Writing tends to be an early vocation. It’s so early even the writer may not know it can last a lifetime, providing interest and excitement. The idea that it is isolating only means that it can also call to people who were introverts before they set down the first word. Erasmus wrote, so did Boccaccio, both in Medieval homes, pullulating with people cooking, talking, and laughing. To me, writing is a luxury—peaceful solitude, not isolation. I started when I was nine, getting serious when I was eleven. I didn’t realize the depth of which the art is capable until I reached twenty-one.
Someone asked my mother if my parents had encouraged me. She said, “You don’t encourage Niagra Falls.” They did encourage me—they listened. The best thing they did was not confuse my work with me as a person. Too many of us have egos entangled with our writing. If we have a lean time or bad reviews, we suffer anguish far beyond the limits of our work.
The Greeks gave us valuable things. However, two of their ideas are destructive to writers. One is that inspiration comes from the outside, as though a god dumps it on the writer’s head. The other is that creativity is next door to madness. We oblige them by dragging up the same old bodies—Poe, Brahms, Plath, Van Gogh, and on and on. The Bachs, the Melvilles, the Edith Whartons, and the Steven Kings have worked their claims for years, mining treasure from sane minds and life experience.
I think writing is a reactive art. The writer sees the world and picks her theme from what she sees and experiences. I don’t mean copying, but interacting with something meaningful and important. Sometimes, a strand—a single thread—goes through the many weavings of her work, which the writer herself may be unaware of. The art of writing begins with the art of reading. All of us start that way. Fiction writers need to read as much as historians or scholars. I can remember a book I read when I was ten. I went to sea aboard a freighter to Shanghai. I helped solve a murder and became a far better Human being. Wow. There I was, taken out of myself into another life and another world. There followed dozens, hundreds, even thousands of experiences in many ages and many countries. I inhabited men, women, children, and even animals.
People think a writer’s life is exciting and romantic. But the work itself demands revision and more revision—word by word—sentence by sentence—cutting, trimming, obsessing over the difference between a word that is almost right and exactly right. John Keats crossed out keeless, wrote perilous, and changed the line from good to great. The art of writing is fascinating and illuminating. It deepens the writer and the reader. The trade is quixotic, low-paying, and unfair. As in football, a few major players dominate the arena, and many great talents lose out due to the mischance of luck or timing. Very few writers can earn a living by their writing alone. Add to this the vagueries of readers’ whims and fashions that make writers feel like stunt pilots flying blind. Still, there is no more gratifying feeling than to read a piece of work that is well-written, eloquent, honest, and necessary and know that you are the one who wrote it.
Editor’s note:
On March 29th, 2024, Joanne Greenberg was interviewed by Katie Parkins of Denver7.com. Here is a link to that interview. Denver7-Interview