‘The work starts to feel like work, and for most writers that is the smooch of death. Writing is at its best – always, always, always – when it is a kind of inspired play for the writer. I can write in cold blood if I have to, but I like it best when it’s fresh and almost too hot to handle’ (Stephen King)
Conversations about writing, especially in academia, often dampens my spirits. This sadness is quite paradoxical because I love writing, and I love talking about writing. It’s one of my favorite things in life, so what’s with the sudden misery in the face of something so dear to me?
I’m not sure, exactly, but both students, colleagues and friends often convey to me an image of writing as a burden, something tedious and intimidating that stands in opposition to the creative practice, even in contrast to life itself.
People tell me they are practitioners, and writing is not for them. That they would like to like writing, but they don’t, they can’t. That they try to write, to become writers, but then find themself faced with rigid expectations of writing, of having to write in a certain way, echoing a feeling that ‘we have to walk in line because of the extreme narrowness of the place where one can listen and make oneself heard’ (Michel Foucault).
Write like this or not at all.
All these brilliant, passionate people are often deterred by images of writing as something only legitimate when it adheres to standards defined by someone else, as if some divinity came down from the mountain to hand us the rules on stone tablets. Or something.
This resonates with an argument made by Alke Groeppel-Wegener in the context of design education:
‘students leave university with the impression that writing needs to conform to academic standards and will not be useful for them unless they decide to pursue a career in research. Practitioners, however, frequently use writing in their practice, although they often do not consider it as ‘proper’ writing, exactly because it does not conform to academic standards.’ (Alke Groeppel-Wegener)
If you know me, you will undoubtedly know that I don’t do well with these claims to necessity and inevitability, the widespread tales that things like writing (and politics, capitalism, human exceptionalism and so many other things) have somehow found their right form and are now bound to stay like that forever. I feel an urge and an obligation to create friction with those myths, because that’s all they are, really, human-made stories about how things (and people and more-than-humans) are supposed to be, to look, to feel, to exist. It’s my job, I believe.
Ok, this could become a big detour, a proper wild goose chase, on our meandering journey, but let’s move on. Back to the people and their struggles with writing.
Other people mention that they are rarely, if ever, part of conversations about writing, that they are left to figure out the mysteries of writing on their own, and that is an impossible task, completely unfair to put on the shoulders of any one person. The feeling is familiar, however, as writing in academia is often just assumed to be something we can somehow already do when we arrive at the doorstep, as if we are ‘already ready as writers’ (Badenhorst et al). And we are not, none of us. We need practice, we need support, we need each other. Some of us might be more disposed towards writing, a few may be talented, but obviously, none of us are born as great writers. It takes years and years of practice that never ends, we are never fully formed as writers, just like we are always incomplete as humans, always becoming.
I think it’s fair to say that many of us are haunted, even in some small way, by a spectre of writing that tells us there is something we cannot do, that we are not good enough:
“I have this voice in my head, a voice that has been quiet for so long that I arrogantly presumed it had left: You cannot, you cannot, you will never be able to write like that again; fun will fade away, enthusiasm slowly die and you will plod your way through life from now on” (Charlotte Wegener)
And this is what makes me sad, especially because it doesn’t have to be like this, writing could be ‘a kind of inspired play for the writer’, a creative practice of making worlds, of sparking joy, cultivating communities and a sense of belonging, it could be a practice of love, of making love possible in a world that so desperately and urgently needs it.
Writing could be all these things and more, and still be considered legitimate writing, relevant writing, good or even great writing, because there is ‘no single way – much less “right” way – of staging a text. Like wet clay, the material can be shaped’ (Laurel Richardson).
‘Words, then, are not the problem; the problem lies in what the academy has done to them. They have been deliberately sterilised, drained of resonance and affect, to ensure they are not contaminated by contact with that of which they speak. This is a condition of objectivity. But it does not have to be like that. Rather than excluding words from our investigations into the possibilities of life, why not bring them back, in a way that would make full poetic use of their expressive potential?’ (Tim Ingold)
As Tim Ingold above, and so many other writers have argued and demonstrated, there are other ways of writing, other ways of making worlds. I wrote recently that:
‘The words we choose, or the words that choose us, and the stories we tell with those words are always-already political, reminding us that ‘writing is world-making’ (Charlotte Wegener) and that ‘there are other ways of making worlds’ (Anna Tsing). See, a language that strives to be playful, kind, generous, vulnerable, affirmative or a voice that aspires to embody a profound love for life, they make worlds that are wildly different from, say, a neoliberal language of competition, infinite growth and a ‘politics of necessity’ or the distanced, rational voice of reason’.
I believe that we can all find a voice, our voice, our writing voices, that resonate deeply with who we hope to become, how we want to exist in the world, and everyone should have this experience. This is when writing transforms from the mundane to the transformative, from something we are told to do to something we cannot live without. When we find those voices that are not imposed on us by external forces, but emerge from the ongoing living of life.
This takes me to my dream.
I dream of cultivating writing communities where we can explore creative and designerly ways of writing together. I hope to open spaces to explore and think about writing differently, where we can play with writing, and I believe that we should begin by cracking open our ‘writing imaginaries’, our shared conceptions of what writing might become. We should huddle together, all of us unfinished, flawed writers, share our doubts, insecurities and vulnerabilities, trusting each other with our words, words that may hold some fragment of the hope that keeps us going.
I want to follow Bertolt Brecht’s spirited call to ‘examine, above all, what seems habitual’, including the ways we think we must write, because ‘in time of bloody disorder, of organised confusion, of unmerciful humanity’, like the times we are living in now, ‘nothing should seem natural, nothing should seem impossible to change’.
And that includes, of course, the ways we write. Writing should certainly not seem impossible to change, it should be the clay we shape, and the clay that shapes us, through careful, loving experiments and inquiries.
It seems appropriate to end this brief note on writing with a wonderful writer who has pushed my own writing, thinking and becoming, time and time again:
’It’s not on paper that you create, but in your innards, in the gut and out of living tissue – organic writing I call it. A poem works for me not when it says what I want it to say and not when it evokes what I want it to. It works when the subject I started out with metamorphoses alchemically into a different one, one that has been discovered, or uncovered, by the poem. It works when it surprises me, when it says something I have repressed or pretended not to know. The meaning and worth of my writing is measured by how much I put myself on the line and how much nakedness I achieve.’ (Gloria Anzaldúa)
Would you join me on this journey into new landscapes and territories of writing? Maybe we can, together, find the courage to put ourselves on the line, even if we are never quite ready?
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