The Intuitionist

In the short run, I think, the intellectual satisfaction that came of doing criticism and philosophy as an undergraduate put a damper on the instinctive feeling I had for fiction writing. The rigorous instruction I received in the forms and structures and tropes of literary composition was all analytical and perhaps induced a degree of self-consciousness about my own aspirations. The great philosophical questions were by turns thrilling and humbling. The philosophical categories were immediately and permanently useful, but it was all too easy to lose oneself in the philosophical diction. So that as relevant and invaluable as my education would turn out to be to my life as a writer, I would not settle down to write my first novel until I was years beyond graduation, married, a veteran myself and in my late 20s. I did do some writing at Kenyon, but what I turned out was mere mental exercise. I had gone backward, away from all that natural surging need to express something, anything, to something else--if not backward then certainly up to the regions of the brain, to calculation, study, research, to the conscious application of learning, all of it wrapped tightly in the longings of the ego.

The truth of the matter is that the creative act doesn't fulfill the ego but changes its nature. As you write you are less the person you ordinarily are--the situation confers strength. You learn to trust what comes to you unbidden. You learn to trust the act of writing itself. An idea, an image, a voice, comes to you as a discovery, and you don't possess what you write any more than the mountain climber possesses the mountain.

Writers write by trying to find out what it is they're writing. The artist Marcel Duchamp was once asked why he gave up painting: "Too much of it was filling in," he said. The worker in any medium had best give it up if he finds himself only filling in what has been previously declared and completed in his mind, a creative fait accompli. It is not that you have no intellect when you write. It is not that you have no convictions or beliefs. It is that nothing good will come of merely filling in what you already know. You must trust the act of writing to scan all the passions and convictions in your mind, but these must defer to the fortuitousness of the work; they must be of it. A book begins as an image, a sound in the ear, the haunting of something you don't want to remember, or perhaps a great endowing anger. But it is not until you find a voice for whatever it is going on inside you that you can begin to make a coherent composition. The language you find precedes your intention or, if not, is sure to transform it.

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