What Readers Don't Know (or Get Wrong) About Writers
There’s a good reason for the misconceptions.
Barbara: We spoke last time about how writers think about their readers. Now perhaps we should talk about the reverse: how readers think about writers.
There’s a lot of public interest in the lives of writers, their work habits, their offices…. And, if the posts on Reddit are any measure, a lot of people aspire to be writers. That said, I think there are many misconceptions about writers and the process of writing itself.
Elizabeth: Which is understandable. People naturally base their ideas about what authors do on their own writing experience, which virtually everyone acquires in school.
Barbara: Exactly. Generalizing from school experience leads to two major misconceptions, since there are fundamental differences between a student’s writing and what I want to call “being a writer.”
First, the purpose of expository writing in school is to fulfill an assignment and demonstrate to the one reader, the teacher, what you have learned. But most writers — perhaps with the exception of journalists who have assignments — write from a personal drive to write and are free to select their own topic. They have personal agency and freedom of expression.
A second misunderstanding arising from school experience is that most people know that writing is difficult — and it is! — but they have in mind the wrong kind of difficult.
Elizabeth: As students, we struggle with the basics, in an effort to be coherent. But out of school (and when not fulfilling a work assignment), writing is a form of self-expression, in every genre. The drive to write comes from complex personal motives.
And often, along with that drive comes a compelling desire to perfect the manuscript. No detail is too small. What might seem trivial to a student can be urgently important to a writer. In the film, Turn Every Page, Robert Gottlieb, the long-time editor of author Robert Caro says this about him:
“The great thing about Bob is also the maddening thing about Bob. Everything is of total importance, the first chapter of the book and the semicolon. They’re of equal importance…. I’m like that too… I too think that a semicolon is worth fighting a civil war about.”
And then there are the bigger issues: using writing to figure out what you’re thinking and then working to capture and maintain the reader’s interest, build momentum, create lifelike dialogue, chart a narrative line, and on and on.
Barbara: In other words, writers have a profound investment in their writing, and this is likely to be under-appreciated by readers.
But, here’s a third type of misconception: the myth-making around writers! My sense is that readers are more apt to idealize fiction writers — perhaps because they create transformative experiences. So, the question arises: “How ever do they do it?” In any case, myth-making is inherently distorting, giving writers … I don’t know…mystical powers.
Elizabeth: I’m not sure that is a complete misconception. Because writing is magical, in a way. All you need is “pencil and paper” to create something from seemingly nothing, words that entertain or inform or persuade or spark the curiosity of readers.
What about this misconception? That writing is a lonely activity.
Barbara: Well, writers do spend enormous amounts of time alone at a computer. But my experience is precisely the opposite of this. I am so absorbed when I’m writing that I’m never even aware that I am alone.
Elizabeth: It’s the same for me. I love the isolation of my office. It’s a sanctuary from the demands of the rest of my life. While I’m writing, my mind is free of everything except what I’m working on. Writers who don’t have a private place — a room of their own — and have to write in a library or coffee shop must be able to wall themself off from the activity around them.
Barbara: Some writers find the background chatter in a coffee shop to be distracting. For others, that “white noise” and the feeling of being among others is grounding. To be effective, writers need an environment that helps them to focus, to attend.
Attention is just what you think it is: a mental “spotlight” of focus. It is a fundamental brain function. All other cognitive abilities depend on the capacity to effectively direct attentional focus. If you are very easily distracted or if you get too “stuck” in your focus and can’t fluidly shift your attention, then you can’t optimally reason, calculate, remember, access a social situation, carry on a coherent conversation, read, or write. You rely on your brain to effectively deploy attention, based on external as well as internal factors. Attention may be a more complex brain function than people realize.
Elizabeth: Getting back to misconceptions, I think, the biggest one is that writing is always serious, grinding, hard work. It’s certainly not that for me. I can think of many enormously pleasurable aspects. Some are just fun and others profoundly gratifying, even self-affirming.
On the fun level, writing is a form of puzzle-solving, and I love puzzles. Everything I write starts with a question, usually prompted by a personal experience or something I’ve read that didn’t quite make sense to me. The question rankles, and I’m driven to find an answer — to solve the puzzle. I may talk the puzzle over with friends and ask for their insights, but in the end it’s through writing that I articulate an answer that satisfies me.
I assume I inherited this idea of fun from my mother, who was something of a puzzle-fanatic. Every week, she rented a jigsaw puzzle, which she worked on in the TV room. When I succeed in finding an answer I’ve been struggling with, I see my mother running her hands over the surface of a completed puzzle, sighing with pleasure.
Barbara: For me, there’s definitely a treasure hunt aspect to writing. I thrive on going down rabbit holes, searching out the historic origins of an idea, reading all the literature on a topic. I like to always have a project on my mind, to be in “creative problem-solving mode.” Often I start with an idea that seems small, but usually I discover that the topic is an iceberg.
For example, I recently wrote an article with three colleagues on a condition called D-MER that affects around 10% of women who nurse their babies. Women with D-MER (dysphoric milk ejection reflex) have intensely negative feelings when the breast milk is released into the nipple. The dysphoric feelings last only a few minutes but range from utter despair to painful melancholy…and they occur with every milk let-down.
My search of the literature showed that midwives and lactation specialists had reported the condition, but no major medical journal had published anything about it. Doctors tend not to know about D-MER, and it is often misdiagnosed as postpartum depression. The only really good scientific study of D-MER was the one that documented how common it is. There were so many questions to dig into!
Elizabeth: Another type of pleasure for me, one that is deeper, long-lasting, additive, and even therapeutic is making sense of the world I live in – my inner world and, through it, the outer world. The poet and essayist Louise Gluck spoke for many of us when she gave this answer to the question of why she wrote:
“I wanted to turn experience, often disappointment or hurt, into an externalized form that, in its accuracy and beauty, would both separate me from the experience and redeem it.”
Not the least of the pleasures for me is of being heard, of having my clarified thoughts resonate with a reader. What I most want is for others to recognize themselves in my experiences and to share the relief and validation and ultimately the hope that I take from the realizations I’ve come to.
Growing up with intimidating, rather tyrannical parents, I felt voiceless. It is no small thing to feel that the thoughts and feelings I’ve excavated meaning from connect me with others. It is the fulfillment of a feeling I’ve longed for for much of my life.
Barbara: For me the process of working on a paper feels like a journey, an adventure. The work expands my thinking and, hopefully, will change other people’s thinking as well.
At some point in the past I remember thinking to myself, “Why do you want to write? What’s your goal?” And the answer I came up with was that I just wanted to be part of the conversation… the scientific conversation. But, at another level, I too wanted to be heard in my family, though I gave up on that very early on. The dynamics were altogether different from your family situation. My parents were a tight-knit couple and I imagined that they discussed things in private so as to make the household run smoothly, which it did. But, there were no family discussions, no negotiating, no exploring. Everyone just did what they were supposed to do. And my job was to be a student — which I still am! Adult students learn to be in conversation with themselves.
Elizabeth: So I think we agree that the most significant thing that readers don’t get about the writing life is how much pleasure it can generate. Writing has the potential to give, as the novelist William Maxwell once said, “a feeling of rapture.”
Barbara: That kind of elation is usually associated with being in a state of flow, or “in the zone,” an extraordinary state of intense attentional focus that is not unique to writers. It can be experienced by any individuals who are performing at a high skill level and whose abilities match the task whether it is painting, or playing an instrument, or ice skating. The work becomes effortless. Let’s talk about flow next.
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