I was working the other day up in my study, in the loft of this terrace house we live in now. All afternoon I could hear my two young boys talking, two floors down, to their grandparents. Speaking all the time, as though naming things were as important as drawing breath.
I thought to shut the door to keep the voices downstairs. But I couldn’t. When I stopped focusing on it, this was a kind of noise— the sound of people learning to make meaning—that seemed to help me write. Until, finally, up the stairs, two whole storeys, came the sound of small feet on timber, and a voice asking whoever might care to listen, specifically me: Who can this be coming up the stairs?
Perhaps we speak to find out who we are. We are languaging animals; we’ve been talking pretty much from the start. Writing came much later. In evolutionary terms, we’ve only just begun. Writing doesn’t come naturally—it hasn’t become second nature yet, as talking has. In abstracting—in setting down on paper—what our mouths and minds and bodies do when we talk, many of us lose our way. I think this happens because we imagine writing as a completely different enterprise to be conducted in a different language. And in trying to find this other language, this different mode and diction, the would-be writer loses the voice that, in speech, comes to them without thinking; and they end up sounding stilted or just plain confused.
Part of the problem, too, is that talking happens fast and writing happens slowly. When we talk, we open our mouths and words tumble out. When we write, even if we know what we want to say and how, we have to use our fingers to form up words, and this takes much longer. Then we start thinking—often too hard—about whether there’s not a better way to go about it; then we forget what else we meant to say, even what we set out to say, and so we spiral into wordlessness or chaotic wordiness.
Because writing takes longer to perform than speaking, we have time to worry. Into the gaps between the letters and the words, into the void of the blank screen, anxiety floods. And anxiety, as Barry Lopez once said, makes us all inarticulate. For some people, that means they don’t know how to start; others don’t know how to stop. It’s anxiety that poisons most of our attempts to write clearly, one way or another.
When we’re anxious, we lose our voice. We sound, on the page as in life, like someone else, like someone we are trying to be, or like no one at all.
But what is there to be anxious about?
There’s the fact that writing endures, whereas spoken words pass. Writers get anxious because they know that what they set down on the page and leave there can be read forever after—all your triumphs and tragedies of construction get preserved for all eternity. By contrast, a careless word or phrase uttered on the phone or a false note struck in conversation can be put right in the next sentence.When you speak, you can get away with umming and ahhing and losing your way and finding it again until you say what it is you discover you want to say. But when you write, no one will cut you that kind of slack.You need to say what you mean to say—and nothing else. Near enough’s not good enough.
That’s enough to scare the bejesus out of most of us.
But there are other anxieties—word limits; deadlines; the feeling that you don’t know what you’re talking about; the fear
of making mistakes, of using the wrong words, of looking ridiculous; politics (more on this later); bad memories of composi- tion classes from primary school; grammar phobias; the feeling that you need to do more research; the certainty that you’re missing the point; the fear that this has all been said before much better by someone else; the fear of offending someone, of defaming someone, of admitting something you’d rather not. Recognise some of those? There is no end to the anxieties that storm the writer’s mind.
The gaggle of anxieties can induce panic. And panic makes for bad prose. If you’re feeling anxious when you write, your writing will sound anxious. Somehow you need to overcome these fears and write. Don’t panic—just learn to take care. Be alert, not alarmed! Compose yourself so that panic does not compose your sentences and put them in some hectic order. This is so much more easily said
than done.You will panic. Everyone does. But how do you rein it in and set it to work for you?
Try not writing for a bit.Try thinking instead.That’s what I was doing the other day when I drew myself those mindmaps before setting out on my walk. I was keeping panic at bay by ordering the mind that was meant to be writing some sentences. I was letting myself write by not writing. One reason you make such plans is to keep anxiety at bay.
Trying to write like a writer, we end up writing the most stilted dross we’ve ever read.
And all the while the real writers are out there trying to write the way they speak (or wish they could). Try that.
To overcome the fear that you don’t know how to write, the best thing to do is the most important step of all— start writing, uncomfortable though it may feel at first, as though you were talking. Don’t think of it as writing at all—think of it as talking on paper, and start talking with your fingers. Once you’ve tricked yourself into trusting the words your ‘speaking mind’ suggests, once you’ve stop thinking about it as writing, you’ll be surprised how much more easily writing comes to you, and how much better it works.
T RY T H I S
What do you get anxious about when you write? Looking like a fool; making some egregious mistake of grammar or fact or argument; getting yourself sued; causing problems for your family? Make a personal list. Sometimes giving names to the things that trouble us can strip them of their power.