There are lots of things I know and might pass on. But to have a chance they have to be said at the right time, when people are ready. This is something I can only intuit.
*
After a few weeks, something good is happening. All the students seem to be writing, both in the workshop and outside. At the end of each weekly meeting, they hand me more and more scripts and stories. Having read them I will sit with the writer, trying to say something which will make him want to continue, or which makes him see that he’s found an idea or image that could be pursued further, which is a key to the way he sees the world. What interests or confuses me is the unevenness of their work — how they can write something shockingly compelling and original one day and hopeless and clichéd the next. I guess you couldn’t have one without the other; perhaps one makes the other. It’s odd, too, how sometimes they cannot tell the difference between the good work and the not-so-good.
Anyway, there are never going to be immediate results. Why should there be? A good deal of writing work is waiting, or gestation. The teacher and the writer both have to learn to wait, even when you’re not certain that anything at all will turn up. Of course, in writing it’s only yourself you’re waiting for. That is the fantasy, or attraction of writing for some people, I believe; the fact there is no dependence on others.
Some people from my groups have become better writers; a few, ten years after they came to the group, have begun to make a living at it, having written successful first novels or plays. The point for me isn’t to turn out writers in the way a technical college turns out bricklayers, but to use writing, as one might use anything else — drawing, say — to remake the world and think about the way one lives in it. Anyone can do this.
*
Usually, at the beginning of a workshop, I go around the circle and ask why people have come. I want to know why and how writing might be difficult — or how difficult they want it to be, and where that sense of difficulty originates — and whether there’s a particular aspect of writing which bothers the students.
In this workshop the replies were intriguingly puzzling. Usually they’re along the lines of, ‘how should you write dialogue?’, ‘how do you get ideas?’ and even ‘how do you get out of bed and to your desk every day?’ On this occasion, however, four people, in different ways, said ‘structure’. A young man asked how he should ‘connect’ the various bits of his writing, saying he wrote different parts of a piece and then couldn’t put them together.
These questions perplexed me because the ‘structure’ of a piece is often something that occurs quite late. Normally you can only decide what to do with what you’ve got when you can see what it is that’s there. I assume that if the writer keeps looking at it, some sort of solution will occur, a solution that will be, that could only be, in the writer’s own voice. However many books you’ve read or films seen, the piece you’re working on will have its own peculiar problems to which you can only find a resolution according to the sort of person you are. The decisions you make can only come from you; they should only come from you and the characteristic way you think, otherwise the piece’s form will only be conventional and something fresh might have been lost. First drafts are usually more original than finished work.
People’s concerns about writing are also another way for them to talk about their lives. Daily writing, or the project of becoming a writer, can give ‘structure’ to a life, to people who feel their lives are unorganised. For young people in particular — and those who have recently left home — there can be too much experience and not enough understanding. While writing is a way of integrating unacceptable material into a life, the daily practice itself, the contract you have made with yourself to continue, along with the regularity of the workshops, will provide the form, framework and inevitability which parents and school once gave. Attending a weekly workshop can provide an important shape. You can only orient yourself in terms of other people. Nevertheless, it is the writing in between, that which people do outside the workshop, which matters most.
Of course, as every school kid and teacher knows, all classrooms are sexual sites. A writing workshop is always going to be more erotic than sitting alone at a desk, which can, for some people, be a way of avoiding bodies. Sometimes the students want to learn but sometimes they just want the teacher. Or they need someone in authority to make a demand on them. They need confirmation that what they want to do is worth the effort, and that they are not writing into a vacuum.
Their fear is of speaking with no one listening. Even worse is the common fear that others might listen but be bored, or turned off by what is being said. Of course, we know what this is like. Not only are we bored by others occasionally, but we are bored by having the same thoughts, fears and words in our minds for years. If we are to hear new stories, the old ones have to come into contact with reality. The question then becomes: can we do something with the past rather than have it merely haunt or oppress us? This need to create narrative and meaning — or new meaning — is not an indulgence or luxury, but an imperative for some people in certain circumstances, an alternative to various kinds of repetition or even breakdown.
*
One young man wants to talk to the group about his fear of being pretentious. He says his brother is an electrician whose existence seems to mock the young man’s stated but shaky intention to write. Being an electrician is its own justification. You can’t have enough electricians. A writer isn’t like a scientist either, who has studied and passed his exams. Any old scientist has the right to call himself a scientist, but when do you earn the right to call yourself a writer? In my view, this doesn’t seem to matter. It is the activity rather than the label which counts. I want to move on. But the group insists we discuss this for a while. It’s important to them to worry about the circumstances in which you can legitimately call yourself, or ‘come out’, as a ‘writer’. If others can recognise what you are, you’re more likely to accept it yourself.
Behind this, I realise, is a certain amount of shame. It reminds me of the shame some actors feel at their profession and the feeling that what they do is really rather childish, not grown-up enough, and that people should grow out of their day-dreams as, they believe, all adults do.
Any kind of writing is an act of faith. At first it is a ‘relation’ but not yet a relationship. The writer has to believe, somehow, that not only does he have something to say, but that he is of interest to others; that he can engage rather than bore them, that he can stimulate desire and curiosity in other people. He has to believe in the future, believe that writing this page today will, in the years to come, be sufficiently alive for others so that they might even pay to read it.