Reflections on Writing
In an essay about writing in The Little Virtues, Natalia Ginzburg notes the shifting emotions that arise, how the act of writing can be pleasurable, necessary, and hard going. Her point is the necessity of writing and how life can interfere with that, put it out of reach despite our desire. Eventually I identified myself as an editor and writer, activities I share with Ginzburg, who made her living as a book editor. She found an audience, but — unlike Trollope and his mother — was never financially independent because of this. The money her books produced was extra. I also made my living as an editor, and my own writing is a vocation, to use Ginzburg’s word: “something I do,” as I have since childhood.
A vocation is a summoning or a calling. “Inner necessity” might be another way to define it, but without the compulsion that necessity might imply. Some writers on writing describe it as a practice, but “something I do” is truer to my own approach. I divide this “something” into three parts: done for money, done out of friendship, and done entirely of my own volition. The first shifted from writing to editing, because I made a good living as an editor. The second has been a long collaboration with my main graduate school advisor around our shared interests. The third is whatever I choose to write: letters, poems, and brief prose pieces. I also started a personal journal, Common Place, to emulate David Diderot, who gave manuscripts to his friends, and Virginia Wolff, who started a press in order to publish her work exactly as she wanted.
Ginzburg wrote poems, then stories, and finally novels. The Little Virtues consists of personal essays. Her novel Happiness, As Such is epistolary — experimental, too, in that it shifts vantage points. The evolution of form is quite important. I’m not much good with long pieces, although I can generate sets of shorter ones. I even imagine they have themes, but that’s doubtful. If anything ties them together, it’s the season of their writing. The last one I wrote spanned a year, interrupted by a comment my daughter made that I had to digest, so two seasons, maybe, distinct yet related.
Letters, poems, and short prose lend themselves to specific subject matter, as they differ as means or vehicles of self-expression. My letters to friends are often rambling essays that allow themselves to be discursive and informal. Short pieces (I hesitate to call them essays) are more pointed if polemical; or they sidestep digression by spreading it out across a set. Poems provide a scrim of varying porosity or opacity. Only poems can say certain things, because — unlike prose — they can touch on life without needing to explain it.
