Sand Though Our Fingers: The Right of Writing

No other animal writes. It is, from a biological standpoint, a useless act.

Ask anyone who writes why they write and they will tell you: they write because they must. It’s a compulsion. Even when it feels difficult – impossible to do – the desire to do it is there, even if we often leave it unsatisfied. Many people who write anthropomorphize words as needing to escape, to get out. Not any particular set of words, not any particular story – although sometimes that, as well. But this mode of language that sits in the brain fermenting and requires expulsion from the body, onto the page.

Derrida, informed by thinkers before him, drew a big distinction between spoken and written language. Not only the very different way in which we construct communication when we write, but the act in itself.

Animals talk. To each other, to us. And I’m fairly convinced that some of them are story-tellers. Marousia convinced me that cats, for instance, are bards of battle. They bring home the poor dead thing they caught and re-enact, often in a non-linear fashion, the way they caught the thing. My cat, Seven, is infuriatingly vocal. He’ll sit beside me and meow for a span of 10 minutes. It took me a long time to understand that he wasn’t meowing for anything. He didn’t want food or water or affection or to be let out. He talks. He gets pissed off when I just echo him. He’s frustrated by the inter-species limitations. And it’s not just the lack of opposable thumbs. Chimps don’t write either.

But writing is not simply the communication of ideas, from one person to another. It is almost always an act of recollection, of a truth or a lie. Of fact or of a fiction. Spoken words are, unless you’re famous, ephemeral. They evaporate into the air. They are there and gone, but writing can be far more permanent.

We often speak before we think, but we almost never write before we think. The amount of mental investment in the construction of what will be written is hidden and mysterious. Some writers may be orderly in their mental construction of a story – they think about characters, about plot, about setting and conflict and all the structural underpinnings of story form, because they’ve been taught that stories have a structure. They have, to some extent, demystified the process. But if you’re a writer who cares about language, taking the story out and walking it around the page still has a mystery to it.

We get haunted by a phrase, we hone it, we interrogate it, we elaborate it. Unconsciously, all the wealth of its semiotic baggage weighs on our minds, pressing the juice from the fruit. Staining the words around it. The drips run in different directions, and our minds chase them down, furiously mapping the terrain around the runoff as it happens, shoring up the banks, trying to control the course. Failing. Succeeding. Both. And when one dribble dries up, we go back to the source and follow another. Or we glean something from the cracked river bed – enough to carry on.

And here’s the worst of all news: the more proficient a writer you become, the harder it becomes to blindly chase down the eruptions. The critic inside you gets spoilt and discerning. It demands that our map-drawing be better, our control of the flow be finer-tuned. Where once only a few words mattered, now it requires that every word be the right one. The gates to the groove don’t open as easily. We have our inspirations, but our critic shoots them down before we even begin. Too cliche, too unbelievable, too subjective, too, too, too. Whatever. Something bad.

Where once an idea would send us rushing to the keyboard erupt forth in glouts of naive exuberance, full of fire, authenticity and grammatical errors, now we demand that that idea prove itself to us before we even bother to press the power button.

But worst of all, we question the value of doing it at all. Writing doesn’t cure cancer, doesn’t feed a child, doesn’t rescue the victims of flooding. It seldom even makes money. What is the point? The world won’t miss my voice; it can do very well without this story. It will carry on just the same without it.

But, as humans, we don’t spend our every waking hour curing cancer, feeding the starving or saving people from disaster. We do a lot of ‘pointless’ things and don’t demand an accounting of the value of time expended in that way. Why writing?

I think it is because we know, instinctively, that writing is powerful. It lasts. It reflects who we are in a way that all those other wastes of time do not. I think the subconscious weight of that responsibility sets up a deep ambivalence to the act of writing.

We eat so much crap. We read, watch, speak, do so much crap.

So, I will ask you: are there too many intelligent voices in this world? Is clear insight so thick on the ground that we would not benefit from more? Have we so many truths and we cannot accommodate another?

No.

So, write. It is of grave importance that you do.