Sooner or later, it happens: you’ve read a lot, or listened to hours upon hours of music, or seen enough paintings to fill the MoMA twice over, and a thought comes to you: I could do this. That spark, when it comes, will be something different for each person; it’s that one thing that lets you know not only that you want to do this, but that it’s alright to give it a whirl.
Salman Rushdie wrote something years back that sums it up wonderfully. In an essay on Gunter Grass, he says:
There are books that open doors for their readers, doors in the head, doors whose existence they had not previously suspected. And then there are readers who dream of becoming writers; they are searching for the strangest door of all, scheming up ways to travel through the page, to end up inside and also behind the writing, to lurk between the lines; while other readers, in their turn, pick up books and begin to dream. For these Alices, these would-be migrants from the World to the Book, there are (if they are lucky) books which give them permission to travel, so to speak, permission to become the sort of writers they have it in themselves to be. A book is a kind of passport. And my passports, the works that gave me the permits I needed, included The Film Sense by Sergei Eisenstein, the Crow poems of Ted Hughes, Borges’s Fictions, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros—and, that summer of 1967, The Tin Drum.
So if you’re thinking about picking up the pen, or sitting down to a typewriter or computer, take some time to think over the “why” of it. There’s plenty of writing that’s been done on writing (think of this as one more drop in a bucket that’s already full to overflowing), but most of it focuses on the how, neglecting why we do what we do, and–just as importantly, I think–why we keep doing it, through rejection, self-doubt, not knowing if anyone’s reading it besides you, whether it’s good enough or you’re good enough to bother. Know that you don’t have to have anyone’s say-so. But realize, at the same time, that those flashes of inspiration and the permission they give you to just let loose can be what makes it all worthwhile when you’re in the middle of that other 99%, and sweating buckets.
This week’s assignment: If reading is a passport to writing, what’s stamped in your passport?