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| Anne Enright |
AUTHOR, AUTHOR
Final thoughts
by Anne Enright
I
t doesn't matter what you think about your work. This is one of the weirdest lessons a writer has to learn, that the emotions that push you to write better, with greater accuracy, truth, verve, wit; the despair that makes you cast your eyes to the ceiling and then plunge back to the keyboard; the running pleasure of one good word being followed by a better; the glee as you set a time bomb ticking in the text; the glorious megalomania with which you set out to describe and yes! conquer! the! world! ... are all completely redundant once the piece is finished.
More than redundant. They are dust and ashes. The thing you have written is a piece of shit. Can I say this louder? And then repeat it really, really quietly? The thing you have just written is a piece of shit.
Or, the thing you have just written is the best thing that has ever been written, it is a truly wonderful thing. Alright it's a piece of shit, but it's the best piece of shit I've ever seen. It is both wonderful, and, yes you are right, truly awful. But it is mostly absolutely wonderful. We hope. Yes, we are sure that Beckett would have loved it, and so will WH Smith.
I knew all these emotions in my 20s. I went through them in glorious Technicolor. In my 30s they faded to a more manageable pastel, now I do them in sedate black and white. Sepia for old age: I am looking forward to the writerly sepia of old age.
Because, although these feelings, in all their abjection and grandiosity, are useful to the writing process - useful in that they keep you typing, they keep your intentions keen - the finished product exists without them. It is not as good or terrible as you might think: it is just as good as it is.
Five years, say, after you have written some piece of junk; some fraudulent, spatchcocked, scrap of literary debris, you come across it again, and you read it in an idle way, and you say, with a terrible sense of loss and shock, "I used to be able to write. I used to be quite good. Where's all that gone?"
So which one of you is right - the one who likes it or the one who didn't?
It gets worse when you are working on a long project, each step of which is a minor death or a minor glory depending on your blood sugar level at the time. Who knows what to make of the finished thing? The book you think will please the world in a particular way, does not please the world at all, much. The book that was full of difficulty, that never went right for you, turns out to be a friendly kind of object, after all. You try to second-guess the relationship between emotional difficulty and ease of response, between speed of writing and length on the shelves. Two years in, you think of all the great books written in six weeks (why is it always six?) - Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Steinbeck's Cannery Row, Heminway's The Sun Also Rises - and why is it always these butch Americans? Did they all drink? Three years in, you think of the time Proust spent in his cork-tiled room. Then you divide his 3,200 pages by 13 years or so and realise he was pretty speedy, actually, the bastard - how did he pull that trick? Then, when, at last, you are finished, you flick through the book and think it might be OK. Just OK. Until suddenly you think it is quite brilliant and then, equally suddenly, you mourn - such devastation! - the book it might have been but is not.
Apparently poets don't have this problem. At least that is what one of them said, when I was discussing this once. She said, "Oh a poet knows." This woman is the wisest writer in Ireland, but I think she was being a tad poetic about it all. "A poet knows what?" I still want to say, "I have met poets who don't know." But actually when I think about it, the self-deceivers are fewer over there: most poets are a little sad-eyed, a little reluctant, with a twitch of failure in them somewhere (or, in some cases, a roar of it).
Writing is mostly a case of mood management. The emotion you have is not absolute, it is temporary. It may be useful, but it is not the truth. It is not you. Get over it. This is what I tell my students, whenever I teach. "Get over it." (I am a terrible teacher) I say, "You have no confidence? No one who is any good has any confidence. So tell me, what makes your particular lack of confidence so special?"
Or, for the grandiose (because it can swing both ways) I say, "You think you're a genius? Then why does this sentence you have written make no sense? Oh, because you're a genius. I forgot."
They love me, my students. They love me in their own way.
As for myself - these days, I am a quieter person at the desk: the occasional pause, the occasional rush of keystrokes, and yes, once in a while, a little grunt, a little creaking sigh. I might lean back and look out the window. I might smile and start again. Over the years, you learn to keep your emotions in the place where you write. With practice you can wrestle them down to something roughly the size of the page. That is why I am so smug and serene and easy to live with.
Ask anyone. It's true.
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