Murray, Before Writing

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Before Writing: Remember What Makes Writing Easy

Donald M. Murray
University of New Hampshire

Donald Murray, Professor Emeritus of English, is a novelist, a poet, and a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. He is best known among English teachers as a lecturer and writer of textbooks on writing and the teaching of writing. His latest books on writing are Shoptalk, Learning to Write with Writers and The Craft of Revision.

Before I start a new book project I force myself to write down the attitudes and disciplines that have made the writing easy in the past.

Yes, easy. Writers like to whine and moan about the struggle, the pain, the suffering of writing but they came to writing because it was easier for them than math, more exciting than chemistry, more fun than the playground. Writers lead a marvelous double life, once in actuality, afterwards in the truer reality of story.

Writers celebrate life by recording their world and then shaping memory into meaning. This telling of story, first to the self, later to others, is as natural to writers as breathing; it is the way writers live their lives. But they tell the world writing is hard. Harder than digging a ditch, driving a truck, selling insurance, caring for an eight-month-old boy with a three-year-old brother, teaching teen-agers to write a subject-verb-object sentence? No way.

I fall into the trap myself. No pity is so satisfying as self-pity. and I have been trained to correct error and avoid failure by teachers, editors, parents, and the clergy--I was born in sin as a Calvinist Scot--but we learn to write well if we construct a writing habit based on ease, pleasure, confidence, and success. What worked well in the past is what will make the writing go well the next time around.

Of course some of us zoom from despair to fantasy, remembering a time that never was. My fantasy is that I can write two books at the same time--on top of my weekly newspaper column, my twice a month poems for the poetry club, occasional articles, the proposals for future books and the revisions, instructor's manuals, page proofs, indexes that trail after a "completed" book manuscript.

I chart my course for a new book by writing a memo to myself, reminding myself of what attitudes and habits made the writing go well the last time around. I am still a student of writing at seventy, but I attend a one-room schoolhouse and am responsible for my own curriculum.

1. To write well I need to take advantage of my difference.

Until Sandra Cisneros spoke to me from the pages of American Voices--Best Short Fiction by Contemporary Authors, selected by Sally Arteseros, [Hyperion, 1992] two years ago, I was ashamed of my "unmanly" sensitivity to life. On the football field, in the paratroops, in college and the City Room, I learned to hide my true feelings, embarrassed by how much I was the watcher, how much the critic of my own living, how often I saw events in a way that set me apart from family and colleagues. My strangeness would be revealed in print--the page does reveal--but I was always uncomfortable with this self-exposure. Then I read Cisneros: "Imagine yourself at your kitchen table, in your pajamas. Imagine one person you'd allow to see you that way, and write in the voice you'd use to that friend. Write about what makes you different."

I accepted, at the age of 68, the obvious. It was my difference that brought me publication. and when I accepted and revealed my individual difference, the more universal I became: readers told me I articulated their silent thoughts and feelings.

2. To write well I need to follow my obsessions.

I work best when I have a psychological need to explore the subject. Bharati Mukherjee says, "When my writing is going well, I know that I'm writing out of my personal obsessions." I suspect that most writers have a few obsessions they must investigate with language. Mine are my childhood, my war, my fear of death (obviously related to a sickly childhood, an "if I die before I wake" religion, and infantry warfare), and the writing act (I started collecting the writers' quotes that appear in my work when I was in the ninth grade). If the book does not tap into some deep running underground river in my being, I should give it up.

3. To write well I need to experience surprise.

My writing is motivated by the discoveries I make on the page: I write what I do not expect to write. I write best when I write against intent, not by plan, but by accident. John Fowles says, "Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan--that is the rule." I start with a territory to explore and a line, a fragment of language that contains a tension that may release a book: "I had an ordinary war," "after my war I fear Spring," "teachers are urged to write but not told how to develop their workshop fragments." That was the starting place of this book--Write to Teach Writing--I am beginning to write for Heinemann. Already, the first test drafts of the opening have contradicted what I believed I would write--a good sign.

4. To write well I need to write fast.

Fluency is the product of velocity. I have to get up to speed to write as you have to get up to speed to make a bicycle balance. In school we are often taught to write carefully, slowly, thoughtfully but most writers have to write fast so that they will write what they do not expect. Writers have to give up control of the text, to encourage it to run ahead of them, following its own instincts.

Writing with velocity also produces an adequate amount of text to surprise. School encourages paragraphs; writers need pages--many pages--for the text to build a flood of language that may flow toward meaning.

5. To write well I need to achieve instructive failures.

Fast writing also allows the writer to outrun the censor that exists within us all, and it causes the accidents of meaning and language that lead writers where we do not expect to go in the way failed experiments instruct scientists. If I do not fail in interesting and instructive ways, I will not continue the book.

Of course, I have little trouble failing; I have a great deal of trouble accepting and taking advantage of failure.

6. To write well I need to work within the draft.

A great danger--and one of the reasons my third novel has not yet been completed--is that I set literary standards for the novel I cannot possibly meet. I remember what teachers, editors, other writers have said and even try to achieve the standards of people I do not like or respect. I set standards that are impossibly high or appropriate for someone else or some other writing project. I must remember John Jerome, "Perfect is the enemy of good," and William Stafford, "I can imagine a person beginning to feel that he's not able to write up to that standard he imagines the world has set for him. But to me that's surrealistic. The only standard I can rationally have is the standard I'm meeting right now . . . you should be more willing to forgive yourself. It really doesn't make any difference if you are good or bad today. The assessment of the product is something that happens after you've done it."

Stafford continued, "I believe that the so-called 'writing block' is a product of some kind of disproportion between your standards and your performance . . . one should lower his standards until there is no felt threshold to go over in writing. It's easy to write. You just shouldn't have standards that inhibit you from writing."

In short, I want to be loved and so look off the page when I know I should work within the page, allowing this page to tell me how to write this draft. Eudora Welty reminds me, "The writer himself studies intensely how to do it while he is in the thick of doing it; then when the particular novel or story is done, he is likely to forget how; he does well to. Each work is new. Mercifully, the question of how abides less in the abstract, and less in the past, than in the specific, in the work at hand . . . ."

7. To write well I need to maintain faith in the draft.

At least twice in the writing of this book, about one-third and two-thirds of the way through, and perhaps more often, I will doubt the book or my ability to write it. I must then remember that even the fine novelist Alice McDermott admitted: "The hardest thing I had to do even to become a writer was believing that I had anything to say that people would want to read."

To conquer despair I must remember it is natural and force myself to keep writing, remembering that this forced fluency will produce pages that will be as good as the ones written before or after despair. I must believe--against all reason--that my story has not been told before, that I have a special authority to tell my story.

8. To write well I need to establish a daily deadline.

Like most writers, I write only on deadline so I establish my own deadlines. My column is delivered Monday morning a week ahead of time so there is opportunity for careful editing and revision. Books have deadlines a year or months away but I break each project down into daily, achievable deadlines: 300 words a writing day, 500, 1,000 or even 1,500 on this book I am starting. I may also establish deadlines by task: lead, middle, end, revise, edit. Deadlines by time--an hour at my desk, half-an-hour, two hours--do not work for me. I waste it. I need a product measure to keep me forging ahead.

9. To write well I need to practice a writing habit.

Beside my computer is the plastic covered reminder:

NULLA DIES SINE LINEA

Write first each day

Complete one writing task every morning

Know tomorrow's task today

On the other side I have counsel from fellow writers:

Every morning between 9 and 12 I go to my room and sit before a piece of paper. Many times I just sit for three hours with no ideas coming to me. But I know one thing: If an idea does come between 9 and 12, I am there ready for it. (Flannery O'Connor)
If I don't sit down practically immediately after breakfast, I won't sit down all day. (Graham Greene)
To be a writer is to sit down at one's desk in the chill portion of every day, and to write. (John Hersey)
Two simple rules: A) You don't have to write. B) You can't do anything else. (Raymond Chandler)
The writing generates the writing. (E. L. Doctorow)
There is no one right way. Each of us finds a way that works for him. But there is a wrong way. The wrong way is to finish your writing day with no more words on paper than when you began. Writers write. (Robert B. Parker)
A day in which I don't write leaves a taste of ashes. (Simone de Beauvoir)
If you keep working, inspiration comes. (Alexander Calder)
To write you have to set up a routine, to promise yourself that you will write. Just state in a loud voice that you will write so many pages a day, or write for so many hours a day. Keep the number of pages or hours within reason, and don't be upset if a day slips by. Start again, pick up the routine. Don't look for results. Just write, easily, quietly. (Janwillem van de Wetering)
Perfect is the enemy of good. (John Jerome)
If you want to take a year off to write a book, you have to take that year, or the year will take you by the hair and pull you toward the grave . . . . You can take your choice. You can keep a tidy house, and when St. Peter asks you what you did with your life, you can say, I kept a tidy house, I made my own cheese balls. (Annie Dillard)
The art of the novel is getting the whole thing written. (Leonard Gardner)
I believe that the so-called "writing block" is a product of some kind of disproportion between your standards and your performance ...one should lower his standards until there is no felt threshold to go over in writing. It's easy to write. You just shouldn't have standards that inhibit you from writing . . . . I can imagine a person beginning to feel he's not able to write up to that standard he imagines the world has set for him. But to me that's surrealistic. The only standard I can rationally have is the standard I'm meeting right now...You should be more willing to forgive yourself. It doesn't make any difference if you are good or bad today. The assessment of the product is something that happens after you've d one it. (William Stafford)
Living's hard. It's writing that's easy. (E. Annie Proulx)

I have to force myself to write first. I get up at 5:30 in the morning, but the world still intrudes. There is a letter to answer, a recommendation to send off, a manuscript to read, a computer problem to solve, a family responsibility. But the writing, if you are to write, must come first.

I also need to complete one task a morning so that I build on accomplishment, day after day, do not feel a daily inadequacy that spins me into hopelessness and paralysis.

I need to know the next day's writing task since the most important writing is done away from the desk when I think about the next day's writing without being aware I'm thinking about it, mutter to myself, make daybook notes, discuss it with a writing colleague. That non-writing writing is what ripens the possibilities so that I can do each morning what Virginia Woolf proposed for herself when she said, "I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall."

10. To write well I need listeners.

I need colleagues who work in their own lonely rooms and who listen to my satisfactions and my grumps, my problems and my solutions, as a book evolves. Chip, Don, Elizabeth, Brock and sometimes others, give me more than therapy. They give me back my own advice to them when I play their listener. We teach each other what we already know, and I often find myself solving the problem I am describing and which I could not solve until I picked up the phone.

11. To write well I need readers.

Few readers. Very few readers. During the first drafts only one--Chip Scanlan because he makes me want to write after he has read an early, not yet ready-for-the-world draft. Then Minnie Mae, my wifely editor, who reads all my final drafts before they leave the house. and there are the others for whom I write-- Don, Elizabeth, Brock, Lisa, Tom and others--whom I see in my mind's eye as I write and with whom I silently talk as I compose. And I am blessed with fine editors such as Laurie Runion, who has been an editorial collaborator for many of my books.

But I remind myself to be careful to whom I show my work. Many readers--and this certainly includes editors and teachers--have a rigid formula for each subject and each genre. If the writer does not fit the formula--and the best writers never do--they are surprised, uncomfortable, disappointed and critical. They do not have the ability to evaluate work on its own terms. I have abandoned poems, articles, books because of the well-intentioned but destructive advice of friends with whom I have shared an early draft. For this first draft, I will be my own reader.

Remember Eudora Welty. What has worked in the past may not work in the present. My way of working is not a model for anyone else; it may not even be a model for me. As Graham Greene said, "Isn't disloyalty as much the writer's virtue as loyalty is the soldier's?" I must not be loyal to tradition, to what has worked for others, to what I have been taught or learned, to my own plans or expectations. I must follow the draft and, if I am fortunate, it will carry me beyond my imaginings.