The Grasshopper #88: The Writer As Character
Not just in a story, in real life
I’m thinking about Annie Lamont, the quintessential West Coast writer who wrote a great book about writing, Bird by Bird, and a bunch of other books, and who has become someone her readers feel they know.
A real character, a person you’d talk to in a bus station, waiting to go somewhere, and years later you would remember her but not where the bus station was or where you were going.
She has an editorial in the Washington Post this morning, really just a meditation on aging, a slight thing that made me smile. I know she has written best selling novels and memoirs of her struggles with alcohol and that aging thing and loneliness and love- all the classic memoir stuff.
Nothing special particularly and yet, we relate and not just we at the cusp of age. I suspect she has many younger readers. Her writing is that conversation in a bus station and we become characters in her story.
And we like it, and her.
This is more of a balancing act than you might think on the writer’s part. First, there is the willingness to be a character. These days it seems more writers break out with memoirs than novels and memoirs require us to be a character.
But there’s a Catch 22. You must be willing to be a character but not consciously structure yourself as one. My readers of my opinion pieces probably think they know me, and I’d like to think we’d have a good talk if we ran into each other. But I did not set out to put myself on the page (screen).
Annie, and that is how I and most of her readers think of her, does this effortlessly. Although she might dispute that effortless stuff. She does her voice and it is her voice. We read her because of that connection.
I know I have read and enjoyed her novels but I cannot name one offhand and it doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t even call myself a fan, but I am drawn to her voice, as I was when I saw her name in the Post this morning.
Certain writers excel at this. Henry Miller for instance, whose style has defied academic pigeonholing. Did he write fiction, memoir, something else? The something else is Miller wrote Miller. He was all personal voice and very aware of himself as the center.
And he was a huge character, by intent. Other writers don’t do this. We don’t see a character named Stephen King in his horror novels, though he peeks out, usually as a child, in the other fiction. King is a public character by choice but not in his stories.
I recently wrote about Tom Wolfe, the acid-tongued commenter on sixties and seventies culture, who definitely was a character but who managed in his writing to stay in the corner watching. Did he wear his signature white suits while riding on the acid bus with Ken Kesey and the Pranksters?
I wonder.
A lot of writers struggle with the idea of wanting fame and recognition but only for their writing, or so they might claim. Personally, I think any writer who gets some recognition went after it and made the decision to not hide themselves in their stories.
It’s why I would never describe myself as a journalist. What a reader reads is me, for better or worse. I think Annie and Henry might say the same. Tom I’m not sure about- he definitely considered himself a journalist until he moved into fiction.
And even then we see him mining real life for his characters and stories.
“Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called ‘mad’ and are shut up in rooms all day and stare at the walls.
Others are called ‘writers’ and do pretty much the same thing”
~Ray Bradbury
‘If you pack it, you have to carry it’
I don’t know why but this saying hit me this morning, maybe because Christmas is tomorrow and for many it has become too much about stuff: gifts and shopping. It’s marketing, we know that, and we can be suckers for it.
But when it comes to writing, more stuff is not good and we need to get rid of it, relentlessly. My only advice when someone has writer’s block, for example, is just write a word count daily with no concern about whether it is any good at all.
You need to get those words flowing. It’s like pumping an old well. Gunk and sludge will come out first but as you keep pumping the water will clear. You let that gunk and sludge, the stuff, sink to the bottom and drink the good stuff at the surface.
Too many beginner writers fall in love with their words, all their words. I get it, it is miraculous when you look at something you have done and there it is on the page and it’s not bad, not bad at all. But if there’s too much stuff in there, too much sludge and gunk, you don’t want to carry those words around just because they came from your hand.
One of the things I did a lot as a marketing executive was to take some writing, often from a CEO or founder, and clean it up. I worked in tech and most of these founders were coders, not writers. But they’d give it a go and then hand it to me to tighten it up.
Typically it involved getting rid of business-speak and jargon and any fluff they had used, typically unconsciously, in an attempt to woo investors or mollify them. I enjoyed doing this kind of thing though it really was not in my job description. Turning poor writing into direct writing is very satisfying.
And we all have to see editing that way when we are chopping our own words. You’re punching things up, hitting the rhythm and moving things along. Sometimes some good writing gets tossed.
It’s ok, those words might find their place somewhere else, or not. Lighten the load. You don’t need to be dragging that big roly bag around with everything and the kitchen sink in it and neither do your readers.
When you receive this it will be Christmas and if you celebrate, I hope the focus is on the real things, not the stuff.
Next week I’m going to write about the side hustle mythology that seems to have infected writing, which is not a great way to get rich, regardless of what you have read!
Until then, enjoy the holidays, and keep writing.
Martin
1121 words
~ I write The Grasshopper, a letter for creatives, The Witness Chronicles, a weekly digest of three of my articles on politics and climate, and The Remarkable, a recovery letter, about my addiction and reentry experience. All are weekly and free with a paid option to share your support. Please check them out.
If you want to show support but don’t want to commit to a subscription, you can always buy me a coffee!
Believe me, it makes my day. M