#1 Why I Write
On launching this newsletter and the gust of wind that let the words crawl out of me
Joan Didion stole this title, “Why I Write,” from George Orwell, and now I do too because there isn’t a more fitting way to begin this newsletter than with these three words that are at once an opening and an invocation. And that they, to borrow from Didion once more, “seemed to sum up, in a no non-sense way, all I have to tell you.” In April 2023, I decided that I wanted to start a newsletter—a space where I could regularly tend to my writing practice and essay through my relentless contemplative state, which I would get to share with others/you all.
I vividly remember sitting on a bench in Newington Green Park with my friend Suzie, admiring how fashionably light her layers always are but never seems to feel cold, as we sipped our coffees and discussed the increasingly popular idea of writing a newsletter. We exchanged words of encouragement and promises of accountability. Later, in the new year and almost a year after our bench talk, Suzie gave me this card from Tate that she wrote for my birthday, which somehow made its way from my bookshelf to my desk recently, and evoked further contemplation. On one side is Jeff Wall’s 1993 (also the year I was born) photograph A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai) and on the other is her note, the last sentence of which reads, “I expect a blog soon!” I hadn’t reflected on this pairing too deeply until now, but the choice feels so fitting—not only because I’m a big fan of (and have engaged critically with) Wall’s work, but also because of the very specific state of turmoil in the composition depicted through the sheets of paper blown away by the “sudden” gust and escaping from the folder one of the figures holds. Suzie moved back to the US the other week, and I couldn’t help but notice the weighty length of the eighteen months that have passed since we sat on that bench and I first decided to launch this newsletter.
The entire course of this period felt like (being under the force and spell of) this gust of wind—my thoughts and attempts mobilized by it, yet flying about and scattered like those sheets of paper. At times, it was exhilarating, a headlong rush into words and ideas; but more often, it was an exercise in futility filled with “failed” attempts and an overall self-agonizing process of staring at the blank page where the only thing that seemed to be moving consistently, or at all, was the impatient blinking of the cursor. The novelist Anne Lamott reminds us so well in her text “Shitty First Drafts” that “almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts.” But even more powerful is her depiction of what she describes as “the fantasy of the uninitiated.” For that, Lamott works up the imagery of how creative processes are usually romanticized—how we tend to view successful writers, for instance, as sitting down at their desks and “tak[ing] in a few deep breaths, push[ing] back their sleeves, roll[ing] their necks a few times to get all the cricks out, and div[ing] in, typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter.” I’m here to tell you that this is not true. And I’m also here to tell you that I have too found myself a victim of this fantasy and have, needless to say, garnered many doubts.
This stretch of time later proved to be an exploration of my relationship with writing—an excruciatingly slow and long process of reckoning that might, in fact, be more precisely described as an exploration of my relationship to myself, through the act of writing. In some ways, I could say that it took me eighteen months to find myself, which sounds far more impressive (if also a bit exaggerated), though I might still go with that. And, in the end, that’s all writing is, really: an exercise in trying to make sense of things when, in reality, all you’re actually doing is trying to make sense of yourself. What struck me in Didion’s inquiry was precisely this self-reflexiveness. “In many ways,” she writes, “writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.” This “I,” perhaps the most unassuming out of the three, was also what had kept escaping my attention. Often and for too long, I had fixated on the external—the objects and the verb of writing—rather than turning inward to the self that is inseparable from the writing.
But also, thinking more about Didion’s choice of words, I found imposition to be very strong. How does one impose when they don’t feel entitled to it? How does one impose, when they aren’t “native” to it? I think a lot about the Palestinian poet and essayist Fady Joudah’s words, “English is the language that genocides me.” I think to and ask myself, what am I doing here? Here, in the English language. How inescapable it is to feel like an imposter, let alone even thinking about imposing. Especially when you can bring this (English) language to your own, because it assumes “universality,” but you can’t bring your own to it, because no one’s deemed it as important. Although, as an editor, I’m an avid reader and user of the Chicago Manual of Style (and lover of oxford commas), I also can’t deny the imposition of language and grammar on me, rather than the other way around. In fact, I’d like to dedicate another essay to the violence of style guides in straightening language and policing expression, but for now, I’ll leave it at the note that all of these thoughts have constructed part of the self-doubt that has forcefully paralyzed or blown away my attempts at writing.
I remember, there was this long period in which I simply couldn’t write. It was as if I had lost all ability to form sentences or access to my own vocabulary. It was strange; nothing made sense. Someone once told me that writing begins only when the very last of your thinkers has left the room, and you sit there alone. Did I never let my thinkers leave? Possibly, out of the fear that there would not be anything worthwhile to sit with. There’s this scene from Dead Poets Society that I keep thinking of in relation to this. The famous “yawp” scene, which I’m sure many who have watched the film remember well, that so aptly and beautifully captures the process of writing, but also all creative acts more generally that is essentially a battle with and liberation of self-expression. As a brief summary: At the beginning of the movie, one of the students, Todd Anderson, taking Mr. Keating’s English class struggles to “show up” whenever it comes to writing or reading poetry. He prefers to stay quiet and engages in listening rather than participation. During one class, when the students are asked to read a poem that they were assigned to write, Todd admits he hasn’t written one. In response, Mr. Keating calls him to the front of the class to give a demonstration of a barbaric “yawp,” which he describes as “a loud cry or yell,” and is a reference to Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” wherein the “barbaric yawp” represents raw, unfiltered self-expression. At first, Todd hesitates, his body stiff and his voice weak. But as Mr. Keating persistently pushes him to “free up [his] mind,” circling him, closing his eyes, clapping, and asking him rapid-fire questions to avoid leaving any time for him to think for too long, Todd begins to loosen up and let words and poetry crawl out of him. Mr. Keating’s initial diagnosis is equally powerful: “Mr. Anderson thinks that everything inside of him is worthless and embarrassing… Isn’t that your worst fear?”
Isn’t that the worst fear? So, I too needed to “yawp.” Interestingly, I also realized that I was doing most of my “writing” away from my computer, when I’ve stepped away to do something else and whatever I’m writing is not my main focus. Sometimes I’d be in line at the grocery store and suddenly a sentence would form—just like that, emerging on its own. Or when I’d finally put my head down on the pillow at night, and in the briefest moment before drifting into sleep, the structure or the opening paragraph of an essay would take shape. I’d find this distance liberating. But the distance is also the “yawp,” when you let go of all the thinking that is forcefully shutting the gates to the flow of creative expression that wants to be flooding and pouring.
But beginnings are especially difficult. They are somehow inscribed with this impossible desire to capture so precisely and fully everything that one tries to convey. I don’t find James Joyce easy to read, but I love the way he begins his novel Finnegan’s Wake, which is itself a critique and mockery of beginnings. The novel begins and ends mid-sentence, wherein the last fragment-sentence is also the beginning of the very first sentence. Both appear to be left unfinished, but together they form a complete sentence in a cyclical manner. In this sense, the book doesn’t have a proper, finalized beginning or ending. I like this as an ethos to writing; it is somehow a reminder or granting of permission that it is okay to start from the middle of things. Not just in the case of writing, but life is itself better described in terms of transitions, rather than through the defined boundaries of where something begins or ends. And nothing—no “first” sentence, draft, or attempt—springs forth from nothing.
Didion’s “Why I Write,” which I chose to “begin” with because it tends to my “middles” and transitions, puts forth another self-reflexive aspect of writing. This time, it is not the “I,” the subject doing the writing, that she comments on, but “writing” itself as both a verb and a noun—when writing becomes the object of that very writing. “Like many writers,” Didion describes this self-involvement, “I have only this one ‘subject,’ this one ‘area’: the act of writing.” I think of the countless hours I’d spend thinking about “what” I would write about, when everything one wants to say, or write about, is somehow already there—and in this particular case, it was me obsessing over the practice of writing and pulling threads that touched on other, related things.
I am reminded by this one quote by the artist Georg Baselitz that I found in Jean Luc Nancy’s book The Pleasure in Drawing: “… when one sees something and draws it, one reflects on ‘how to draw’” This, to me, is a profound observation that holds true for writing, too. When one sees, hears, notices, thinks about something and writes it, they also reflect on the broader question of “how to write.” The practice or execution of any creative act is inherently a contemplation on what that act is, and what it means to perform it. To write is to think writing, again, and again, and again. It is to reformulate writing, and to generate one additional meaning to inscribe it with. Didion, in discussing the objects of her writing, or “what” she writes about, gives us a glimpse of “how” she writes, too. She describes these objects as being specific and tangible as opposed to more abstract—like a flowering pear tree outside her window that she would find herself concentrating on instead while trying to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic. For her, these objects also exist as they (directly or immediately) are and not studied in relation to their broader meanings or contexts: the bevatron is a bevatron, and not a political symbol or shorthand about the military industrial complex. In a way, I find this approach of Didion’s similar to Susan Sontag’s discussion in “Against Interpretation,” which argues for modes of criticism and commentary, or reading a work, that deals more intimately with the work (of art) as it is standing in front of us, and not through its other layers that interpretation operates to extract further meanings out of. I personally find myself drifting toward the opposite direction of Didion’s, but the point that I want to make here does not have to do with a specific mode of inquiry; rather, the content of our writing always already comments and reflects on the way in which we do writing, or how we write. The object, without trying, suggests the mode; the “what” is a contemplation on the “how.”
I’d like to “end” this essay, which is, of course, fittingly, a critique on endings itself, with some thoughts from Nancy’s book. When Nancy speaks of art in general, he comments on how it always “proceeds from a tension that searches for itself… not in order to reach the goal of relaxation but to renew this tension infinitely.” This is a reference to the theme of desire that he consistently returns to throughout the book as well: so long as what it desires to reach is not reached, the desire can exist. For Nancy, pleasure and drawing are discussed in similar terms: both are sustained only as far as they remain as a process in which finality is not reached. The anticipation of satisfaction, which necessitates the lack of it, is how pleasure can be sustained. So here I carry this elaborate articulation to writing: I write this essay, or begin this newsletter, not in an attempt to reach a finality but to sustain the tension of that search, the desire of writing.
Welcome, and thank you for being here,
Melis
Here are some things that accompanied me in the making of this essay:
The physical copy of Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Pleasure in Drawing
The various forms, scales, and extents of support I received from my friends (Suzie, Alice, Anna, Filip, Eslin, Josh, Perim, Gulfem, Gizem, Théo, Ipek, among others)
The fig leaf tea Cenk has kindly gifted me
Desire of/for writing