“Whoever you are, go out
into the evening, leaving your room, of which you know every bit; your house is
the last before the infinite, whoever you are.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke
As I write this, people
throughout the world are sitting alone in rooms. Many who, by law, cannot leave
them for more than a brief reprieve. Some are laying panicked on the floor.
Some are sleeping through the days. Some are enjoying the quiet. Some are sick
or have lost jobs or people—alone in other rooms. Some are trying to write.
And some have made peace with the fact that this is a time to be gentle on
ourselves about whatever we do inside these rooms, and whatever we imagine is
happening outside of them.
Before the
Coronavirus pandemic struck in New York, I had a day job working for a small
publisher a few days a week. Every morning, as I made the two mile trek through
the park to my office, I encountered the same woman walking from the other
direction. Vaguely middle aged and slumped in her posture, though the woman is
older than me, we faintly resemble each other, both petite with dark curly
hair, hers just a little grayer than mine is. I’ve tried to engage with her
many times, to at least say hi, as after two years of passing each other, she
must by now recognize me. But most days she just trudges along, gazing down at
the ground with a sour look on her face, and in all this time we’ve never
spoken. Though I’ve since given up on trying to talk to her, every time I pass
her, I’m still met with a mini existential crisis. Will I be walking this walk
forever, I wonder? Will I become this woman one day? Will my face turn sour
like hers has? Will I evolve into a person who doesn’t notice a stranger’s face
reoccurring in the crowd?
When I was 13 years-old I
befriended a writer. He was the only writer I had ever met. He told me that
when he was 19 an old woman said to him that if you want to be a writer, you
have to write everyday. So he started writing everyday, sitting down around
10pm and going late into the night, drafting letters to people when no one else
was awake, letters, which over time, became essays, essays, which became novels
and so on. It was simple, the way he explained it. No secret strategy or
formula or perfect weather to wait for.
When I was 18 and setting
out to leave my childhood home, there were further instructions. In one of his
famous speeches he had given to many young writers, he described writing as “the talent of
the room,” that no matter how talented a person is, if good hard time isn’t put
into exercising that talent, it will only exist as a sort of gift that remains
unopened. What writing actually requires, he said, more than talent (though
having talent helps), is the simple ability to face hours and days and years
alone in a room. The picturesque has nothing to do with it—the desk by the
window, the vintage typewriter, the scenic view. Waiting until you declutter
the surface will not help you, moving the furniture around, or putting off the
task until you convert the attic into the perfect writing room will not make
you a writer. What it all comes down to is the basic act of sitting down and
doing it, whatever the set up, however little time you have.
I generally agree with my
writer friend’s
point on this, though despite having already spent a good number of years alone
in many rooms, I am certainly still guilty of decluttering and rearranging the
furniture. In fact, I have a ritual of simply having to put away all the
discarded clothes that accumulate on the chair in the corner of my bedroom
before I can sit down to begin writing. Distraction is often as much a part of
my writing day as actual writing is. Life and the internet creeps in for all of
us, obligations, anxiety, self-doubt. Facing a blank page to make something out
of nothing is a harrowing enterprise, but it is the fundamental task of
writing, one that doesn’t change or become any easier, whether you’ve published
30 books or toiled away in obscurity for years on a single sentence.
There are many days when
the page that is faced remains blank. Knowing this and having the resolve to
keep your butt in the chair for hours anyway can be a masochistic practice. But
it is what we agree to when we decide to become writers. These are the terms we
must be willing to accept if we are ever to arrive at the day when the page does fill with
something, and even then, to be lucky enough to fill it with something true.
The “talent of the
room” is indeed what it comes down to, an ability which perhaps now more than
ever is being put to the test. Writing, however, is not limited to the moment
of transmission. There are a million invisible motors behind the simple act of
placing words on a page. “Writing” in a sense is also happening when you are
walking in the street observing your surroundings. It is taking place when you
are zoning out in line at the grocery store or riding your bike down a hill or
gazing out the window or loading clothes into the washing machine or sitting on
the subway. It can creep up on you in the middle of something entirely
inconvenient or when you least expect it, a seemingly brilliant phrase that
composes itself in your mind after you’ve already submitted your manuscript or
as you are lying in bed with your eyes open in the dark. Without time spent
outside of the room, nothing will materialize inside of it.
This has become more
poignant, as the limitations of COVID-19 have settled over us. The fact that we
have no
choice
but to stay inside the room at the moment has not made staying in it, or
writing in general, any easier. In fact, for some the current and very
necessary restrictions of sheltering in place may have made this whole process
even harder. It is one thing to be submerged in a self-imposed metaphorical
isolation one has the power to lift at any time, but when the isolation is
mandatory, exterior, and without antidote, the stakes inevitably change. On top
of the usual distractions, now there is the distraction of COVID-19, which
hangs invisibly over everything in the background (or foreground): the threat
of death in its most literal sense, the anxiety over what is happening in the
world and the fear that we may be alone in the room forever.
As many writers and
artists have vocalized online in the past month as the pandemic has taken hold
in the US, it has been difficult to stay focused. On one hand, now that many of
us have an unusual abundance of time on our hands, there is an overwhelming
pressure to create. On the other, there is so much information being hurled at
us, so many unsettling realities playing out, that it often feels impossible for
the mind to reach the state of quiet needed to produce anything.
I’ve never been a full
time writer. I’m not exactly a part time writer either. I write regularly. That
much is true. On the days I’m not in the office, I generally make the attempt,
cordoning off a certain number of hours to be devoted to writing, even if
nothing comes of them. I’ve placed faith in the logic that if you show up often
enough, eventually something will. “If you don’t get serious with your writing,
your writing won’t get serious with you,” my writer friend said. Like exercise
or playing an instrument or slowly digging a tunnel with a spoon, whatever your
habits or method, doing it consistently seems to be what is important, finding
a practical system that you personally will actually employ, however off or
unromantic it might feel for someone else.
A wake up at 4am and
write before work writer I am not. A midnight oil writer I am not. After years
of trying different set ups, I know now that I’m a day time writer, a late
morning and afternoon writer, a sometimes coffeeshop writer, a laptop on the
couch or at the foot of the bed writer, a desk by the window writer, a notebook
on a train writer, a back of a bank envelope writer. And sometimes I’m not a
writer at all. Or perhaps I’m a writer at all times, least of all when not
writing—the quiet person in the corner taking mental notes. I do also keep a
physical notebook, but its pages are never limited to official writerly
thoughts. Rather, they are a mess of lists and phone numbers, business cards,
receipts…all woven in with sections of text. Many of my best ideas end up on
scraps of junk mail that accumulate on my desk. Some of these fragments make it
through to full sentences and paragraphs. Some are thrown out—a detritus of
thoughts discarded along with the material trash.
When I taught in the
mornings I used to come home from class and either go for a run or meditate
before transitioning to writing. In recent years, the long walks to the office
had also become a meditation, a quiet rhythm of contemplations dissipating and
re-emerging, the inward cycle moving in concert with the repetitive
motion of the feet. Predictably, I keep to a strict regime of coffee—once in
the morning and once in the afternoon, almost at the exact time everyday. I
wear the same pair of deteriorating blue jeans I never wear outdoors, the same
repertoire of t-shirts, while when out in the world I’m often much more
elaborately arranged. When writing, it seems I make no attempt to be mistaken
for a character, to wear the costume of myself I present to the public,
intentionally or not.
The rituals that actually
stick for me are none that are so curated or planned. They are the ones that
develop on their own, that I’m so comfortable in I don’t notice them, unless
they are gone (like a day without coffee). Over time, the patterns become
familiar animals. If I have a few free days in a row to write for instance, I
know that at least one of them will be a wash, one will usually manifest some
good work, and one might be a mix. I know when I’ll get hungry, I know I’ll
check my email or social media at countless intervals. I know that a good
amount of time will be lost to the ether.
“What did you do today?” people
with normal jobs used to ask me when we met up at night on the weekends. “I was
writing,” I’d answer, knowing that in most cases what they were imagining was
not at all how I spent the time. A day of “writing” for me often alludes to an
interior life of wandering from room to room, the apartment dimly lit in
winter, sweltering in summer. It is a day that can seem long or short, filled
with a million small tasks and failed attempts. Flipping a light switch
in hopes of an idea, brewing a cup of tea, emptying a drawer, scouring the
cabinets for a guilty snack, watching the cars go by from the window. The
interjection of a phone conversation, a lonely meal, a shower, a walk to the
corner store, a shaking of a limb that has fallen asleep. Perhaps an interlude
of eyebrow plucking or staring at a leaf pattern on a plant in the windowsill
and being reminded of something random from childhood.
Sometimes, when I’m feeling
particularly stuck I’ll embark on a cleaning project. As I find myself
needlessly mopping the floor or reorganizing a closet, I’m reminded of Sylvia
Plath’s famous baking habit, imagining how when she was avoiding writing, her
kitchen counter would fill with a spread of elaborate pies, while on her desk
there remained a stack of empty pages. Cleaning is the fastest form of change,
a task one sets out to do which will always be accomplished. Writing, for me,
has never worked so neatly. It’s always been a slow and gradual process, a
perpetual reaching out for something mysterious and invisible, which, every once
in a while, amidst all these small doings, after hours of waiting quietly in
the grass for the leopard to appear, suddenly flashes its light onto my
fingertips…if I don’t let it slip through them.
I don’t write every
day, as my writer friend was told to. I don’t always write in the same room. I
write most days and I’m serious about showing up to do it. I’ve found my own
weird way of doing things…which is the only way anyone ever figures out how to
do anything. That writer friend isn’t around anymore. Routines need to evolve
at some point. As Voltaire once said, “if we don’t find anything pleasant, at
least we shall find something new.” Still hard to find is a life of
freedom and structure, as we both need the routine and yet long for it to be
interrupted. The interruptions are often where life actually happens, where the
things worth writing about occur.
A few years ago, a
colleague and I were approached in the subway by the guy who created Humans of New
York,
the photoblog series of portraits and interviews with people found on the
streets of New York City. We were picked out because we were both wearing
flamboyant fur hats and the photographer had assumed we were a couple. We
explained that in fact we worked together at a small press and were on our way
to a poetry reading, and that we were also both writers. “Why do you write?’ the
man asked us, as if shocked by the notion. My colleague and I looked at each
other for a few moments, suddenly at a loss as to how to reply. This was a
question with no single answer, meriting a response that is different for
everyone and can be difficult to put into words. I thought of all the hours I’d
spent alone in rooms and how many more hours would be spent in them. I thought
of my walks and the crisis of seeing that woman pass me every morning. Finally,
I said: “I write in an attempt to describe something indescribable.”
Now alone in a room
again, just walls away from other people alone in other rooms, the days of
facing the blank page continue, as we wait out the collective solitude of a
historical moment that has felt indescribable. Void of the routine and the
interruptions, a little grayer than before, I am left in a place without
freedom or structure. It has been weeks since I’ve seen the woman
walking in the other direction, and I feel both unhinged and a little excited
by the break in the pattern…
Kyra Simone is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared or is
forthcoming in The Brooklyn Rail, Black Clock, Conjunctions,
Entropy, F(r)iction Magazine, Little Star, and the Best
American Experimental Writing Anthology, among other journals. She is a
member of the publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse and works an associate
editor at Zone Books.
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