writing as a way of life – Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

Irresolute

I want to have a New Year’s resolution but I can’t think of one. I already don’t smoke or drink, and a minor and extremely tedious recent health issue cost me five pounds last month that I didn’t want to lose and have been trying to get back. Read more books and fewer social-media feeds, I guess? Good luck, me! As for writing, past experience suggests that the tightening of thumbscrews fails to increase my productivity, or maybe I just don’t want to believe or admit that it could, holding on as I do to the notion that life should be worth living.

I don’t seem to have as much faith in my raw will-power as I used to. And yet, and yet. On some days, raw will power seems to be all I have. According to the “wrapped” function in the app that tracks my Cross Fit workouts, I lifted 868,994 pounds in 2025, which is 129,685 pounds more than I lifted the year before, which suggests a certain amount of single-mindedness, or bloody-mindedness.

One idea is that I should write more of these little essays for my blog / newsletter, and then also turn on the “enable payments” spigot, and dive headfirst into the resulting piles of cash, like Scrooge McDuck. I have hesitated to turn this spigot because I have a conflictual relationship to the idea that there should be any relationship at all between writing and money. Also because one reason I mistrust my reserves of will-power is that I really ought to be devoting them to the writing of novel #3—my New Year’s resolutions for the past half dozen years were pre-inscribed long ago, if I’m being honest. I continue to write these essays at all only because every so often I work myself into a knot that I can’t figure out how to unravel any other way. If I were to write them more often and more incidentally, they would probably have a different flavor, less urgent, more meandering.

For example, I could write about a feeling that I’ve had lately, which I think is a symptom of late middle age, where I’ll be doing something like goofing with the new puppy, whom we adopted on Christmas Eve, and when I rise from the floor, a little light-headed, from the sudden shift in blood pressure, I experience something that isn’t as well formed as a recollection but does seem to have the coloring of one, the fragment of an episode that I’ve mostly forgotten, maybe a residual sense-memory of wrestling with our last dog when he was a puppy, twenty years ago, or of a joke my husband and I used to make back then, or of what it was like proprioceptively to be on the floor in the apartment where we then lived, at the age I then was, or maybe all these trace sense-memories overlaid together, transposed onto the current moment without the right tags, so that what comes into my mind is nonsensical the way a dream is. Vague, cryptic. I get moments like this a lot lately, and they remind me of—and this is such a historical thing to be reminded of that it’s a little embarrassing—a product called Silly Putty, a plasticky, rubbery ball that they sold at the grocery store when I was a child, which came in an egg, I seem to recall, and which you could stretch, and snap in two, and bounce, and another of its odd properties was that you could flatten it and press it on top of the Sunday newspaper’s comic strips, which in those days were printed in color, and the dry flexible tablet that the Silly Putty had become would lift a reversed impression off of the comic strips, which you could marvel at the exactness of for a minute or two, and then smush up, and marvel again as the bright reds and blues and oranges of the comics were diluted by your folding and massage back into the light pink substrate that had briefly held them. What I experience, in other words, in my moment of lightheadedness, is like one of those short-lived Silly Putty copies, the text in them an illegible mirror image of something I probably didn’t pay that much attention to at the time, restored for a moment with colors that are strangely sharp but at the same time recognizably secondhand, restored however without any possibility of lasting preservation, restored only for the ephemeral pleasure of a chance to notice how the plastic of memory is emptied as the tissues on which your memory is imprinted are recycled.

While I was lost in the composition of these sidewinding sentences, the current puppy, today’s puppy, sitting on my lap, chewed a corner off the case for my reading glasses.

Another cruise

I was interviewed about Moby-Dick for a podcast the other day (keep an eye out for an episode of The World in Time, from Lapham’s Quarterly), which triggered a re-reading. I think this was my sixth time through? I am now the age of Ahab, who, in chapter 132, tells Starbuck that he started whaling as “a boy-harpooneer of eighteen” and has spent “forty years on the pitiless sea.” I, too, have reached my implacability-and-fixed-purpose era. (Or would like to have reached it. That third novel would be getting written faster, if I had.)

I think I was invited on the podcast because I’m a bit of an oddity, someone who managed in the end to turn himself into a general “writer” but started as a Melvillean. In an earlier life, I wrote for scholarly journals and university presses about such topics as Melville’s conflation of cannibalism and homosexuality, the trick sanctification of sacrificed gay desire in Billy Budd, and the Platonic erotics of mining for sperm at sea.

I happen to be re-reading Emerson’s journals, for no particular reason, and along the way I have been jotting down what amounts to a haphazard collection of entries that prefigure Melville. Some are pretty uncanny. For example, a dozen years before Melville’s debut novel Typee, which fictionalized his experience of jumping ship to live among islanders who might or might not have been thinking of dining on him, Emerson wrote in his journal: “In the Marquesas Islands on the way from Cape Horn to the Sandwich Islands, 9° S. of the Equator they eat men in 1833.”

A few days later, Emerson records a night in a hotel that foreshadows the meet-cute of Ishmael and Queequeg:

I fretted the other night at the Hotel at the stranger who broke into my chamber after midnight claiming to share it. But after his lamp had smoked the chamber full & I had turned round to the wall in despair, the man blew out his lamp, knelt down at his bedside & made in low whisper a long earnest prayer. Then was the relation entirely changed between us. I fretted no more but respected & liked him.

Prayer helps reconcile Ishmael and Queequeg, too; shortly after they get married, as you may recall, Ishmael joins Queequeg in worshipping his idol, Yojo.

Father Edward Taylor, the seamen’s minister, who was the real-life model for Melville’s character Father Mapple, was a friend and colleague of Emerson’s, and stayed over at his house at least once. In June 1835, while mulling over whether he should still call himself a Christian, Emerson declared, “But if I am the Devil’s child, I will live from the Devil,” a passage that reminds me of Ahab seizing a lit-up lightning rod in chapter 119 and avowing himself a child of the unholy electric fire.

Maybe the most remarkable prefiguration comes on 19 February 1834, when Emerson reports that

A seaman in the coach told the story of an old sperm whale which he called a white whale . . . who rushed upon the boats which attacked him.

Emerson was living in a Melvillean world.

What’s it like to read Moby-Dick when you’re Ahab’s age? There are probably a number of things I no longer see as acutely as when I had young eyes, but some elements are now in sharper focus. When young, I had only the vaguest sense, in any given chapter, where Ishmael was, geographically speaking. For me then, the important seas to be swimming through were of metaphor and feeling. Now I see that Melville is actually pretty careful to map the Pequod’s journey; in late middle age, my internal GPS module keeps better track of where I as a reader am supposed to be—so much better track that it’s a bit of a comedown to realize that the epic events of the novel happen in specific actual places, not just in elemental spheres.

At this point, I’ve read pretty much every word of Melville’s that has survived, so another thing I can’t help but notice is the way Melville prefigures himself in Moby-Dick. For example: In one of his prefatory chapters, Melville presents a series of quotes about whales and whaling. One of these is taken from an account of a mutiny aboard the whaleship Globe, and reads, “‘If you make the last damn bit of noise,’ replied Samuel, ‘I will send you to hell.'” Next to this extract, a younger me wrote in the margin, “& the relevance to whaling?” (in his defense, young me went on to speculate a not-implausible link to Hobbes’s Leviathan). I don’t have any trouble seeing the relevance today. It seems obvious to me now that mutiny is implicit everywhere in the novel, that Billy Budd is already present in Moby-Dick, as an undertext. (Mutiny and Billy Budd were also present in White-Jacket, the novel that came just before Moby-Dick.) In chapter 123, mutiny becomes explicit, when Starbuck raises a musket and then, weakly, lowers it. Starbuck is a good hero who can’t get angry enough to rebel, much as Billy Budd is the Handsome Sailor who can’t bring himself to say plumply no, until his fist flashes out. Starbuck’s fist never does. He’s the classic liberal, without quite enough thumós to take out the madman before it’s too late. Mutiny pretty much has to be an issue aboard the Pequod; the search for energy, after all, is classically the locus where force supervenes in politics and economics—where need and power override contracts and consent.

Other prefigurations: In their gams, the whaleships in Moby-Dick trade letters, sometimes addressed for sailors who have already perished, a foreshadowing of the Dead Letter Office that was Bartleby the scrivener’s previous place of employment. And in the contrasting plights of the sperm-filled whaleship Bachelor and the bone-dry Jungfrau, there seems to be a precursor to the “joke”/schema of Melville’s paired stories “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids”—a joke that now seems pretty ponderous to me, unfortunately, however laden it may be with homoerotic significance.

When you read Moby-Dick as an undergraduate, and you come across a reference to, say, a Bible verse you haven’t heard of—such as, in chapter 95, Melville’s reference to 1 Kings 15, which describes, Melville says, an idol “found in the secret groves of Queen Maachah in Judea; and for worshipping which, king Asa, her son, did depose her, and destroyed the idol, and burnt it for an abomination at the brook Kedron”—you think to yourself, Huh, well, we didn’t learn that verse in Sunday school, but I bet it’s the sort of thing a well-read person in the 19th century would have known about and recognized. Or, you read Melville’s comparison of the white whale to an anti-deity worshiped by “the ancient Ophites of the east,” or his comparison of the dark depths of Ahab’s soul to the undercellar of the Hotel de Cluny and to “the Roman halls of Thermes,” and you think, Everyone must have been so much more learnèd in Melville’s day! They must have had all these esoteric religious and archeological references at their fingertips. Well, maybe. But I’m as grown-up now as I’m likely to get, and have read an awful lot of 19th-century prose, and I think undergraduates can be forgiven for not getting all of Melville’s references. My sense is that some of Melville’s points of reference were pretty obscure, and would have been even to educated peers of his. Which isn’t that surprising. Melville was an autodidact. His picture of the cultural world is one he had to draw for himself, and what he came up with can be a little quirky, as is often the case with autodidacts. Especially quirky, with Melville, are the departments of theology and anthropology. Somewhat surprisingly, he actually seems pretty canonical where whaling is concerned; my sense is that most whaling nerds of his day would have agreed that the whaling books he mentions are the important ones.

The last thing that strikes me strongly on this re-reading: Moby-Dick is not built the way novels are supposed to be. It’s not surprising that most people who attempt the novel lose their oomph somewhere around page 100. Novels usually hold your attention with little loops and twists of plot. Clara and Guillaume have become engaged to marry, but after Soren returns from his apprenticeship in Rome, Clara remembers all that Soren used to mean to her, and for some reason becomes willing to believe Soren has reformed, as he claims, although Guillaume has by chance found out that Soren is not only still partial to gaming but also saddled with ignominious debt, and yet it would be ungentlemanly for Guillaume to betray Soren’s confidence to Clara; the only noble thing to do is wait out patiently the rekindling and eventual subsidence of her infatuation—there is nothing like any of this in Moby-Dick. Instead: sailors get on a doomed ship. They agree to hunt a white whale. Everyone knows it is going to end badly. Everyone knows this pretty much from the start. There is a romance plot, but no sooner is it sparked than it dives, far beneath narrative. Ishmael and Queequeg are married in chapter 10 (of 135), but once they board the Pequod, you pretty much never hear about their love, or any of its vicissitudes, ever again, unless you count the very late resurfacing (sorry, spoiler!) of Queequeg’s coffin, which becomes Ishmael’s life buoy. And there’s not really anything that takes the place of this submerged romance plot. There is no other novelistic “business.” Nothing ever seriously threatens to derail Ahab from his mission, for example; there’s not any back-and-forth of hope raised and then dashed. The novel’s plot is a straight line—interrupted, for a span of about 350 pages, by fairly allegorical episodes of whale-hunting, and fairly metaphysical essays about whales. I still think Moby-Dick is brilliant, don’t get me wrong, but it’s brilliant as a meditation on representation, and incarnation, and the problem of having a soul that’s inside a body, and necessarily dependent on, and sometimes antagonistic to, other bodies, which apparently have souls inside of them, too, and of living in a world that is said to have been created by a deity but doesn’t have all that much in it in the way of the grace and mercy that a benevolent deity could be counted on to supply. Moby-Dick is not brilliant in the way of, say, Middlemarch, which is the novel I’m re-reading now, where characters have different kinds of interiority and purpose, and project onto one another and frustrate one another and discover they have feelings for one another they weren’t at first aware of. Ishmael is almost too ironic about himself to have interiority, of the George Eliot sort. In Moby-Dick, only Ahab has rich interiority, and he’s insane. And the reader accesses his interiority through his soliloquies and through Melville’s complicated prose gestures towards him, not through the eavesdropping that free indirect discourse makes possible.

In Moby-Dick, a young, great, unruly, and untrained mind is wrestling. In chapter 42, for example, as Melville piles up associations and allusions that might help explain the meaning of the whiteness of the white whale, he notes that “the great principle of light . . . for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge.” Two chapters later, describing an episode that Ahab goes through of what sounds like depersonalization, maybe as a component of a panic attack, Melville tries to describe what it’s like to be conscious without a self, writing that “the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness in itself.” Did Melville realize he was echoing his earlier paragraph? The novel is full of what scholars call “unemendable discrepancies” and “unnecessary duplicates”—scribal errors that are impossible to yank out of the book’s semantic fabric. Maybe this echo, too, is an error, or maybe, to look at it more generously, Melville became aware, as he wrote, that he was repeating that idea that light, which bestows color, itself has no color—and doubled down. Maybe the “mistake” of repetition, as he made it, began to suggest a meaning he couldn’t bring himself to discard. I don’t think Melville is someone who ever killed his darlings. It’s hard to winkle out exactly what this particular “mistake” means, and it’s equally hard to imagine that Melville intended to make it before it, as it were, happened to him, in the heat of writing. Still, the suggestion made by the error is ingenious: that there is a parallel between the horror that the white whale inspires, through being the no-color of light itself, and the horror that not-Ahab experiences, when the self of Ahab is no longer coloring not-Ahab—that there is something terrifying about unqualified, unmediated existence, more real and more powerful than the appearances that we usually live as and among.

On Not Being Found

In a new book, The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry, Stacey D’Erasmo asks half a dozen artists, “How do we keep doing this—making art?” I read it avidly, devouring D’Erasmo’s profiles of a painter, a composer, a garden designer, and others, especially enjoying the “fugitive, occasional memoir” (her words) that her disclosures about herself add up to. I did have a hiccup, however: I had to set the book down for a few hours in order to talk myself out of the expectation that either D’Erasmo or one of her interview subjects would answer the question as it applied to my own case. Selfishly and rather naively, I realized, I had been hoping that she or they would.

Alas, no one but me can—which doesn’t stop me from continuing to try to get other people to. In the gift shop of the Edward Gorey House on Cape Cod, last month, I bought Mark Dery’s biography of Gorey and read it straight through, in that untroubled way that one reads when one finds a book that happens to be running parallel with one’s preoccupations at the moment. How did Gorey keep going? His special power seems to have been an ability to distill everything he loved into a distinctive sensibility—and then persevere in that sensibility all his life. In retrospect, the Gorey formula seems clear—William Roughhead + Edward Lear + Ronald Firbank, rendered graphically—and seems super gay, but it wasn’t clear that the elements belonged together before he put them together, and the homosexuality of it all (which comes with this asterisk: though Gorey’s crushes were all on men, as a practical matter he seems to have been ace) didn’t become transparent until later. The stubbornness is what I came away from his biography most admiring—the reserves of patience that enabled him to draw the many delicate, etching-like hash marks that texture the wallpapers of his dark rooms, and to keep drawing these hash marks in small-press book after small-press book, for decades, until at last America decided they were awesome.

That “at last” doesn’t arrive in time for everyone. In most of D’Erasmo’s case studies, however—since she has chosen artists who made it into old age, some selection bias may be at work here—there’s a windfall at some point, an unexpected, not-to-be-relied-upon intersection of popular taste with the genius of the artist in question. In Gorey’s case, he got lucky with his set design for a 1970s production of a play about Dracula, which brought him money, and then with his animated title-credit sequence for the PBS show Mystery, which brought him fame. I want to say that money and fame, when they came, altered him not at all, that he kept on going exactly as he had before, and in many ways this is true, but Dery reveals that Gorey’s focus did change, after Dracula. The experience revived his love of creating and staging plays, and in later life, he devoted more and more of himself to them, the more absurdist the better. The plays weren’t what America wanted from him at that point—having discovered the droll little illustrated books, America wanted more of those—which dissuaded him not at all. Were the plays the best use of his genius? Maybe not, but it was his life. What stayed consistent, in other words, was not his art, but the stubbornness with which he kept executing it.

I can do stubbornness, too, I’m pretty sure. And I can definitely do drift in kind of art. I’m supposed to be writing a third novel, and maybe someday I will, but lately I only seem able to finish poems and short stories.

In a chapter that profiles country musician Steve Earle, D’Erasmo quotes the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott:

In the artist of all kinds, I think one can detect an inherent dilemma, which belongs to the co-existence of two trends, the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found. This might account for the fact that we cannot conceive of an artist’s coming to the end of the task that occupies his whole nature.

In the same essay, Winnicott tells the story of a patient whose private journal was read by her mother when she was nine. On the first page of the journal, the girl had written, “What a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” Her mother asked her where she got the quote, revealing she had read the journal, which upset the patient. But the patient believed she wouldn’t have been upset if her mother had read her journal without revealing she had read it. This, Winnicott comments, “is a sophisticated game of hide-and-seek in which it is a joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found.”

The two moments in Winnicott’s essay seem to get at something profound about the creative impulse. And the two moments, it should be noted, contradict each other. Does the artist urgently need not to be found, or would it be a disaster not to be found? Yes, seems to be the answer. D’Erasmo brings in Winnicott in order to throw light on the anxiety that she feels has driven her own writing, an anxiety to report on “an interior world that has often felt as if it was burning down.” Anxiety in the sense of both wanting to share and feeling no one should see.

The girl’s quote comes from the Book of Proverbs, by the way—from a chapter in the most public and available book in the Western world. On the other hand, the import of the quote seems to be that the higher truth about a person is in her secrets. At the start of his essay, Winnicott writes that he surprised himself, in the writing of it, by “staking a claim . . . to the right not to communicate.” He concludes that “the individual person knows that [her core self] must never be communicated with or be influenced by external reality.”

What does this have to do with going on as an artist? One of the things artists must do is let themselves be made use of, which is somewhat endangering. To let oneself be published is to let oneself be made use of. The other day, a newcomer to my gym asked what I did for a living, and when I said I was a writer, he said, “So I can google you and find out all about you?” and it brought home to me how strange it is that for the sake of my career I’ve agreed to be exposed.

There are other, more-mixed forms of use. Gorey let his illustrations appear on the front of other people’s books, while he was a designer of paperbacks at Anchor, and onstage in other people’s plays. He didn’t have much to do with the creation of the Mystery animations, Dery reveals, apart from granting the producer of the sequences the right to combine and put into motion his illustrations. How can you let yourself be made use of while continuing to protect the core of you that must never be communicated? That, I think, is the hard part. Making money is hard, too, and maybe for the same reason? The paradox of needing to be found and not found may explain the stubbornness and drift in someone like Gorey (or me)—the insistence on not changing and on changing. In order to continue, you have to be able to not continue. Not being found is a tricky game to keep playing.

Training and practice

I’ve been going to Cross Fit classes for five years now, and even though I’m deep into my fifties, I have become stronger and have learned a number of skills, outcomes that have surprised me. It’s a remarkably effective system of education and training.

My vocation is writing and not (yet) fitness influencing, however, so my progress in Cross Fit has sometimes led me to daydream about whether a system like it could teach and train writers. This is not a question I have found an answer to! What follows will be exploratory rather than decisive.

In America today, instruction in creative writing usually takes the form of a workshop, which isn’t completely unlike Cross Fit. Both a Cross Fit class and a writing workshop leverage the power of the in-person group. When people come together with the aim of getting better at a particular endeavor, their will power as individuals is strengthened by two social forces: solidarity and rivalry. Being in the presence of people who share your ambition gives that ambition a social reality, by showing you others who are also making a commitment to it, and the encouragement of these peers, in the form of admiration and expressions of confidence in you, can provide positive reinforcement. Humans in company inevitably compare themselves with one another, which risks sparking unpleasant feelings but if properly regulated can be a further motivation for learning and effort. I probably wouldn’t do my allotted burpees quite as fast if I weren’t hoping not to be the last person in class to finish them (as I often am, still). Similarly, in the setting of a writing workshop, I’m probably spurred by a wish to impress, or at least not disappoint, my colleagues. Getting the balance right between solidarity and rivalry is tricky. Much depends on the charisma and emotional intelligence of the group’s leader, whether coach or teacher, and perhaps as much on the social rules, implicit and explicit, that order the interactions between participants.

In a group setting, most instruction comes from the coach or teacher but not all of it. Participants also sometimes instruct one another. This can happen indirectly, as when you watch a peer respond to a teacher’s advice on how to overcome a flaw in technique, or directly, as when a peer gives you a suggestion about how to improve. There’s a risk that the peer might not know what he’s talking about, but this risk is reduced if the coach or teacher eavesdrops and intervenes when necessary. And the act of offering advice is itself instructive, because it is an opportunity for the person giving the advice to consolidate his understanding of technique.

So much for commonalities. Now for some distinctions. I should say up front that I have far less experience with workshops than most writers. I took part in a few as an undergraduate, and over the past half-dozen years, I’ve taken part in one with a few friends, all of whom are professional writers. But I’ve never attended or taught at an MFA program. Take what I say with a grain of salt, therefore.

One limitation of a writing workshop is that its focus is almost exclusively what you might call “demand-side.” I’m using the term metaphorically. In economics, a “demand-side” solution to a problem focuses on consumers, perhaps by proposing to boost their spending power, whereas a “supply-side” solution focuses on producers, perhaps by suggesting that burdens on them like regulation or taxation be lowered. When I say that a workshop has a “demand-side” focus, what I mean is that the attention of a workshop is mostly focused on the way writing is received. This focus is largely built in to the rule that structures most workshops: one participant listens silently while peers who have read a piece of her work describe their reactions.

Writing is not words on a page. It is a series of impressions and thoughts conveyed by words on a page—in part by their texture and rhythm, and in part by their semantic content. A workshop is excellent as a test of whether impressions and thoughts are arriving in a reader’s mind as intended. Do your readers suspect that the butler did it in the first half of your story, or can they tell from the get-go that it was the heiress and resent you for taking so long to say so? Does your description of a rural landscape stir up uneasy feelings of insecurity in childhood, or are you the only person who feels that way about distant slopes of yellow and green? If people in your workshop are skilled at describing their responses to a text, and feel comfortable being honest about their responses, the feedback can be invaluable.

It’s not clear to me, however, that a workshop can provide much more than this. A reader who can tell you that something is wrong is not necessarily a reader who can tell you how to fix it. The premise of a workshop is that its participants arrive already equipped with enough strength and skill. But can you ever have enough of those? It’s easy to see how access to attentive readers could help a writer fine-tune a piece of writing. But it isn’t clear that feedback from readers will build up a writer’s skills. On the contrary, if a writer doesn’t have a resilient enough ego, feedback might impair his fluency, one of the skills a writer needs, by making him self-conscious about exposure.

My daydream about a Cross Fit for writing is that it might be possible to design a kind of instruction that is “supply-side”—that focuses on improving the skills that go into good writing.

A couple of objections immediately present themselves. The first, and perhaps most obvious, is that there are established, agreed-upon conventions for success in Cross Fit, and there are none in writing. There is little to no ambiguity about what is good form in, say, a power snatch. But tastes differ in the arts, and even if you argue that a community of informed, well-read taste-makers will tend to converge in their opinion of which writers are the best, you will have a great deal of trouble articulating the aesthetic rules behind their judgments, and you will never be able to derive rules as practical and concrete as those that allow coaches to correct athletes on the spot.

Second, can writers train and practice, in the sense that athletes can? The understanding in Cross Fit is that athletic performance depends on a number of different skills. Some of these, such as stamina and strength, improve with training, that is, by choosing goals that are more and more challenging (in Cross Fit, this usually means heavier and heavier weights), which cause the body to adapt by becoming stronger than before. Other skills, such as agility and balance, improve by practice; during structured repetitions, the brain and nerves learn, becoming better able to perform particular tasks and improving their general coordination of the different parts of the body. Two of the skills behind athletic performance, power and speed, improve only with both training and practice.

What are the components of skill in writing, and can they be improved by training (more challenging goals) and/or practice (structured repetitions) in a group setting? Some candidate skills: memory, insight, observation, tact, theory of mind, openness, stubbornness, precision, surprise, fluency, control of tone, grammatical resourcefulness, ear (including rhythm and sonority), diction (including vocabulary), figuration. This list needs work! I’m so used to focusing on the attributes of good writing that I find it hard to name the skills that good writing relies on. Even if we can come up with a list of these skills, however, we might discover that they are best cultivated by some other kind of effort altogether, neither training nor practice—such as, for example, plain old reading, which, when done right, expands a writer’s vocabulary and broadens her understanding of literature’s possibilities. It also might turn out that it is impossible to come up with a well-formed list. It might be the case that writing is such a whole-psyche endeavor that the list would be tantamount to a description of what it means to be human, which presumably can’t be nailed down, trained for, or practiced (or can it?). Or maybe my list needs to be winnowed, and the more-general traits, like organization and insight, set aside in favor of the traits that have a closer relationship to writing, like ear, grammatical resourcefulness, and diction.

A third, perhaps related objection: What if writing is intrinsically unlike athletic performance? An athlete, after all, competes in public in real time, whereas a writer usually works in solitude, and presents her achievement to others long after she has finished “performing” it. Athletes don’t get to revise their performance; writers don’t have to show their first drafts. Athletes are constrained by rules—their competition is given meaning by rules, and is felt to be undermined when they are not enforced—whereas there is virtually no rule of writing that some great writer has not broken.

Still, originating sentences, even in private, does require something like athletic skill. You can’t convincingly use a word or a sentence structure that you haven’t made yours, that hasn’t become a part of your voice. No amount of fiddling after the fact can take the place of a missing insight. As I’ve grown older, I’ve grown more and more aware of how physical writing is—how much depends on being in good health, well rested and well fed. The secret weapon of most successful writers is probably hidden long hours, but there is an element of fitness, too. It may take you a thousand tries to write a sentence perfectly, but you do have to write it perfectly that one time. If it turns out that agility in writing can’t be taught, I don’t think it will be because that agility can only exist when the writer is alone. Improving a skill seems likely to help a writer, even if some paragons of the art, following its mysterious vicissitudes, decide to make the experiment of dispensing with the skill in question. I admit, though, that writing created during an exercise in a group setting probably won’t be of enduring value; it will be what in Cross Fit goes by the name of “assistance work.” Privacy and silence probably are necessary, in the end, for magic to happen.

“Lifer,” a new poem in the NYRB

“Lifer,” a new poem of mine, is published in the 17 October 2024 issue of the New York Review of Books. Please check it out!

In other news, I’ll soon be leaving the derelict building where I’ve rented a writing studio for the past dozen years. The new owners plan to turn it into apartments. If you happen to have read Melville’s novel Pierre, you will have an idea what kind of building this was—an archaic structure that the lords of real estate for a time weren’t able to figure out what to do with, and where deserters from capitalism were therefore able, for a while, to find shelter for their arty, inefficient pursuits.

I’ve found a new place, which I hope will be even better, but I wrote one and a half novels here (counting only those that have seen the light of day), and more than a dozen short stories and poems, and I’ll miss it!