I am celebrating. Iï¿œve just finished writing yet another conference paper. Yes, itï¿œs 1:30am the night before I leave for the conference, and yes, it would have been better to have begun it sooner, refined it more, but as I sit here watching it print out, sipping my celebratory chambord and cream, life is good.
As a teacher of literature and writing (among other things), one would assume that I enjoy writing. I donï¿œt. It sucks.
What I enjoy is having written. Writing is painful and hard; aside from the physical task of concentration, thereï¿œs also this script running in the background: What if Iï¿œve overlooked an obvious source? What if someone else has already made this same argument? What if my professor/editor/audience doesnï¿œt like it? What business do I have writing this for public consumption?
Inevitably, once I play a few hands of computer solitaire, check my e-mail, win a game of Mah Jongg and receive my lucky fortune (one of which reads ￜDo that thing which you have been putting offￜ), and begin writing, I have plenty to say. In fact, what I thought was one conference paper is three, if not four. This revelation of my competence takes me by complete surprise every time I sit down to write, although, once I reach this state of relief, I always remember that I experienced the same doubts and the same surprise the last time I sat down to the computer, and the time before thatￜ.
As I was re-reading some texts for this paper, I found this passage from Carson McCullersￜ ￜThe Flowering Dream: Notes on Writingￜ:
It is like a flowering dream. Ideas grow, budding silently, and there are a thousand illuminations coming day by day as the work progresses. A seed grows in writing as in nature. The seed of the idea is developed by both labor and the unconscious, and the struggle that goes on between them.
I understand only particles. I understand the characters, but the novel itself is not in focus. The focus comes at random moments which no one can understand, least of all the author. For me, they usually follow great effort. To me, these illuminations are the grace of labor. All of my work has happened this way. It is at once the hazard and the beauty that a writer has to depend on such illuminations. After months of confusion and labor, when the idea has flowered, the collusion is Divine.
Finally, language to describe the moment when I move from rehearsing to writing and find that I have something to say: ￜthe grace of labor.ￜ Writing is like religion in that you have to labor with the faith that grace will come, all the while worrying that it might not.
