This Writing Thing

I had this problem — work or starve. So I thought I’d combine the two and decided to become a writer. (Robert Bloch)

Hello there, dear old and new subscribers! I hope you’re all healthy and in high spirits. We’re having our first heatwave🤯 of the year in Northern Europe, after quite a few cold spells🥶 which almost killed me. (No, I’m just being melodramatic.) Here’s some musings on the business of writing to cool us down. I’d like you very much to tell me all about your own experiences so please, comment, reply, let’s exchange thoughts.

Writing can be an adventure, if adventure, to you as is to me, means opening a .doc file, or taking a sheet of paper, and pouring your thoughts on it, the same thoughts that looked so clearly etched and crystalline in your mind but, once out of their natural environment, refuse to be molded into beautifully structured sentences. Or, at least, sentences that make sense. Or even poorly thrown together sentences, for the love of God, just give me something!

OK, let me rephrase my premise – writing is a misadventure. Sure, you embark on it bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. You think you got this. How hard can it be? If writing were that difficult, there wouldn’t be so many books published on Earth, right? But a quote attributed to Thomas Mann infamously says that a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

This means that: a) some of those books are authored by insouciant scribblers, then skillfully revised by their long-suffering editors; b) Thomas Mann was making excuses to his publisher; c) I am a writer. Nevertheless, after I pat myself on the shoulder, my disquiet still stands. What if my prose is purple? What if my style is schmaltzy and annoying? What if my knowledge of written English is much worse than I think, what if I make my forgiving readers grope in a treacly darkness, and they feel like they’re wasting their one wild and precious life?¹

A Lady Writing, Johannes Vermeer, 1665-6, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Look at the fabulous outfit, the opulent yet tasteful setting, and the poise of this lovely young woman

And, style issues aside, what if my ideas are not only stupid, but alienating? What if I write the most idiotic piece of crap ever? I’m being melodramatic again (and a tiny bit self-aggrandising), but it’s something I’ve been thinking about, since I started serialising – or, more accurately, making it up as I go along – Operation White Birch on Substack. I decided that this eponymous operation will consist in “sell(ing) communism as a product” (brilliant, now I’m even quoting myself🙄).

How am I ever going to develop this idea in a plausible way? I said that I want to write this silly story as an exercise, in order to train myself to think, build, and work like a real writer does. But as silly as I’d like it to be, I owe my readers an entertaining story that holds itself together, that won’t make them feel cheated, and that may lead them to better books on the same topics.

Nor do I want to take cheap shots at an ideology which, for many of my formative years has been important and defining to me.

As the dear friends who honour me with their affection since I was a teenager, and the dear new Russian friends I made it on here already know, in my youth I was a communist. I had this maximalistic, idealistic streak, coupled to a dualistic world view that made me sure I was definitely on the right side of History.

My love for Russia and its wondrous language, however, didn’t have nothing to do with it. I used to think that communism was the least interesting thing about the Country and its people. I’d have loved them even if they’d been still czarists. Heck, I still love them to bits now, although I often find them frustrating, exasperating, and in dire need of a good licking.

As it happens, I’ve even been a Soviet Pioneer. In 1982, my teacher of Russian told me that every year, the Youth section of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union used to invite 10 Italian kids under 16 to spend 4 weeks in one of their Pioneer camps during the Summer. I might tell this story on here someday. Watch this space.🙃

What did I find alluring in Communism? I was a weird girl (actually, I thought I was perfectly normal and that the others were the weird ones but, apparently, thousands of people trump one, so there we go) who had just become an atheist, and I needed a new ideal in my life. I didn’t want to wait to shuffle off my mortal coil to end up in the just and fair Kingdom of God, and the pace of political reforms in Italy and in other democracies was too slow for my impatient self. As a Russian proverb goes, do Boga vysoko – do czarya daleko, Heaven is high and the czar far away, and I thought revolution was the only answer, where the end justifies its violent means.

Wasn’t I wrong! I had to become a mother in order to understand that violence is never the answer. (Unless the question is: what is not an answer?) Making a human being is hard work and a work in progress, and you commit all of your love and most of your life to this endeavour, how can someone, who is aware of this, kill or cause harm to another human being?

Therefore, if my idea of Heaven requires other people to go through Hell, then it’s not Heaven.

And that’s why I’ve got my work cut out for me in the next months. Wish me luck and clarity of mind, I’m going to need them, and I hope you’ll keep on staying with me.

Let’s round it up with a poem by Marge Piercy, that I find both sobering and encouraging. Enjoy the reading:

For the young who want to

Talent is what they say

you have after the novel

is published and favorably

reviewed. Beforehand what

you have is a tedious

delusion, a hobby like knitting.

Work is what you have done

after the play is produced

and the audience claps.

Before that friends keep asking

when you are planning to go

out and get a job.

Genius is what they know you

had after the third volume

of remarkable poems. Earlier

they accuse you of withdrawing,

ask why you don’t have a baby,

call you a bum.

The reason people want M.F.A.’s,

take workshops with fancy names

when all you can really

learn is a few techniques,

typing instructions and somebody

else’s mannerisms

is that every artist lacks

a license to hang on the wall

like your optician, your vet

proving you may be a clumsy sadist

whose fillings fall into the stew

but you’re certified a dentist.

The real writer is one

who really writes. Talent

is an invention like phlogiston²

after the fact of fire.

Work is its own cure. You have to

like it better than being loved.

And let’s end in style with this brilliant cartoon by Tom Gauld:

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My favourite Tom Gauld’s cultural cartoon for Books – The Guardian

1. A quote from Mary Oliver’s poem The Summer Day, a meditation on life and, why not, also on writing and making art.

2. The phlogiston theory, a superseded scientific theory, postulated the existence of a fire-like element dubbed phlogiston contained within combustible bodies and released during combustion (more on Wikipedia).

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