What Is Writing Supposed to Feel Like?

This is a stupid question that preoccupies me utterly. Like so many of my odder preoccupations — and I apologize for going to this well yet again — it probably has some of its origins in my youthful fundamentalism, and partly in my basic cognitive equipment, which is already a little fundamentalist-like in its tropism toward rules, principles, basics. I want to be sure what the right way is, and I want to be sure that I’m suffering enough.

I decided pretty early in life that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. I was then confronted with a lot of lore — picked up from conversations with other people, from pop culture, and most of all from whatever books about writing I could find at the Alma Public Library or at mall-outlet Bargain Books stores. (Do the latter still exist? Wonderful places. I learned who William Gaddis was at one of them; it then only took me twenty-five years or so to get around to reading him.) Eventually I graduated to the Calvin College library and the old, massive Barnes and Noble on 28th Street, in the glorious late flowering of physical media and the various temples to it. All the books I found either made writing sound low-effort and routine (“pick your market”; “follow this template”) — a shit you take on a schedule — or completely impossible. Obviously, since the first set of people weren’t interesting, I listened to the second set of people. Annie Dillard compares writing to, say, a moth being burned to death slowly, for God. John Gardner talks about doing a twenty-hour writing marathon while in the hospital recovering from colon cancer. Jonathan Franzen wrote most of a novel, liked one scene, junked the rest of the novel, and wrote The Corrections around that one scene. There’s that damn story everybody likes to tell about either Flaubert or Voltaire spending all morning putting in a comma and then the afternoon taking it out.¹ And here’s how William Gaddis describes novel-writing:

Sixteen years like living with a God damned invalid sixteen years every time you come in sitting there waiting just like you left him wave his stick at you, plump up his pillow cut a paragraph add a sentence hold his God damned hand little warm milk add a comma slip out for some air pack of cigarettes come back in right where you left him, eyes follow you around the room wave his God damned stick figure out what the hell he wants, plump the God damned pillow change bandage read aloud move a clause around wipe his chin new paragraph God damned eyes follow you out stay a week, stay a month whole God damned year think about something else, God damned friends asking how he’s coming along all expect him out any day don’t want bad news no news rather hear lies, big smile out any day now, walk down the street God damned sunshine begin to think maybe you’ll meet him maybe cleared things up got out by himself come back open the God damned door right there where you left him …

And after all that effort, Gaddis’s novels weren’t even supposed to be that good — at least if you listened to Gardner and to Franzen! (If you listened to Gaddis, it was rather every other novelist in the world who sucked.)²