Lily of the galley
Over at Bookslut, Jessa links to an essay about writing in the Washington Post. I can’t imagine such an essay ever appearing in a broadsheet in this country. That’s because it isn’t very chatty or overly fearful of pretention, both de rigeur here. Lily Tuck writes about sustaining the ‘lie’ of fiction, including such crucial banalities as making sure there are no distracting typos in the proofs. She also talks about the advice from Creative Writing classes that she has copied into notebooks. “Whenever I am feeling at a loss about writing” she writes “I open one of the notebooks at random”. An example is provided:
“A writer does not need to prove anything; she only needs to show in words as accurate and as consistent as she can find that the English language is her own and new.”
I don’t know what this means really. Yet, by feminising the sentence, its clear this writer needs to prove something. Can one prove by assertion? And how can one own a language? Isn’t language, by definition, not new?
Whenever I feel at a loss about writing, I know its time to begin. “Not to write � what a long way there is to go before arriving at that point” (Blanchot).
Another thing that doesn’t coincide with my experience: “Making things up - as in fiction - sounds easy and like fun and it may be at first. By page three, to say nothing of by chapter five or six, I guarantee, it becomes harder and harder to sustain that lie.” (sic)
On the contrary, for me, the first sentence - the first paragraph, which could be the same thing - is the hardest. And in the first sentence, if it’s right, both truth and fiction become impossible. Just as it should be. “To want to write: what an absurdity. Writing is the decay of the will” (Blanchot again).
Despite what I’ve said, a lot rings true. Yet still I resist: “Stay on the body, Gordon Lish used to admonish us in class about our prose” she writes. I’ve read about this apparently monstrous teacher before, in Salon. I don’t get it. Writing is about finding one’s own way, so to seek another’s help seems self-defeating. Maybe that’s the point? It’s the height of giving-up. But if writing is an assisted suicide, your assistant should at least be dead.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- It’s got to be a wind-up
- Cinematic writing: on McEwan and Bernhard
- Val�ry’s Notebooks
- The Uses of Doubt
- Well said that man
