Learning to Write (With a Little Help From My Friends)

In the last few weeks, I have been discovering writers which I had no idea existed.  This is such a nice thing to happen to me, as I am going through some weird growing pains as a writer.  Even uttering that one is a writer with a declarative certainty of a full possession of one's "I" is heavy, burdensome, tough.

Beryl Bainbridge

The three writers which I have discovered are Beryl Bainbridge, Paula Fox, and Edna O'Brien. I have read their thoughts on writing and I’ve experienced no pretension - just an honest attempt at authenticity as a human being and as a writer. The difficulty of life (for example, Fox was abandoned by both her parents) figures prominently into the voice which emerges in a book. Suffering, then, must somehow be connected to writing.

Paula Fox

I really don't know much about the act of writing, that is, I still don’t have a good handle on it.  I still ask whether I am really meant to do this and whether I am just a writerly fraud, a mediocre writer at best. So far, I can report that it is a painful process and my days have been filled with emptiness (if that silly paradox even makes sense). I find myself losing more and more strength.

Edna O'Brien

In an interview for The Paris Review, Edna O'Brien reflected on the profound melancholy and the possibility of suicide every writer experiences - naturally, some more than others.  But she also mentions the need to keep going:

"It is by the grace of God, and perhaps willpower, that one comes through each time...When a writer, or an artist, has the feeling that he can't do it anymore, he descends into hell. So you must keep in mind that although it may stop, it can come back. When I was a child in Ireland, a spring would suddenly appear and yield forth buckets of beautiful clear water, then just as suddenly it would dry up.  The water-diviners would come with their rods and sometimes another spring would be found.   One has to be one’s own water-diviner.”

For the time being, I will enter into “friendship” with these three newly found writers and see what I can learn from their words and their struggles.  In a way, finding solidarity while still being alone.