What is Writing?

"Writing is utter solitude." -Franz Kafka

"Writing is a struggle against silence."  -Carlos Fuentes

"Writing makes no noise." -Ursula LeGuin

"Writing gives you the illusion of control." -David Sedaris


"Writing is like prostitution." -Molière 


"Writing is revising." -Joyce Carol Oates


"Telepathy, of course." -Stephen King


King's statement is what I'm most interested in.  


I was assigned a presentation on interiority in literature for an English class, but due to my wife giving birth the day it was due and the responsibilities that come with that, I ended up turning it into a presentation on 'free indirect discourse,' which was less of a compelling study of why it's used, and more of a sort of look-at-me-I-read-these-books-and-I-noticed-they-used-free-indirect-discourse kind of presentation.  Needless to say, I got less than my best mark.


But I haven't stopped thinking about the topic.  I read an essay called, "Criticism and the Experience of Literature," by Georges Poulet, in which he speaks of interiority not as that moment in which the narration enters the mind of a character (or however you want to define it), but as the act of reading as an interior action.  His claim is that the author sets forth these words, and the reader opens itself to them and allows them to take over its own thoughts.  An intriguing concept, to be certain.  


This, I'm sure, is what King means when he says writing is telepathy.  He gives an example by describing a table, a cloth, a cage, and a rabbit with a carrot and a blue number 8 painted on his back.  He claims that by reading his text, you have allowed him (and now me) to place these objects in your mind, and it is this action that makes writing telepathy.


For me, as a writer, the concept is humbling.


Recently, I Tweeted Margaret Atwood (in an act of shameless self-promotion, I won't deny it) and asked her to look at my blog (my other blog: Found Dialogue), and she ended up re-tweeting it to her three-hunderd-thousand followers. I'm assuming this means she read it (would she blindly promote someone else's writing?).  Obviously, I was more than excited; I had nearly 1,000 people read my blog that day, and a load of new followers, and I was thrilled.  But then I thought about Margaret Atwood, with her curly grey hair, and her blue eyes, and all her years of experience and knowledge, and her list of bestsellers, and her countless lectures, and her influence across this country and around the world, and this image—of Margaret Atwood pushing up her glasses to allow the words I had written to flood her mind, and then the hundreds of others that did the same shortly after—made me feel very small.


It gave me a greater respect for writers and the act of writing and what it is able to do.  Writers place these images in their readers head, some of them staying there for a really long time.  I have an image in my head of Aslan singing Narnia into existence, of Pi drinking turtle's blood, of Stephen King's wife digging Carrie out of a trashcan, of countless other things, all of which are colorful and active and changing, all of which came from some black and white splotches on a page.  


If a picture can paint a thousand words, a thousand words, in the right hands, can paint a picture more vivid, more extraordinary, more lasting than any brush could.


It makes me wonder if the words I have written, am writing, are words I am confident I wish to push into others minds.  It made me rethink what writing is.  When people ask me why I want to write, I often say, 'For the fun of it.'  This is true; there's nothing I enjoy more than a good writing session.  But that can't be the only reason.  If I wrote simply for the fun of it, I could be satisfied with filling my moleskins and stashing them away in my drawer.  I am not.  I want people to read what I've got to say. I want people to think about what I've got to say, to think about it and to talk about it.  


In that case, I don't write for the fun of it. 


I write because I feel (whether it's accurate or not) that I have something worthwhile to say—about life, about love maybe, about the world I live in. 


I want people to hear it, to see it in words.  


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