Writing: Final Thoughts and Advice

"The wide windows look out on Harlem's invincible and indescribable squalor: the Park Avenue railroad tracks, around which, about forty years ago, the present dark community began; the unrehabilitated houses, bowed down, it would seem, under the great weight of frustration and bitterness they contain; the dark, the ominous schoolhouses from which the child may emerge maimed, blinded, hooked or enraged for life; and the churches, churches, block upon block of churches, niched in the walls like cannon in the walls of a fortress."
         James Baldwin, "Fifth Avenue Uptown," 
         from Nobody Knows My Name

It is common for writers and teachers of writing to show their students passages of literature, or even great sentences, in hopes that the greatness will rub off on the students, who, lit up with this impregnating pollen, run off and beget similar great sentences of their own. As a former English teacher I cannot resist showing you my own examples of great, awe-inspiring sentences. Look at how balanced they are, I exult; see how skillfully they use repetition, or the semi-colon...

But when I stop talking and go back to the sentences, I realize that what moves me about both of them is their power to shut me up. I do not want to sit down and write my own great sentence, or even figure out how to use the semi-colon. Instead I want to read more sentences like these, to let myself be taken up by them, anywhere they want to go. I am theirs, not mine. They are visions, not textbooks; and though I may learn from them, the learning will not feel like problem-solving, how-to-do-it learning. It will be more secretive, even sad--the way a snake might feel when, alone in the woodlot at night, it takes off its skin.

"Awe," said Emily Dickinson, "was my mother." I puzzle over that sentence, as over many of her enigmatic remarks. But one thing it suggests is that awe is not what moves you to write. It may move you to think and wonder, and that wonder may ask for words from you. It may move you to read more and to argue on paper with your reading. It may be the parent to thought. But the writing itself comes from your need to speak for yourself in your own words. That is why writing is so hard to do when you feel overwhelmed by others' words. It should be hard. If you feel the presence of a large something, that is a good feeling, like looking at the Northern Lights. But do not try to tame that feeling into a rule. Save it and savor it, and add others to it. Someday you will make use of awe, when you find a sentence in which it is utterly missing, like "I am not a crook."

If we read Dillard's and Baldwin's sentences not to find what they can do for us but to see what they do to the language, we may nevertheless find something we can use. When I read them, I time my breathing to their pauses and stops, and so I am carried forward into mystery. For Dillard the mystery, the revelation, is inside and outside her house. The creek goes on flowing, the books go on whispering. Each exists outside of her control, and she loves their indifference to her. At least that's what she says. But in the flowing of her sentence, in its whisperings, she has taken the creek and the books into her language. 

They abide in her as well as beyond her, though she cannot lay claim to them. So its language is her way of observing life and letting it go on without her: it is her hello and goodbye, happily spoken. And the plain, open announcement at the beginning of the sentence invites me into her happiness. I like language to do that: invite you in and let you look around, and caution you gently not to mess up anything.

The passage from Baldwin is relentless, yet not as relentless as what he sees. He knows that though showing is more important than telling, he must make his telling take hold. At every point where an image comes forward, the voice comes up from way down deep, the big, Latinate words welling up and welling up, the past participles stiff with hopelessness. This is not a sentence to crusade with, but rather one to see by, to make us keep looking into the well. 

Its terrible beauty tells me that there is nothing language can do when it knows what he knows, except to go on seeing and telling. And it says that everything Baldwin sees is alive with riddling life, and that when he writes he is committing not one life, but many lives, to words. Language is not just alive because of a writer's lucky facility with words, but because it just is. That is its curse and its blessing. That is what its wide windows look out on.

What can we take from this for ourselves? Until we are ready, nothing; but I think that nearly everyone is ready, at some time in life, to make words speak what they truly know. But if you assume that what you know only comes from great books, or great professors, or even great experiences, then you will be starting at the end instead of at the beginning. The beginning is the aliveness of words, the fact of their moving and exalting and hurting and using people, the fact of their doing it, not just of their ability to do it. 

A sentence is the physical fact of thought; its words are the deeds thought commits. Once you start thinking of a sentence as physical, you will see why its structure must be sound (as the arm of a pitcher must hold the ball through the forward curve); why its rhythm must not jar (as the ear shuns monotony and clang); why it discards the wrong word (as we gag at pepper on chocolate).

These physical facts live in you now, no matter how well or how badly you write, no matter whether you want to improve or not, no matter how many awe-inspiring books you have read. You have all, in some way and at some time, used words to reveal your aliveness. Even when you have used atrocities like "parametrical substructures" and "subsocialization systems" you have uttered your living need for a better way to speak, or bodied forth your own deadened feelings. 

You have all tried out words to see if they were true (such as "I love you") or had the naughty joy of comparing an Important Person to an animal or a piece of furniture. You have cursed and called names, cried and laughed, and found the awful power that one word could unloose upon you. You have been caught alive in your language.

And so it is from your humanness, not from your humaneness, that writing begins: your breath, your senses, the movements of your feet, your heart, your hands, and the shared, mingled, mixed-up life of the planet. Language is the flowing creek, the whispering book, the invincible, enraging city--but those are not just metaphors. You are there already, in words as in life, and if you go toward them they will come and find you. Then, but only then, will you know what to do with them.