On Writing

Joseph Epstein" has a very funny, and highly critical, review of Alice Flaherty's The Midnight Disease, a book that seeks in neuroscience answers to questions about why writers write and what is happening when they cannot (a book, by the way, that was breathlessly reviewed recently on NPR). Epstein's specific criticisms of the book are pointed, but he is at his best when he is writing, with characteristic candor, about the reasons for writing:

"I was recently asked what it takes to become a writer. Three things, I answered: first, one must cultivate incompetence at almost every other form of profitable work. This must be accompanied, second, by a haugty contempt for all the forms of work that one has established one cannot do. To these two must be joined, third, the nuttiness to believe that other people can be made to care about your opinions and views and be charmed by the way you state them. Incompetence, contempt, lunacy �Eonce you have these in place, you are set to go."

Or this: "My own early drive to write was, I think, fairly typical, but since it conforms to none of Flaherty's categories, I wonder how she would deal with it. As a young would-be writer, I habored no elevated notions of bringing truth or beauty into the world. Instead I wanted, ardently, to bring me into the world: to call me to its attention. My desire to write, which began when I was twenty, was never separable from wanting to write for print. In my own little behaviorist Skinner box, I pecked at the lever that, I hoped, would deliver small but delicious pellets of praise."

Or this: "For the professional writer, at any rate, awaiting inspiration or the visit of a muse or the telltale twitch of the limbic system wil produce no better results than waiting for Godot, who, when I last checked, had yet to show up. My allusion to Godot came, I believe, not straight from my intact temporal lobe but from my careful study of how metaphors work and sheer jolly cleverness."

And finally this: "I should like Dr. Flaherty to know that my two motives in writing this essay have been, first, to collect a decent fee, and, second, to try to knock down her book as an assemblage of profoundly muddled notions that I, given my calling, find mildly but genuinely offensive."

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, April 04, 2004 at 11:13 PM

Permission is given to use material on this site, provided the source is cited, blog entries are republished in full, and the author is notified in advance.