Responding to Joy Williams
The first version of this month’s newsletter had a pretty pretentious thesis: “To create is to join with a force beyond the mundane, be it internal or external. To write fiction is to shape that force into a recognizable form and to pour love into a story and characters.” I wrote the thesis with the intention of writing a sweeping essay on why I consider fiction writing a spiritual practice, and so I decided to read some other writers’ thoughts on the matter. The first piece I found had an intriguing title: “Uncanny the Singing that Comes from Certain Husks,” by Joy Williams.
When I finished reading it, I scrapped the original outline for this month and wrote a new one, because all I wanted to do was respond to her essay. It’s gorgeous, lyrical, and wrong. To Williams, writing is intense, inexplicable, mystical, and miserable. I want to confirm my belief that writing can be explained, doesn’t have to be miserable, and is completely of this world.
This might contradict my original thesis; I talked about joining with a force, which sounds mystical enough. But my emphasis is on writing’s earthiness, its muddy reality. The clay between your toes. Writing is not extraordinary, and in its mundanity lies its spirituality.
The first thing that struck me about this essay was its beauty. Even before I understood what she was saying, I was swimming in the language. But almost immediately, Williams began to write things that demanded a response. In the first paragraph, she says, “Who cares if the writer is not whole? Of course the writer is not whole, or even particularly well. There’s something unwholesome and self-destructive about the entire writing process.” This is a part of her thesis, that to write is to invite misery, because writing is a miserable act.
I once believed that in order to be meaningful, writing had to hurt. I loved the line about sitting in front of a typewriter and bleeding. So I gave my writing all I could, and a lot I couldn’t afford, besides. The piece that I long considered the best thing I had ever or would ever write was an essay describing the worst year of my life. When I read it now, I still think it is a good piece of writing. But I see something lacking in it, too. I think a writer intent on being miserable is fundamentally self-absorbed. For a long time, when I wrote, I could not see anything beyond myself.
In 2020, I began writing a series of essays based on Brideshead Revisited. It was then that I realized that writing did not have to drain life from me. As I thought about Charles and Sebastian and Julia, these characters I loved, I found myself writing more than I ever had. It was hard sometimes, yes. But the more I looked outside of my own life for inspiration, the more revived I felt. After three years of intense illness, I was finally coming alive.
Williams writes: “The writer is never nourished by his own work, it is never satisfying to him.” This makes me sad for her. Why write if it doesn’t nourish you? I think that she sees something beyond the human in writing, a force that compels. I see something beyond the human in writing, too, and indeed, I am compelled to write. But I am compelled precisely because writing nourishes me. It satisfies me.
It is the most ordinary thing, to string together words into sentences and sentences into stories. We’ve been doing it for thousands of years. I think that the harm of an essay like Williams’s is that it promotes a sort of cult around writing, and it suggests that it takes a special kind of person to do it. I couldn’t disagree more. Not everyone wants to write, and that’s fine. But everyone can. She declares that “good writing never soothes or comforts.” She would have the writer be a swordsmith, forging weapons from words.
Close to the end of her essay, Williams says something that strikes me as disingenuous: “Writing has never done anyone or anything any good at all, as far as I can tell.” I do not believe that she believes this. The essay, beautiful and winding, claims that writing is mystical and miserable, but I don’t think anyone could pen that essay who didn’t really love writing. And I don’t think you can love writing without believing that it is good.
I return to my original idea, that writing is ordinary and thus divine. I sit and write every day of my life not because I want to change the world or cut people to the bone, but because it as an activity that I greatly enjoy. I want people to read what I write, but not because I think I am a purveyor of truth, nor because I think I’m serving a greater power and delivering its message. I want people to read what I write because I love my own words and I want others to love them too. To Joy Williams, this might make me something less than a real writer. But I want writing to be available to everyone, and when she covers it in a veil of mysticism, I think she bars people from the practice.
When I set out to write this newsletter, I said I wanted to find the divinity in mundanity. I don’t think anything exemplifies this better than writing. I say to Joy Williams: writing is a lovely, small thing that we return to because we want to. I am not bleeding as I write this. I am not pouring out my soul, I am not retching. I am sitting in the kitchen as my friends make focaccia, and it smells like olive oil. I am sipping hot apple cider, spiced and warming. I am wearing my favorite sweatshirt and my feet are cold because it is the first day of November. And I am writing, and it is ordinary, and it is divine.
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