More Lessons in Swimming
Once I stopped trying to write this book as I’ve written everything else, the writing got easier. And the writing has been easy since it began, but progressively easier because I kept unteaching myself, keep moving from the pattern that worked before. It worked once, all right, in some ways it worked several times before. And that pattern was based on another pattern. To write like a slavedriver, to push myself because when I first began I could hardly begin. All I had was this deep dream to be a writer.
And we all know just how powerful a dream without work is.
When I first started writing… no, when I first began to write novels, which is the only thing I really ever needed to write, wanted to write. It was winter, it was bitterly, bitterly fuckingly could and I fantasized about throwing myself in the frozen river. I wanted to die. It took a long time not to want to die. I began writing the way someone in the frozen forest begins rubbings sticks together. Because I needed to.
Only gradually did I begin to feel the warmth of writing.
It has taken a long time to get to the place where I did not want to die.
People tell you, and it is a lie, a luxuriant lie, about how writers need space. Need a room or several rooms of their own. Need to go off of a cabin or… or…. Fuck, listen to me. What I needed was to write. Gloria Anzaldua understood the need of a writer of color, especially a woman of color to write, of queers to write. She said, forget the room of one’s own. Write on the john. Write on paper bags. And write from yourself. Write about yourself because no one cares about you. And no one else is going to write about you. Because your tired ass, your gay ass, your black ass, your fat ass. And yes, even your white pasty ass, as it is, is simply not marketable material. So you have to write, that you might live.
It is the prerogative of those who are too white and too well off to talk about how they wish they could write, how they can’t finish what they’ve started. Blah, blah, how they want to be an artist. Listen: as to space. That is, I have found, a lie. When I began I wrote in a house harangued by a half drunk father and a half exhausted mother. Neither one of them believed in anything. The house was falling apart around my ears, constricting my throat. Everyone said in their various voices, “You’ll never write. You’ll never finish. You’ll never do anything?” And so I wrote. I wrote without the luxury of space and as a consequence my world expands around me. They say get yourself space and then write. I realize that I never sought my own space, my own home, until after my writing and my art had expanded me so there was no other choice.
For me there was no business of sighing and saying, “Oh, but I wish I could write. Oh, but I’d love to be a writer… La. La.” There was only this… If I had not written, I would have drowned. I have a lot of friends and many of them are fools all the time. All of them are fools some of the time. And at their most foolish, because they haven’t given up all to be artists, they say to me and my artists friends, “when you go into the real world….” Or “I live in the real world…”
Meaning we do not.
Here is what I say to those fools: When I turned to writing it was because I would have drowned in the so called real world. I couldn’t stand to be submerged in a world someone else had made. So I had to make my own. There was no other choice.
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