Time and the writer | Susan Johnson's blog

FOR A WHILE now I?ve had this little private theory that writers experience time differently to other folk. Not in a better way, or a superior way, just in a different way.

My theory goes that, unlike most, writers (and I would hazard a guess all creative artists) are born with a sort of inner clock, already ticking. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, exist to be filled, that is, filled by something made.

Every artist I know seeks to create meaning from what he or she sees before his or her eyes. If not meaning, then call it form from formlessness, messages from chaos, a recording of beauty, horror, or of the ordinary, struggling days. An artist seeks the essence of the thing, the passing light, the fleeting moment, to speak out loud the pieces of the puzzle.

Every writer I know is compelled by time. Many years ago I was struck by an interview with AS (Toni) Byatt, speaking of her own artistic maths, in that she had worked out some mystical formula involving her age, divided by her working practice/model, giving her a pretty exact approximation of how many books she had left in her. Ditto, Donna Tartt, a notoriously slow writer, who has also figured out the time/book equation.

Like King Canute sitting in his throne, waves lapping around his feet, writers write as a way of holding back the tide. Of course, unlike King Canute they know the tide is coming and even their vanity tells them that they too ? like Canute and every other human soul born into consciousness ? will be washed away. But, for me and I suspect for many other writers, writing is a way of holding back the tide.

Writing is a way of fixing life to the page. So, this is life! This is us, passing, more than a collection of cells. We lived! We breathed! We passed this way! If time is the vessel in which life is carried, then every hour, every day, every second counts.

I have a friend, a writer and an artist who, when he was a boy, used to write himself a letter. An ordinary letter, describing his day, his feelings, his life to that moment. Then he would climb on a chair and, reaching as high as he could, toss it on the top of the highest wardrobe. He then placed an arbitrary date in his diary, say, six months to the day, when he would allow himself to climb back up onto the chair ? using cushions and piles of books ? to retrieve his letter to himself.

He opened it with wonder. Who was he now, reading his letter? Was he the same boy who had stood on a chair and threw up his letter? Where had he gone then, his old self? Was time captured in the ink of the pen he once held? I think I may have used this as a scene in a book somewhere.

I remember being twenty-four, twenty-five years old, and thinking: ?I don?t have time to waste. I must write!? I was conscious of time then, of every passing day. I already knew then that life is fleet, so swiftly passing, the seconds, the moments, and that I wished to put out my hand and cry: Stop!

In that impulse to shout Stop! lies the artistic compulsion. Time is the reason I write books: to witness life?s passing, to record the ordinary agonies of ordinary existence, to make a sort of time capsule for the future. I don?t mean writing for posterity (Ahem ? only time decides which writer achieves artistic immortality, so it can?t be for that). I don?t mean writing as a huge fat exercise in narcissism (although ? double ahem ? all writers must have a dose of that to even begin to think anyone might be interested in what they have to say).

I mean writing because one has a life in which to create meaning. Every one of us has a life to shape, to give meaning to, to use as we wish. For writers, there is never any One day I am going to write an amazing book. For writers, there is only writing the book, even if ? alas! ? it doesn?t prove to be as amazing as one originally hoped. For me, life would have a strange futility if I couldn?t seek to puzzle out meaning, to make use of the days. I don?t wish to merely record my own puzzlement (I?m not vain enough to think anyone would be interested in that). I want to record this particular moment, this puzzlement, this time we collectively swim in.

Yesterday another writer friend sent me some images of long-ago Paris (above). What impulse caused me to weep looking into the faces of the dead? Once alive, with washing up to do, a house to sweep, money to earn. How alive they look! Yet how many years dead they are! I had the same wounded, tender feeling walking around Victor Hugo?s apartments in Place des Voges in Paris, or in the tiny ramshackle house where Balzac lived, with a special escape hatch so he could run away from his creditors.

Life! Create! Aim to be like Balzac and create your hundred characters, every one of them alive, and breathing! Life, do your worst, keep that tide coming, but, please, please, let me write just one more book. ?

Source: http://www.abetterwoman.net/wordpress/?p=567

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