The Writer

This is an edited version of a journal entry  I wrote this summer.

I’ve been thinking about my philosophy as a writer.  I’m reading a book of interviews of Margaret Atwood.  Writers always seem to be asked–even by other writers!– what the role of The Writer is in society and various other questions about The Writer. Writers always seem annoyed by these questions, but yet they always supply answers that though they may be under the guise of humility, instead come off as pretentious and self-important.  I can’t pretend not to be pretentious, but I have to say that while I think novels can be important to society, such lofty ideals do not motivate me to sit down and put my fingers to the keyboard every damn day.

I always thought, before I had the confidence to say it out loud, that symbolism was something only critics and teachers and students ever spoke of.  I can’t even imagine a writer sticking in symbolism with any intention.  Themes, maybe, but I think they more often come naturally.¹

What I think most when I read these interviews is that there is no The Writer.  Writers come in all forms and work in different ways.  I need to remind myself of that more than anyone.²  It’s not that there aren’t some techniques better than others or that nothing can be taught, but I don’t think we can ascribe one role to The Writer or think for a second that we all have the same motivations.

It’s always going to be a messy process, but I want to keep it as simple as possible.  Simple words, simple motivations, and mostly simple stories.  It’s always been the relationship dynamics that intrigue me the most.  Not crazy plots or unique characters or a precious worldview or clever dialogue, but the way people relate to each other.

I’ve been thinking, too, about the degree to which novels are autobiographical.  Atwood and Joyce Carol Oates will say they are not autobiographical and balk at those who make that assumption, even calling them unsophisticated readers.  That all sounds good, if not a little snobby³, but I can’t shake the feeling that all of my characters are at least partly autobiographical. I mean, all of their thoughts were at one point my thoughts, even if it’s just projection. Then Atwood said something that rang very true. She wrote about stepping into the shoes of another person.  That’s what it is.  I can’t abandon myself, but I can put myself in another’s shoes and write from there.

What I’m getting at is that any person who writes is The Writer, so even if we continue to assign general characteristics and motivations to such a person, we should know that the reality is far more complex than any stereotype.  And in figuring out our own philosophies and reasons for writing, we shouldn’t be limited to what other writers think writing is.

1. I am very possibly doing the thing I am supposedly arguing against in saying that I don’t think writers think as consciously about symbolism as scholars do, but I’m getting into my philosophy here and I can only say that I hope they don’t. [↩]
2. Some of them even come in the shape of Carrie Bradshaw. [↩]
3. In their defense, as women writers, they were getting people assuming that they were somehow incapable of distance from their characters.  They assumed that everything the women wrote about had actually happened to them.  For instance, Margaret Atwood wrote a character who was fat and she had a person ask her at a reading how she’d lost all the weight. [↩]