Where Writing Comes From

Writing Life

Image of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from the cover of Reveries of a Solitary Walker

How do you write? 

I wanted to propose a schematic — since this is a pretty fundamental topic and I’ve almost never, as far as I can think of, seen it addressed. 

The idea is that almost all writing comes from either….

a) the imagination 

b) memory 

c) research 

….that these are actually are very different centers of focus, and produce very different types of writing, but that, strangely, in the ways we categorize writing, we tend not really to think about where, in a person, the writing is coming from. 

Before getting to these, I wanted to think through a few other, rarer types of writing. 

There’s writing by reaction. This is mostly how people speak and it has migrated over into the quick-twitch writing of the internet. I don’t necessarily mean that pejoratively. There’s something very natural and honest about writing that reflects the way people actually react to things. Much of the writing on this platform, for instance — the hot takes, virtually all of the notes — are writing as reaction. A great deal of Beat-style poetry is reactive: ‘first thought best thought,’ ‘write it down exactly as you think it,’ are some of the mantras. When I was writing a lot of plays, I would usually try to start with something that was vaguely irritating me and then build a play around that — I thought that that suited the highly social, highly reactive inner truth of theater. (I suspect that a lot of Bob Dylan songs are written that way, incidentally.) But the issue with writing by reaction is that it loses its sting the deeper you get into a complex piece of writing; it’s like an electric shock that gradually dissipates its charge. The way people react to things tends to be highly mediated by their social positions. Lose that social embeddedness — which is a major part of what serious writing is — and you tend to lose some of your facile reactivity. 

There’s writing by projection. The best, purest soul I knew in college had this idea of a writing project where he would think about the three people he liked the least in school and try to write from inside their heads — it was writing doubling as a form of empathy or as redemption. I liked that idea a great deal in principle — I think it can work; the novel Stoner, for instance, was basically written that way — but have found it very difficult to do in practice. It’s somehow almost impossible to really inhabit the mental architecture of some other person you know, even somebody you know very well. 

There’s writing by inspiration. This is of course the most controversial one, the one that writers get the shyest (or most vainglorious) about. Often, inspiration is just a fancy way of describing a vivid imagination. But there is a type of inspiration that definitely seems to exist, which is close to channeling, where some entity or other seizes a person’s imagination and they write in a voice that isn’t exactly theirs. A great deal of occult work is supposed to be channeling — The Seth Materials, Law of Attraction, etc — but it shows up, more often than one might think, in ‘mainstream’ writing as well. My understanding is that Tolstoy, in writing War and Peace, believed that he was being bequeathed an entire era. It’s hard to comprehend something like Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, a 600-page novel written in 24 days, without recourse to some idea like ‘channeling.’ 

Then there’s writing by research, which is the most common form of published writing. Journalism is writing by research. Term papers, academic papers, etc, are writing by research. The tendency in all of these forms is to flatten out voice, for voice to not get in the way of material. Whenever I write a heavily-researched piece, I always have this odd fantasy that I’m like a tour guide trying to keep up the pace of a flagging group as I move them from one sight to another. In longer, more creative writing, research tends to be a liability. Historical fiction is a notoriously problematic genre in large part because of the amount of research required to sustain it — writers have a way of disappearing into their research, like an actor falling overly in love with their costume. At the moment I’m working on a project that’s writing-by-research (I usually write with a whole bunch of internet tabs open in front of me) and it’s a strange feeling, of my voice getting sort of subsumed by other voices, of a whole chorus of different perspectives finding their way into the work, but there is also a special charge about it. The thing about research is that it’s a process of discovery — it really is immensely fun for the person doing the researching — and the idea can be to use that adrenaline of discovery to propel the work. 

Then there’s writing by memory. Maybe the most salient development in the last century or two of writing is the shift of an understanding of literature as being based in imagination or inspiration (or some sort of collective unconscious) into an understanding of literature as being based entirely in personal experience and memory. The clearest way to trace this shift, actually, may be in the 19th century development of the idea that Shakespeare’s plays could only have been written by somebody whose biography incorporated that of Shakespeare’s leading characters — a dramatic turn from Ben Jonson’s depiction of Shakespeare as writing ‘without blotting a line,’ as if pulling the words from the air, to Mark Twain’s insistence that a writer must ‘write what they know.’ Virtually any contemporary novel that I read now (with ‘auto-fiction’ just putting a name on an already-advanced trend) is pretty much a glorified memoir — a personal experience repackaged in a way to have a slightly more satisfying structure. And this was the approach to writing that, growing up, I learned to take for granted — the writer as a kind of spy in their own life, writing down every possible conversation, every possible thought, Rumplestilskinishly spinning it all into marketable form (and, if you were a really virtuous person, changing the identifying details). But I eventually found there to be a certain poverty in working this way. For one thing, writers had a tendency to run out of material; for another, they got tired of talking about themselves; for another, the memories tended to be so strong that they crowded out the invented incidents that were necessary to sustain a story. For writers of memoir, people like Tobias Wolff and Mary Karr, writing from memory turned out actually to be an extraordinarily complicated craft — since doing it right involved dredging up context, remembering all the things that one had forgotten, and then trying, like in some sort of impossible jigsaw puzzle, to fit together all the broken pieces of a vanished world. The results could be stunning, but they were also a bit solipsistic, neurotic, and involved an uncomfortable degree of betrayal of virtually everyone one was ever close to. 

And, finally, and hardest to describe, there’s writing by imagination. I don’t exactly know where this comes from in people. There are some blessed people who seem to just have very active imaginations, who never lost a certain childhood-y ability to daydream, but I suspect that for most writers imagination is a muscle that has to be developed — and developed in a very counter-intuitive and sort of anti-social way, since we’re not in a storytelling culture. That’s what the “10,000 hours” or “sustained solitary effort” is largely about — staring at the blank screen, without any social inputs, and forcing oneself to find some well of expression that goes deeper than reactivity or even memory. It’s very mysterious what it is or where it comes from or how far it can extend (the future history of art may well hinge on the degree to which AI programs can replicate it, by using the very-different method of pooling together so many different data points as to sort of create a collective unconscious), but what you start to notice in reading a lot, or in writing a lot, is that a person has an imagination that’s as distinctively theirs as their set of fingerprints is theirs but that may have only a passing resemblance to their everyday, social personality. 

It is possible of course to create amalgams between the different types of writing, but something I’ve noticed is that, in any project, one tends to predominate over the others: a memory, for instance, might take over and then shape everything else; and it can be very difficult to get these centers of focus to cooperate. In terms of where we are as a society, reaction, research, and memory have virtually driven all other forms of writing from the field: notice how little input the poem, the fairy tale, the epic, the vision, the prophecy, the allegory (all forms with a highly respectable pedigree) have in our lives.

What I would like to suggest is that it’s possible to have a richer and broader literature than we have now, in part by being aware that our current creativity is coming from some fairly limited parts of ourselves, that we do have more centers of expression (imagination, above all) than we maybe realize, and that by just slightly rewiring ourselves we can say far more than we believe ourselves capable of. 

Sam Kahn writes Castalia.