Take One: Do you sometimes get an inkling to write, only to stop yourself by thinking, Nah, it won’t be any good? The bad news: There is no answer to “Will it be good?” The good news: The very question is no good. Adopt Miles Davis’s attitude: “I never think about not being able to do anything. I just pick up my horn and play the hell out of it.”
Take Two: Doubt and failure are the artist’s companions; they should be recognized and overruled. For most, doubt never departs, and failure rarely stays away for long. Embrace them as allies. Doubt does not preclude success; consider this comment by John Steinbeck: “Although sometimes I have felt that I held fire in my hands and spread a page with shining—I have never lost the weight of clumsiness, of ignorance, of aching inability.” Indeed, the embrace of failure is often a prerequisite for success; as Gilbert Sorrentino said, “I am absolutely obsessed by the idea of failing miserably.”
Take Three: Walker Percy wrote to Shelby Foote: “I’ve been in a long spell of accedie, anomie and aridity in which, unlike the saints who writhe under the assaults of devils, I simply get sleepy and doze off.” (Of course, no one truly in a state of accedie, anomie, and aridity could write this.)
Take Four: “Beset with technical difficulties and doubts,” Nabokov was carrying the first chapters of Lolita to the garden incinerator. Fortunately, his wife, Vera, stopped him. (I imagine her cajoling, “Vladimir! Don’t take out the garbage!”)
Take Five: The great actor Charles Laughton was plagued by self-doubt, especially during the 1937 filming of I, Claudius, which was never completed. Laughton would put his head in co-star Merle Oberon’s lap and weep, “I can’t find my character. I can’t find the man.” Years later, one of the actors lamented that Laughton “needed sun and got frost” from the director. Laughton shows enough flashes of brilliance in the surviving footage to make the case that much was lost because no one did for I, Claudius what Vera Nabokov would do for Lolita.
Take Six: I witnessed a conversation in the late 1960s between Allen Ginsberg and the painter Arnold Bittleman. Bittleman was describing how he would often paint deep into the night, look admiringly at his work, and go to bed convinced that he had created a great work of art—only to wake up and discover someone must have broken in and ruined his painting. Ginsberg replied that he used to feel that way, but now, even as he is writing, he’ll think: “This is the same old bleeeecchhh.”
Take Seven: John Berryman didn’t read reviews until he was thirty-five because “I had no skin on . . . I was afraid of being killed by some remark.” A better response might be to respond to offensiveness with offense. Robert Burns reacted to a critic with a rhapsodic, vitriolic screed, including: “thou servile echo of fashionable barbarisms … thou carpenter, mortising the awkward joints of jarring sentences … thou executioner of construction … thou pickle-herring in the puppet-show of nonsense.”
Take Eight: Francis Williams—who played trumpet with Duke Ellington—started out as a pianist in his hometown, Toledo. Williams thought he was pretty good until he met a local piano player who was so much better that Williams decided to change instruments: how could he succeed in the piano world if he wasn’t even the best in the neighborhood? Perhaps Williams made the right decision, but it was for the wrong reason: his neighbor in Toledo happened to be Art Tatum.
Take Nine: You not only need the wherewithal to start something, but also the will to keep going.I watched a master dance class taught by the choreographer Bella Lewitsky, during which she asked students to execute a series of steps from one end of the dance floor to the other. Whenever a student faltered and lapsed into a sheepish gait, Lewitsky would command, “Finish the line.”
Take Ten: Approach your writing with respectful fearlessness, and don’t take “Nah” for an answer.
(adapted from The Writing Workshop Note Book)
Take Seven is beautiful: but see also what John Updike's Bech proposes in the last of the three Bech books. In a rush hour crowd, h gently shoves an enemy to his death on e tracks. Michael Caine does the maneuver in a movie called, I think, "A Shock to the System." Not spoilers from me will you get about "House of Cards," the US version.
Posted by: David Lehman | October 25, 2014 at 08:40 PM
I love the use of "gently" preceding "shoves an enemy to his death..."
Posted by: Alan Ziegler | October 26, 2014 at 07:35 PM
Take Seven- wonderful. "Robert Burns reacted to a critic with a rhapsodic, vitriolic screed including" "thou pickle-herring in the puppet show of nonsense." Turn on the news any night to "a puppet show of nonsense." I am inspired by "vitriolic screed".
Posted by: Erin Langston | October 27, 2014 at 09:58 AM