How to Sit Down

Two or Three Things I Know About Writing

How to Sit Down

Welcome to my SubStack. I feel a little trepidatious, because I have a history of dropping out from serial commitments. Back in 2007, when people had blogs, I was only able to sustain mine for about a year. Then again, I was trying to get myself to write every day, and that is something I’ve never managed under any circumstances. I write in bursts. Maybe this will turn out to be a burst, maybe a microburst. I’m certainly not going to charge money unless and until I can be sure that this is truly a going thing. The title comes from a leaflet I distributed to my MFA students in the ‘90s, in which I collected every piece of writerly advice I could find in authors’ letters and the Paris Review interviews, all of them clashing and contradictory.

The subject is writing. That is something I’ve wanted to address for a while, even more so since my retirement in 2023 after 27 years teaching writing—three years in the MFA program at Columbia, a semester in the one at at the New School, and then 24 years at Bard College. Since I am an actual dropout I always felt a degree of impostor syndrome about it, and I had no idea how my colleagues taught their classes. I was afraid to ask. The only examples I had to draw on were the poetry classes I took with Kenneth Koch and David Shapiro when I was an undergraduate at Columbia. (I was a poet then, and anyway there were very few other writing classes on campus.) Nevertheless, over the years I slowly built up a reserve of ideas about writing, which I tried to communicate to my students, and I wanted to set them down before the experience of teaching receded into the past.

Let me identify my biases right away. Some years ago I was a panelist at a small literary festival. During the Q&A a man stood and addressed me. “You’re one of those intuitive writers,” he began, stepping hard on the adjective. Aren't we all? was my first thought, but then, looking at my fellow panelists, I realized that no, many writers are procedural or mimetic or discursive. They are raconteurs or reporters or haranguers or intellectuals. They employ front-brain operations to render a story or an idea into words, translating straight across from one to the other. Nonfiction in particular draws the reporters, the haranguers, and the intellectuals, people who have something definite to say. If they have the skills, they will say it concisely and concretely; if not they will produce reams of text that has to be mined, like quartz, in order to extract the veins of meaning from the surrounding masses of clay and dirt.

Intuitive writers, by contrast, do not quite know where they are going. A lot of my writing is basically this: I have a strong but complicated emotion about something. I couldn't easily explain it in conversation. It is a capacious emotion, rife with anomalies and ambiguities and internal contradictions, wrapped around a teeming anthill of sensations. To make sense of it in writing I have to methodically break it down into its constituent parts, until I have identified every significant facet of that emotion. Then, with the patient splayed on the operating table and all its organs numbered, hitherto unsuspected patterns will begin to emerge. This process is something I first realized when I was film critic for a monthly, so that I'd see maybe forty movies a month, but could only write about one or two. I discovered that the most interesting pictures to write about weren't the ones I loved or the ones I hated, but the ones that caused strong unresolved emotions that I would have to work out on the page. Which is to say that the writing would not be descriptive of a thought process but would manifest the thought process in itself.

Some people write in their heads. I can occasionally do that—when, for example, I take a bathroom break and spend the whole time mentally reordering the current sentence. In general, though, my writing occurs on the page. “Thought begins in the mouth,” said Tristan Tzara in 1919. Sometimes, champing at the bit as I begin an extended piece of writing, I will find myself forecasting scenes from later portions of the intended work, down to imagining specific sentences to showcase this or that insight or discovery. Invariably, when I finally get to that part of the text, the context has changed, my thoughts have been reordered, and the scenes appear in a whole new guise that precludes those imagined sentences.

Part of the reason is that I’m simply lazy. When I worked in a bookstore, a colleague one day spotted me carrying an absurdly tall pile of books. “My mother called that a ‘lazy man’s load,’” he said. In the same way, I’m far too lazy to ever attempt to write successive drafts of anything. My first drafts are also my final drafts, with a lot of fiddling in between. I view sentences as stairsteps. In order to build the next step, you first have to make sure that you can bounce on the one below it. Each sentence generates the next, and in doing so creates a whole new set of questions. Every sentence has to be thoroughly examined for clichés, solecisms, inconsistencies, blather, repetition, off-register rhetoric, posturing, showing off, humblebragging, and pretending to know things I actually don’t. Meaning and music must be consulted, preferably together, since both must be advanced, whether via continuity or jump cut. This sustained interrogation of every sentence cannot help but change the intended course of the writing, as internal contradictions are revealed and unfounded assumptions are unmasked. Yes, a long time can elapse between the start of a sentence and its end—although sometimes the sentences just fly by, too—but then you won’t need to do another draft.

I’ll be posting these nuggets irregularly, but I have a lot to say. Future installments will concern reading, editing, organization, chance, flow, music, plasticity, knowing and not-knowing, the commonplace book, the American language, and much else.

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