reading is writing, and all that plus the composition could fill whatever eight-hour shift you’d like to schedule for yourself. But all the things that aren’t that – whatever you’re not burning the midnight oil for – also have some sort of alchemical input on the work. I think often of Anne Boyer’s poems “Not Writing” and “What is ‘Not Writing?’,” featured in her book Garments Against Women, where she creates a heuristic of nonproduction: “There are years, days, hours, minutes, weeks, moments, and other measures of time spent in the production of ‘not writing.’” Not writing, to Boyer, is “work” and “unpaid work like caring for others” and “caring for the mind” and “also politics” and “also the kind of medication that is consumption” and “time spent staring into space that is not a screen” and also “all the time spent driving.” After more and more enumerations of what not writing is – or what writing is not – Boyer concludes:
It is easy to imagine not writing, both accidentally and intentionally. It is easy because there have been years and months and days I have thought the way to live was not writing have known what writing consisted of and have thought “I do not want to do that” and “writing steals from my loved ones” and “writing steals from my life and gives me nothing but pain and worry and what I can’t have” or “writing steals from my already empty bank account” or “writing gives me ideas I do not need or want” or “writing is the manufacture of impossible desire” or writing is like literature is like the world of monsters is the production of culture is I hate culture is the world of wealthy women and men.
That ending stab at the “world of wealthy women and men” summarizes the conflict between precarity and the writer’s life (very few writers are better on class and art than Boyer); it’s only someone who can afford (in money, in time, in effort, and all their intertwinings) to write that can do it so often or for so long. Beyond the quotidian obstacles to writing, though, Boyer’s work also points towards another mode of nonproduction - what she calls in a later poem “self-abolition”:
To do, or almost do, to begin to do but refuse, to rehearse some doing but never act, to appear to do but actually do another thing entirely – what is done also undone by that.
Or, more pithily, in the collection’s title poem, she writes of the “walserian monument” and the
[...] walserian #motto Y S R W T L O (“you shouldn’t really want to live once”). a clerk’s antinomy.
These are references to Robert Walser, the itinerant early 20th century Swiss author of books like Jakob Von Gunten and The Assistant, which feature characters who dwindle away into obscurity by their own volition, leaving behind the world where they might matter, and by extension, might put down any kind of record. (Quoth Jakob Von Gunten: “I shall be a charming, utterly spherical zero.”) The clerk – the key Walserian character – is antinomic in their existence as someone who should never be seen until they are needed, at once present but invisible. Beyond his books, though, Walser was put into an institution after years of living hand to mouth as a tramp, and there renounced all writing, remarking only that he was “not here to write, but to be mad.” Secretly, though, he developed an extremely minute form of shorthand, later called microscripts, that allowed him to clandestinely write new stories and sketches on small scraps of paper, matchbooks, and advertisements. It was a writing never meant to be seen, something more private than a diary: self-abolished nonwriting, an expression recorded for no one. You might think you’re committed spending every Friday night in writing until the sun comes up, shunning all human contact and pleasure; try shutting yourself away for good and writing in nigh indecipherable2 script for no one. What are you, an amateur?
Another writer who’s knelt at the monument of Walser and the self-abolishing writer is Enrique Vila-Matas, whose novel Bartleby & Co. is a catalog of writers who, for myriad reasons, stopped writing. While the title alludes to Melville’s avatar of refusal – and his gnomic mantra that “I would prefer not to” – the book begins, and is perhaps led on its wending course, by Walser. It’s fashioned as a series of footnotes to a text that doesn’t exist, and the first note begins: “1) Robert Walser knew that writing that one cannot write is also writing.”3 Later, Vila-Matas’ hunchbacked narrator writes that “Walser’s entire work, including his ambiguous silence of twenty-eight years, is a commentary on the vanity of all initiative, the vanity of life itself.”
Rather than fall into despair, though, Vila-Matas embraces the paradox of the writer writing that they cannot write, of the one, like Boyer, declining to take initiative but still moving forward. For in nonproduction and not writing lie the seeds of production. Vila-Matas’s narrator writes of another writer who believed that there are “phantom texts, invisible texts… that knock at our door one day, and, when we go to receive them, for what is often a trivial reason, they disappear … It was undoubtedly a great book, the great book that was inside us, the one we were really destined to write, our book, the very book we shall never be able to read or write now. But that book, let it be clear, exists, it is held in suspension in the history of the art of the No.” In some mix of all the false starts and half-feints and amid all the daily drudgeries of work and care and constant distraction, the germ of something appears, and then the chase begins, the great book (dis)appearing and staying forever out of reach. But something else comes out of that pursuit, the work itself, no matter how short it falls of the great book we were destined to write. Vila-Matas’s narrator ends his catalogue with Tolstoy’s last diary entry, where, too weak to continue, he broke off midsentence:
a sentence he did not manage to finish: Fais ce que dois, advienne que pourra (Do your duty, come what may). It is a French proverb that Tolstoy was very keen on. The sentence ended up looking like this: Fais ce que dois, adv …
Vila-Matas’s narrator calls this a “Bartleby-like” sentence that fittingly “peter[s] out,” yet its proverbial wisdom is the spur for all writers, for as much or as little time as they have to devote to the craft: do your duty, come what may. And maybe just talk about doing it a little less. Or maybe Tolstoy’s countryman, the Soviet writer Daniil Kharms, summed it even better and even more in the spirit of the paradoxical push and pull between writing and nonwriting: “Today I wrote nothing. Doesn’t matter.”
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Professionally - you have to meet people to get writing work, and you also have to meet and speak with more people to get close to realistic seeming people in your fiction, and to hone your dialogue skills, and also to just bounce ideas off of people - but also just for your mental health.
It took years of careful study to work out the microscripts!
Translation by Jonathan Dunne.
I loved this post, Evan, and shared it with writer friends. So much work happens away from the page...