Writing on Writing: Permission Slip
Friday, July 18th, 2008
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.