Roethke writes, “I learn by going where I have to go,” which is the story of writing—which is also to say the story of life. For the moment, lets stick to writing. There is no book, no instruction manual, and no teacher who can replace the hours of work you will spend at the work. You will learn to write by writing—by going where you have to go. The going is, of course, the writing. The “have to” is the need you do the work—perhaps the need to tell a story, but in the end, the need—compulsion, obsession—to to put words on the page.
You can redirect that need—turn it into a need to teach, a need to organize buttons in a jewelry box by size, color, and the number of holes drilled through their centers, or even the need to make a living. You can track your paychecks, note the yearly fluctuations in tax deductions and insurance payments, allot funds to various savings accounts, investments, and because you are not a pre-reformation Scrooge, charities. You will know where every cent ends up, and although you have plenty, there will always be a deficit—a shoe that pinches your toes together just a bit too snuggly, a pair of jeans that fits but is a shade away from the right color, a partner who looks at you as if you smell a little too much like their childhood doctor’s office.
Which is to say, no matter the wealth of lapis lazuli buttons with three holes bored into what must be the vertices of an isosceles triangle—should the sharp end point down or up when sewn onto the back of a blouse?—you will feel unnameably dissatisfied.
Writing will not solve the problem of dissatisfaction. You will be frustrated in a thousand and one new ways. You will complain about your inconsistent use of semi-colons—complaining to anyone who will listen, but mainly, and with a tone bordering on abusive, to yourself. You will natter on about story shapes, query letters, and the predominance of Latinate words, but your feet will slide into your shoes, into every pair of shoes, with an ease you forget to notice because you are working. And you must work.
Perhaps not. Sublimation—damned Latin—is a powerful force, a whirlpool that can suck you into something like a normal life. Writing is not normal—not the way she does it, or he does it, or you do it. You may have snuck it in, adding unnecessary flourishes to your annual report (your supervisor redlined that entire paragraph), but you never did it because you “liked to write.” You may not like to write. You might rather binge the entire run of Buster Crabbe’s Flash Gordon serials, or sew, or take your dog for interminable walks. Writing may make you fundamentally unhappy, but, to be honest, you are fundamentally and essentially unhappy, so writing was never the problem.
You have to write. You don’t like it, as a date once said to me as an offer of amnesty—red, not white, flag. If you have given into the work, it pursues you the way the bottle chases the alcoholic, or the tulip chases the sun—logotropically. You may choose some attendant activity that grants you the release of completion—all those pick-up basketball games that end when one side score 21 points, poker tournaments, or clean plate after clean plate—but until you learn that completion is a grift as glittering as accolades, you have not learned that writing is where you have to go. The ticket is sewn into the lining of your coat, with any luck you will know when it is time to rip it out and show it to the conductor.
This train is for you and you alone, and you will never arrive anywhere but here. And before you know it, you will be the conductor, the engineer, the porter, and the signalman. The train will shake as it crosses the trestle over what—a ravine, an ocean, a galaxy, just a street in Tokyo?—but the shaking will help settle and steady you on your way. You have already arrived.
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