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The Life of a Writer
One of them called to a wasp, which had landed on the large mutilated shell at my feet as I combed the sand for unscathed offerings. I crouched and watched as it lingered a bit too long and was swept up in the surf, now littering the sand like its damaged fascination, its wings wet and useless. What an echo of life! I thought. The ocean had beckoned to the hungry creature, offering it a buffet of possibilities within the crevice it explored in the shell’s heart only to sweep it away with her choking liquid. As the wasp helplessly tumbled in her rolling embrace, I wondered why the ocean felt the need to take the breath of others. Didn’t she feel confident, as strong as she was, I questioned; didn’t she trust that she’d have enough of a life force to sustain her throughout eternity?
That night I watched a television interview during which Faye Dunaway remarked, “What do you do when you’re vulnerable? You cover it up and pretend you’re in control.” I thought of that wasp, so insignificant against an ocean that certainly wasn’t giving up its forcefulness. It struck me that my own sense of power had grown such a tiny bit as I continued to develop a small writer’s voice, and the thought soothed me as I turned out the lights to be sung to sleep by the waxing and waning waves.
The solace was short-lived as I faced the flight home the next morning. We slipped away from Panama City before dawn, the wings of our small plane vibrating in reaction to the unfriendly air mass we were battling as we clawed our way past Montgomery’s cloud-choked sky. The radar fanned on the control panel, seeking rain’s presence and painting itself spotty green in victory. It yellowed when finding heavy patches of Mother Nature’s wrath, the brilliance of the sunny hue the antithesis of what it represented.
Jim puttered around the cockpit doing what pilots do and I wanted to tell him to keep his eye on the road, though there was no need for him to peer through the embattled windshield, which was taking it on the chin as the rain pelted it in a staccato rhythm. Had the ride not been so bumpy, it would have been a pleasant experience sliding through the blueness of the sky as the day dawned bright above the blanket of clouds. I was determined to finish Weber’s article, which I’d started the day after I’d studied the boys on their bikes, but the plane shuddered to the point that the words were vibrating. As I held the magazine still enough that I could follow the text, I found Ford’s take on the life of a writer to be fascinating, as he saw it as a combination of self-sacrifice and self-championing. Could I champion myself if I ever found the courage to make the sacrifice to write? I wondered as I read that fiction writing was to Ford as useful a thing for a culture as there is. He went on to say, “Not that I’ve been so useful, but it is as high a calling as you can have…serious devotion to it purchases some rights: the right to presume, to make things up, to create.”
I knew I was doing certain things the “right way,” namely keeping my writer’s notebooks. Ford kept them; would spend months accumulating the “raw stuff” that would come together to make his novels or short stories whole. He maintained that anything that appeared to him to be singular would end up in his notebooks. “Here’s a sentence I wrote [that’s] not meant to be interesting to anybody else: ‘Christmas, comma, Jesus Christ.’ That’ll turn out to be a dialogue line.”
He went on to tell Weber, “A sentence in my notebook will come at a place where I never imagined it. And that’s what writing is for me, taking the raw stuff and recasting it into a logic that is its own. Taking lines which maybe occurred in life in one context, and then creating another context for them.” Ford says of the characters in Rock Springs that though readers may think of them as less articulate, the stories assert they have just as much to tell. When Weber mentions that the critics contend he gives his uneducated, unambitious characters too much credit, he responds, “It’s a philosophical point very near the heart of everything I write…If I were limited to just predictable responses, if we believe ‘Here is a guy who can only think this or that,’ that people live within their givens, then life’s pretty well set for us. But human beings continue to surprise us. It is just a fact of life that people pick up Volkswagens at moments of stress. People just say things that make you stare off, sometimes.”
As I clutched the magazine, stretching the page to a tautness that would keep the words from jumping around, I prayed I’d get to the point of being able to say what Ford declares next: “I’ve just given everything I’ve ever written my very best—my absolute, greatest best shot. And that’s all.”
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A Real Place in the World
In the piece, Weber stated, “The stories in Rock Springs…are populated by characters who are mostly down and out, natives of a remote region that simply doesn’t offer them enough. It’s a class of people familiar to readers of current fiction. But unlike those in, say, the early stories of Raymond Carver, whose work set the tone for many of the new writers of the 1980’s, Ford’s characters rarely yield to despair or defeat. They actively seek the high-minded solace that’s available in self-knowledge, in the future, in love.
“The individual’s struggle for transcendence is an old literary theme, of course. But in the narrow mainstream of contemporary American fiction, it’s absence has been well-noted—and by an increasing number of critics missed—particularly in the spreading influence of the so-called ‘minimalists.’ According to many literary observers, short-story writers like Carver, Mary Robison, and Amy Hempel, by virtue of their many imitators, have spawned what has become a dominant fashion in American writing.
“The perceived minimalist formula is marked by a technical expertise resonating primarily in the service of characters so burdened by powerlessness, diffidence or anomie that their engagement with the world around them is superficial or oblique. Their often introspective revelations tend to reinforce this sense of isolation…Ford is onto something new…providing American fiction with the theme that life is serious, rather than life is trivial or that life is very grim. That there are issues in this life worth trying to clarify.
“Raymond Carver, who is Ford’s close friend, is unequivocal. ‘Sentence for sentence,’ he says, ‘Richard is the best writer at work in this country today [1988].’ Ford says, ‘I really think that human beings accommodating themselves to a landscape, to a place, is natively dramatic, that that in itself is potentially the stuff of literature.’”
This made me think of the people I’d been meeting in Costa Rica and how dramatic life felt to me just by the sheer fact that the people there were responding to such a fierce environment. Ford went on to say, “The stories didn’t exhaust all the things I care about, the things that move me to write…The other books are novels, and in writing them, I exhausted everything which is, in a way, my own private definition of a novel. I try to exhaust my own interest in a place. Then I’ll just move on, write about someplace else where I kind of notice again how people accommodate themselves to where they live. That accounts for the kinds of things I write.”
The article made me want to read his work so I put Rock Springs at the top of my book-buying list. One of the main reasons I was anxious to see how his writing style unfurled itself on the page was this statement by Weber: “Ford’s sentences are raggedly lyrical, an eclectic music equally capable of the elegant, vaulting language that seeks to encompass an ambiguity and the brisk simplicity of vernacular speech…Perhaps the most salient characteristic of the stories in Rock Springs is a climactic explication. In his most trenchant passages, Ford launches an almost essayistic probe of human yearning and the stories resonate finally with the conviction that his characters have a real place in the world, however strained.”
Ford tells Weber, “What I write is fiction. What I do is imagine a place and call it a name.” Weber asks Ford about his relationship between the place on the map and the place on the page. “Me,” he answered. “It’s just me. There is a place, and there is an impulse to write, and I am the only important meditative there. Which is not to single out my own importance, just my responsibility.”
I sat for a while, staring out at the deepening blue of the water as the day waned, feeling envious of someone who could talk so confidently about writing, the writing life and his responsibility within it. I wanted to rest in that hallowed place so badly I could taste it but the writing I was doing was paltry and stunted. Would that ever change? I wondered.
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
