Writing is a place where the rubber of our lofty visions meets the badly-paved road of actually getting words on paper. For me, this process is messy, involves wrong turns and dead ends, and sometimes never leads anywhere.
But even so, millions of writers sit down every day to put their ideas to words, string them together in a coherent way, and maybe get close to what the lofty ideals of their imagination unkindly set for them. In sum, it's about showing up and doing the work. As Isabel Allende puts it, "Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too."
These four quotes from four different women who are among the best writers in the game have inspired me to show up day after day, and I hope they might do the same for you.
#1 Rachel Carson: 'No writer can stand still'
In a now out of print book, The House of Life: Rachel Carson at Work, we discover Carson's unpublished papers collected by Paul Brooks, who worked as her editor-in-chief for The Edge of the Sea and, the colossal 20th-century environmental classic Silent Spring.
Writing, for Carson, was less about talent than sheer endurance. A marathon of writing and revision that doesn't end at a finish line but churns you out at the starting line of a new race. Talent might give you that initial spark, but the real fire of writing only flames up when you commit for the long haul.
Other titans of writing echo this belief: that writing is a ritualistic practice of showing up every day with relentless tenacity. James Baldwin (1924–1987) writes, "Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance."
And Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018), the towering writer of science fiction, writes in her collection of non-fiction writing Dancing at the Edge of the World that writing is not like hunting, working up towards a climatic and heroic 'big kill.' Instead, the writer's life is more like foraging: gathering together different ideas, values, images, and stories that should only lead to more stories, adventures, and questions.
Along these lines, Carson suggests a similar feeling about writing:
"No writer can stand still. He continues to create or he perishes. Each task completed carries its own obligation to go on to something new…
Given the initial talent … writing is largely a matter of application and hard work, of writing and rewriting endlessly, until you are satisfied that you have said what you want to say as clearly and simply as possible. For me, that usually means many, many revisions."
– Rachel Carson (1907–1964)
#2 Zadie Smith: 'Writing is like dancing'
In her short essay, Dance Lessons for Writers, Zadie Smith finds dancing to be a productive metaphor for the minimalist joy of writing. Smith writes, "What can an art of words take from the art that needs none? Yet I often think I've learned as much from watching dancers as I have from reading. Dance lessons for writers: lessons of position, attitude, rhythm, and style, some of them obvious, some indirect."
"Writing, like dancing, is one of the arts available to people who have nothing. "For ten and sixpence," advises Virginia Woolf, "one can buy paper enough to write all the plays of Shakespeare." The only absolutely necessary equipment in dance is your own body."
Zadie Smith's essay examines the direct and indirect connections between writing and dance. She writes, "When I write I feel there's usually a choice to be made between the grounded and the floating." In a similar way, dancing is an embodied balance that plays between the earth and the air. Like writing, dancing may 'quote' commonsense, down to earth, everyday language, or instead, cite more 'literary' sources appealing to more lofty, erudite aesthetic ideals.
Extending the comparison, Smith provides a more complex picture of the tension between talent and endurance in writing that Carson wrote about. She writes, "Some of the greatest dancers have come from the lowliest backgrounds. With many black dancers this has come with the complication of "representing your race." You are on a stage, in front of your people and other people. What face will you show them? Will you be your self? Your "best self"? A representation? A symbol?"
Writing about the genius of Black artists, whether dancers or writers, Smith describes the common sentiment expressed that the relentless representation of talent was not just a spark, but an only option: "Genius contained, genius ring-fenced. But also genius undeniable." Smith continues, "'My talent was the weapon,' argued Sammy Davis Jr., 'the power, the way for me to fight. It was the one way I might hope to affect a man's thinking'….A mother tells her children to be 'twice as good,' she tells them to be 'undeniable.' My mother used to say something like it to me."
#3 Susan Sontag: 'Writing is a little door'
Susan Sontag's On Photography transformed how I think about the powerful role of imagery in a capitalist society. It complicated my understanding of the technology of photography, like a neutral tool that can be just as easily harnessed in positive or destructive directions (although Sontag suggested that photography in our current age embraces the latter much more than the former): "Although photography generates works that can be called art — it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure — photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made."
Sontag's perspective on writing, like photography, is stereoscopic. The stereoscope was invented in the 19th century, enabling you to see two images simultaneously, a different image in each eye, making the viewer experience a 3D image. The writer and philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) used the metaphor of the stereoscope in his political and historical analyses. Benjamin's stereoscopic perspective shapes many current thinkers writing about history and its influence on the present, because "the past does not go away but accretes, layer upon layer, into the present." Layering an image of the past onto the image of the present into a composite reveals an enhanced three-dimensional view of reality.
Sontag's 3D view of the world is visible in a more recent collection made from her journals and notebooks: As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964–1980. In an entry dated '8/30/64', Sontag says:
"Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won't come through."
Writing is like selecting images for your stereoscope: we want to include so much imagery from the past to enhance our understanding of the present, but we have to be extremely selective with what images we choose because only so much can fit through our little door–whether a sentence, a paragraph or a book – at once.
#4 Ursula K. Le Guin: 'Don't go for a walk without bones'
While Ursula K. Le Guin is best known for her science fiction, her nonfiction essays on the art of writing itself is some of my favorite of her work. Her essay, Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction shapes how I approach environmental storytelling, writing about environmental issues from species extinction to climate change.
But listening to Le Guin divulge her immense experience with how to write well feels like eavesdropping on secrets you weren't supposed to hear. Even though she usually qualifies these secrets with the caveat that without hard work they don't mean squat: "Some of the secretiveness of many artists about their techniques, recipes, etc., may be taken as a warning to the unskilled: What works for me isn't going to work for you unless you've worked for it."
In her 1987 essay Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?, Le Guin provides a masterclass in writing, and although geared towards fiction writers, I've found it immensely useful as advice for writing creative nonfiction. In this essay, Le Guin gives her answer to how good ideas might find their way onto the written page, chronicling the perils that confront the big-ideaed writer along the way:
"Beginners' failures are often the result of trying to work with strong feelings and ideas without having found the images to embody them, or without even knowing how to find the words and string them together."
So, how do you find the words and string them together? Le Guin's essay explores this question in increasing depth, but one quote sticks out for me:
"There is a relationship, a reciprocity between the words and the images, ideas, and emotions evoked by those words: the stronger that relationship, the stronger the work. To believe that you can achieve meaning or feeling without coherent, integrated patterning of the sounds, the rhythms, the sentence structures, the images, is like believing you can go for a walk without bones."
–Ursula K. Le Guin