I tried. I went away, to have adventures; I’d lived a sheltered, landlocked life, too, and maybe I needed that shock and grope we experience when stripped of our context. What the hell had I experienced? What real experience had I even seen? I lived in France for a year, ate the bread and cheese and drank the red wine, hoping the babble of another language would send me scurrying back into my own. I traveled a lot, Italy and Russia and Greece, sat for hours in cafés thinking profound thoughts, pen frozen in hand, as everything ticked away. I berated myself for wasting time, for being a big lazy adverb of a person. I did write stacks of cheery, chatty postcards and voluminous letters, about food and hairstyles and the latest fresco or fountain I’d seen, the latest guy I’d slept with, the magnificent inspiration with which I was constantly being suffused — five hundred words a day was easy, as long as they weren’t intended to be five hundred words of real writing. I tried to meet Sophie or Nathan or revolutionaries, people with bigger stories I could learn from, but it was mostly other American students with backpacks looking for adventures of love and death to write about, too. Everywhere I went I bought blank books — charming French schoolchildren’s notebooks, Florentine hardcovers with bargello or marbled designs — that I was too scared to stain with my puling adolescent self-pity or insignificant observations. I amassed a large collection of them, lugged them around from country to country, and waited for border guards to menacingly ask me what my occupation was and would I write of my impressions. I took good care of those empty, hopeful books, because I hoped one day I’d open them and find them magically full of words.
Because, I realized, I still had no clue where those words came from. Not only did I have nothing to write about, I couldn’t even get past the mechanics; I couldn’t translate real thought out of myself and into the written word and onto the page. I was full up on images of the Writer at Work, the montage of typing and drinking beer, the European wandering. But I wasn’t getting how words — real words, serious, written-down words — take shape to form people and pictures and tales that burst Athena-like out of your brain. Even if I found something to write about, I still had no idea how to make the writing happen. I’d learned all I could about How to Be a Writer; but without the writing, I was nothing. I stopped telling people I was going to be a writer. It was too late. If it hadn’t happened by now, it never would.
What a failure. What a fraud. How would I ever face Julia again?
It’s difficult to capture and depict the internal creative process visually. Movies about painters or dancers can show us how early daubs of paint evolve into Art on the canvas; the dancer straining to stretch at the barre can suddenly break into graceful grand jetés. We can watch the dance; we can gaze at the painting. Movies about musicians might show us Mozart or Beethoven in the messy, cacophonous act of composition, but then we get to hear the magnificent opera or concerto; a sculptor’s lump of clay or block of marble becomes the Pietà or Camille Claudel’s famous foot. Perhaps we can’t touch, but we can still study and appreciate the product, not just the process. We can watch a writer write (or eat a sandwich or stretch or gaze out the window), but you can’t visually depict the inner workings of the writer’s brain, the translation of cerebral electricity to language, the actual transformation of thought, image, theme, emotion, character, into mere words on a page. Thank God movies show us writers doing battle and making love! You can see the product only at a remove — that book on the shelf, that one perfect page of a Lara poem, perhaps a scribbled line or two of text — and you can’t see the process at all, not really.
Then, Garp. I saw The World According to Garp in 1982, and for the first time I truly saw a writer writing.104 Young Garp announces he’s going to be a writer in order to impress young Helen, who is a reader, not a writer, but announces she’ll only marry a writer, and a real writer at that. (Helen echoes Yuri’s Tonia, here — Garp, a wrestler, asks if she’d ever marry a wrestler, but Helen replies only if it were a wrestler who’s also a writer, a real writer.) Garp immediately tells her he spends a lot of time imagining things — it’s part of his training as a writer, a real writer. Later, when a different girl he’s sleeping with asks Garp how he knows he’s going to be a writer, he replies with enviable assurance:
GARP
It’s just something you know.
GIRL
What are you going to write about?
GARP
My life, once I’ve experienced enough.
I expect we will now see Garp go on to have meaningful experiences, but we just cut to Garp, sitting in his room, facing the typewriter. I’m waiting (yawn) for the archetypal montage — the eating of a sandwich, the seconds of typing, the bottle of beer, the pacing. Perhaps he’ll throw the typewriter out the window, he’ll bemoan (yawn) how it’s all falling apart again. I dully wonder what he possibly has to write about — even he knows he hasn’t experienced enough. All those generic, fleeting images of writers have gone flat and mystery-less for me. Garp looks out his window, through the slats of Venetian blinds; he blinks and sees his neighbor playing jazz; blink, the memory image of his playing as a child at his grandparents’ beach house (!); blink, he sees himself wrestling; blink, he’s running across a field with Helen, trying to recapture hundreds of loose, escaping pages whirling about. It’s the oddest beginning to a writing montage I’ve seen, and I perk up, just a bit.
He goes for a walk in the city; movers are trying to get a grand piano into an upper-floor apartment window; there’s a couple getting out of a cab and arguing; there’s a glove lying in the gutter. We’re suddenly back with Garp at his typewriter, and suddenly the couple are in his head, fighting about their relationship; the man is then hovering four flights overhead, playing the hoisted, dangling piano; the woman is begging him not to jump; the man tosses down to her a glove as a token of love, and it symbolically lands in the gutter. Garp is taking these bits and pieces of life and weaving them into a story; we’re inside his head, we’re seeing him do this. It’s the first visual depiction of the writing process I’ve ever seen; it’s like snapshots of cerebral impulses, clicking the pictures he sees in his mind. It doesn’t involve words, it can’t—this is a movie, we’re here to watch images, not to read — but it’s a quilt of impressions, a weaving together of images stitched into narrative. It’s Rumpelstiltskin; it’s profoundly generative; it’s photosynthesis, gleaning nourishment from the very air.
This is writing, I think! This is what a writer does, how he does it. I get it, for the first time, and I feel hope. You don’t need to go to Europe or have wild adventures or tap the lifeblood of a mysterious and suffering stranger’s soul — just look out the window, look around you, observe the glove in the gutter and fancy how it got there, speculate on the strolling couple in crisis. Create experience out of that; insight into the human condition is just seeing, then connecting the dots. And being able to witness this excites me — it has finally morphed in my mind from theoretical discussion to tangible process and form.