First, a confession: I’m a bad writer. I try to tell myself it doesn’t show, or at least not much, but it’s a conclusion that I’m often forced to draw at the end of a day’s writing, particularly over the last few weeks. (Seriously. It reeks.) As a teacher, I make it a point to talk with students about the difference between process and product. Process is that mysterious combination of ritual, craft, discipline, and self-deception that it takes to get the writing done, while product is the final, highly polished text that makes its lonely way to market. This is an important distinction for several reasons: first, it helps you to avoid confusing the excitement of the writing process with the quality of the product. Sure, it feels good to make something, but that doesn’t mean that what you’ve made is good. At some point, every writer has to shift gears from writer to reader, looking at her work with a critical eye and then making the hard editorial choices necessary to bring the project from childlike innocence to hard-won maturity. The process belongs to you, but the product is what you offer to the reader, so the time always comes when you have to stop thinking about your writing as self-expression and start thinking about it as a machine you’ve devised to do a job for the reader as efficiently as possible.
But it’s also important to draw this distinction during those times when the writing isn’t going well. We all go through those periods when we lose confidence, so that the project begins to blur like a camera that’s gone out of focus, or we simply feel ourselves get clumsy, like a dancer losing the beat or an athlete in a slump. It’s part of the creative process, but it can’t show in the final product. As writers, we’re lucky that we don’t have to go through our slumps in public. Unlike an athlete, I can spend weeks swinging blindly at curveballs and nobody has to watch it happen. That doesn’t make it fun, but I try to remind myself that I’ve been through it before, and I just have to grit my teeth and keep working at it to reach the day when I feel the gears catch and the wheels begin to turn again.
The analogy to athletes partly came to mind because of the news that a member of Congress is requesting a Justice Department investigation into the allegation that Roger Clemens lied to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in his denial that he ever used performance-enhancing drugs. Now, I’m not really a baseball fan, but the sport to which I’ve become addicted as a spectator is the one that has even bigger problems with this issue than baseball: bicycle racing. In fact, while watching last year’s Tour de France almost collapse as top riders were disqualified over accusations of blood-doping, I realized that what first attracted me to the sport was the drama of those steep climbs in the Pyrenees that allowed some riders to break away in the final week of the Tour. I was drawn to the great mountain riders like Michael Rasmussen, Alberto Contador, and Alexander Vinokourov, who annually produced the Tour’s most dramatic moments. Like a baseball fan drawn to the spectacle of towering home runs delivered in every game by chemically-enhanced sluggers, I was attracted to the sport by riveting narratives that were only possible through the use of performance-enhancing drugs. And like some other observers, I find our culture’s current obsession with cleaning up professional sports more than a little ironic given the huge amounts of money we pay athletes to produce these results, all paid for by advertisements for lifestyle drugs that promise middle-aged men chemically-improved sexual performance. (Viva Viagra!) We demand perfection from our athletes, artists, and writers, almost as much as we demand it from our children, too many of whom get performance enhancers to improve their academic prospects. Our culture no longer allows for moments of weakness or failure as part of the process by which greatness might be achieved; we value only product, not process.
Last year, I taught a course on seduction narratives. When we came to Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, I asked students what they’d consider selling their souls for. Like good liberal arts students, they quickly dismissed the idea of signing in blood for money, fame, or power. Then I hit them with the hard one: “What if the devil promised to make you write like Shakespeare?” On this one, they paused. There were several writers in the class, and a few of them seemed ready to sign. (I had the forms ready, which tells you everything you need to know about my role in the class.) Only when I pointed out that the devil is a trickster who would inevitably betray their hopes in some ironic fashion (i.e., they’d end up writing just like Shakespeare, with cramped letters and a quill) were they able to give up the temptation to seize any chance to achieve the writer’s dream of greatness.
Writing badly, I tell myself, is part of writing well. But I have no way of knowing if this current stretch of bad road will ever lead to anything good. I’m doing my best to keep the faith until the wind shifts and my sails fill, but I have to confess that there are times I’d give anything for a strong dose of inspiration.
Now where did I put my quill?