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The Red Sari: Writing for Life

It is springtime in Seattle, which means that the weather is even more unpredictable than usual. Usually you can count on a good splash or a nice drizzle through some part of every day, unless it is summer, when it is dry and warm or dry and cool, depending on the time of day. During the spring you are likely to be sweltering in your rain gear, or soaked to the skin without it, because you didn't plan on the weather changing on the half hour.

I have been taking the 7:15, number 48 bus from Lake Washington home every Friday night now for some weeks. And for at least the last three, I have been caught by one hellacious weather front that seems to last exactly the hour and a half it takes me to arrive across town near the edge of Puget Sound. It thunders and crackles and hails. Great flashes of lightning strike terror into the hearts of small dogs barking in their hallway windows. One gets drenched from the dribbles of fellow passengers getting on and off the bus.

I have my headphones on, loudly, listening to something called "The Peacock" by a Russian symphony. I do this to drown out the complaints around me - because - but for the unhappy people moving to and fro around my little circle of heaven, my spirits are not dampened at all. Across the way sits a Hindu family, a grandmother, mother and son, smiling peacefully. A swath of red passes though them, like an impromptu fan club for some unknown rain sport - red sari, red sweater, red pants - they do brighten up the place. They nod. I nod back. I think we are the only people who realise that it could be much worse and we could actually be walking though this mess.

I open the pages of a book on writing that someone gave me. It isn't a bad book. In fact parts of it are quite good. But it is just one in another series of books that I have read that tries to convince you how hard writing is. I am disgusted. I close the book.

There is a dirty little secret that writers never tell non-writers, for all the advice books and writing workshops I've seen, read, experienced or heard on tape. Someday I will teach my own class, but as a preview to that class, let me say this: Writing is not hard. Writing is not easy. Writing is merely work.

Some people would like to think that writing is as simple as being able to speak their native tongue. I speak English, therefore I should be able to write stories in English. Well it isn't quite that easy. But someone once said all that writing requires is to look at the blank page and "open up a vein." And I must tell you, it isn't that hard, either. I had two fathers to my writing: Professor Ventre and Professor Hruska. Hruska taught me to fear mediocrity, and Ventre taught me to love my own voice.

Mediocrity comes from writing what you've heard before, what other people say, what is rolling around the television, and movies, around the press and the radio. Loving your own voice comes from listening to your inner observations, your own original perspective of the world. Everyone has a viewpoint that is perfectly, purely their own. Writing is the attempt to find it.

Writing requires two fundamental things -- presuming you know the rules of spelling and grammar of the language in which you choose to write -- it requires honesty and editing.

You see the big secret about writing is that writing is just life, all squished up, with all the boring bits taken out.

Think about this. Do you know how a situation comedy is made? A team of writers, hopefully good ones, sit down together in a room and come up with a situation and hundreds of responses to that situation that are each a little funnier than the average Joe could come up with on a good day. The end result is "the best joke you ever heard" -- times twenty minutes.

A novel, a really good novel, is the company of someone you would like to spend time with, having a conversation with you. The conversation takes between 2-10 hours, depending on how fast a reader you are. But the person who does the "talking" took a year or two thinking up what to say.

Most people, when they are being honest, can be pretty good company. There are few of us so base as to inspire friendship from no one. The glue that binds that friendship together is the stories we tell each other, back and forth, over a lifetime.

If you have had a friend, and you have shared yourself with him or her - you can be a writer.

The first story you tell will be your story. That is usually your best story. It takes time to learn to tell it honestly, and it takes some maturity to sort out what it means. Most writers don't tell the literal truth, because that would probably hurt too many real people, and might not show the reader what the experiences felt like anyway. So that first story reaches to get at the feeling of being yourself and sharing it, as though with a good friend, with the world.

The second story is about someone else. For this you not only need to have had friends, you need to have been a friend, You need to have spent enough time in the company of people and paid enough attention that you have some understanding of what it might be like to be in their shoes. Expand that out into your neighbourhood, your town, your state, places you have visited and liked particularly well, and you have the raw material from which your second story will come.

Reading counts, though it's nothing without the experience of life. Reading gives you exposure to whole worlds of people, places, thoughts, and things with which you can build stories if you like. Very simply, to write you must be able to ask yourself: What matters to me? And -- How am I going to show it?

You can look to other writers to see how they show what matters to them. You can study some writers' methods and you will get conflicting messages, telling you writing is entirely structural, or entirely intuitive, telling you writing is the flow of florid language or the terse tight hold of a page without adjectives.

When you begin to write, writing is all of these things. When you are far along the discipline of writing, writing is only finding the river of your own voice and letting it flow - then going back and cleaning up what got left on the page. Do not be afraid of the page. The page is your friend. It will tell you things about yourself that you never knew. It will help you give order to your life, and meaning to the world around you. It will leave something of you behind when you are gone and it will give you something of yourself that you can share with those you love. The page will deepen your love for all life. And the page will record that which is worth remembering.

Do not ask the page for fame and fortune. The average person who puts "writer" on their tax return makes $3,000 a year writing. People think that getting published means winning a jackpot. Often novelists receive nothing for their first novel and a couple of thousand for their next few. If they stay in print, they may make a modest living. But they will live someplace where the cost of living is low, and they will have teaching jobs, or copywriting jobs, publicity jobs, advertising jobs, or law offices - something really unromantic -- handy to pay the bills between royalty checks.

If you write for long enough, writing simply becomes a way of life. And it is a very good way of life. It is a good way of life because it teaches you to notice that the Hindu family on the bus, in red clothing, across the aisle is smiling at you.

And life is so very precious, that these moments should not go unobserved.

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