Thoughts from a Thinking Girl

Writers are not known for their social skills. Even those who write great dialogue do so from the privacy of their own writing space, with endless re-writes and reading it back out loud to determine when they have finally captured something like “real” conversation. You can write a to-do list, or even a family Christmas letter, in the presence of others – maybe even only in the presence of others. But by the time you write something deeper, like New Year’s resolutions, a job application, a college essay or even a diary entry, you might need to be alone.

Writers must separate themselves from the crowd, opt out of the usual human fray, so they can write things that seem like they actually could, would, or did happen. This forced isolation is a yeasty environment for things springing to life on the page. Off the page, it takes a toll on the writer’s own human interconnectedness.

Which comes first, you might ask? The alienation or the writing? Do the estranged, deep-thinking people self-select into writers (or painters? sculptors? composers? photographers?)? Or does creativity and its requisite perfectionistic revising of the craft eventually separate out the artistic wheat from the unimaginative chaff?

We don’t know. But we know the writer’s temperament. Even the most polished wordsmith, writers whose work finds an agent, a publisher and an audience, often have an exterior that is more polished and successful than their inner experience – well-defined characters, brisk plot lines and poignant poetic reverie conceal the isolation, alienation, self-doubt and conviction that no one could be interested in what they have to say. Writers are more comfortable with words than the people who speak them; prefer what happens on the page to what is happening in their own living room.

Get a group of writers together, and you’re likely to find anxious small talk, uncomfortable silences, and a wild mismatch between what one person says and the listener’s response. The writer who pitches the first line is concerned with word choice, tone, the possibility of another way of saying something; the writer who listens is so preoccupied that they lose the arc of what the first writer said long before it becomes obvious that it is now clearly their turn to speak. But what did the first person say? They didn’t hear it, were lost, instead, considering which aspect of their public persona to portray, whether the piece that they’ve prepared needs one last edit, if there’s any other word or phrase that would convey it ever more closely to what they intended, with discerning the overall mood, age, intelligence, reading/writing background of the group to determine which of several pre-selected poems or short story selections they will risk reading tonight.

“What are you working on these days?” I asked a writer I was equally afraid would or would not remember me. He’s a talented poet, and delivers spoken pieces with perfect enunciation and a captivating tone, smooth as a kid-skin glove. He’s attended readings for years; I’ve just begun. “I’m writing short stories these days. But they’re too long to read. I brought some poems tonight.”

“Are you reading tonight?” he lobbed back. “You write reality. Creative nonfiction pieces, right? Yeah, I can’t ever get the hang of that. I don’t even try any more.” I was floored. By the time my brain processed the excitement and surprise that he did remember me, I heard what he said. Then doubted I heard him correctly, as I’d just spent my half of the interaction in my own head. Since I frequently mistake being understood for being loved, I also spent a few nanoseconds falling in love before I re-oriented myself, returned to the interaction.

He told me has never been able to master the first person; can’t find a way to write reality. I told him I’ve never mastered the short story or the novel – and that I’ve finally come to understand why. I have no characters alive in my head. No dialogues and dreams that don’t belong to me.

“Oh,” his smooth voice said with the kind of artistic envy one has for all other creative beings who you assume have an easier life than you. “It must be so quiet in your head.”

“Oh no,” I replied, laughing. It’s noisy as all hell in there! It’s just all me.”

His eyes widened as he understood. He is subject to the endless chatter of voices and identities and the wishes and actions of a whole slew of beings he is in part responsible for, but also simply hosting, like a good B&B proprietor. He gives them shelter, some home-baked scones and boutique jam, and is an avid, skilled, curious and interested listener to the stories his guests have to tell. His fiction, his poetry, reflects reality in a way that real life sometimes obscures.

I am subject to the endless chatter of my own voice, my own memories, spun and re-spun however many times I can, events and incidents pulled apart, re-sewn together, only to be pulled apart again. I host only what I think of as real people in my head, but of course, since I’ve dissected them and frozen them in time, locking them in the inaccuracies of how I need to see them, need to remember them, they are as fictionalized as if they held another name and hailed from a distant planet. Even the “I” in my head is a creation, the result or goal, perhaps, of digging within the what-has-happened to “me.”

A blessing on our heads, we the poor writers. We who spend hours and hours in a world of one, a world hijacked by the realities and unrealities we cannot escape, a world filled with noise and endless chatter. We who relentlessly sort and slog through memories and wishes and fantasies that either tell part of our own story or spring from someplace that is still us, and that, in truth, we can no longer distinguish that which is true from that which we create. We create truth, and truth creates us.

And just like that, we hit on something that might be worth trying to write. We exit, again, abruptly, without much social grace, from an interaction, from this interaction, return to the isolation we crave and curse.