Driving the work
Writing means learning lots of things and one of them is how to be a driver.
What does this mean? It means there’s no-one sitting next to us guiding, explaining, suggesting or taking responsibility. We are the driver. We’re in the car, on our own, we make our own decisions, take responsibility for where this car goes, how it goes. We make sure the car has enough petrol and is roadworthy. To make the car go we have be in the driving seat and we have to know where we’re going.
Writing is the same. We are the drivers. You might never ever want or be able to try for a license to drive a car, a plane, a boat or a train, but if you want to be a writer you have to drive the work. Yes you can be someone who writes a beautiful line, whose friends and parents tell you they’re wonderful, who sits and waits on ‘the muse’ and thinks everybody who doesn’t appreciate them is a barbarian, too young, too old, too lazy, too conservative to appreciate their genius. You can be all this, it’s really easy. But — if you want to be a writer you have to practice, learn the rules. You have and to develop judgement — about places to go, about choices, problems, the best routes to take. You have to learn the basics like grammar and punctuation; there are no other options.
It is clearly obvious that if a car is parked in a space it’s not going to go anywhere until someone gets in the driving seat, turns the ignition on, uses the gear lever, and gets the car moving. It’s the same with writing.
Oh but a story or a poem is not like a car, you cry. There’s something ‘mechanical’ about driving a piece of writing, perhaps commercial we don’t want to be thought commercial — surely the real writers are the ones who are inspired by ‘life’ and whose words just flow until there’s a collection of stories or a novel, a nonfiction work, or a long poem there on the screen.
So you’re saying it’s okay for the writing to just stay in the same place and not go anywhere?
Here’s the deal. If you want your writing to go somewhere, then you have to be the one who exercises judgement, makes the decisions, decides the destinations and, having done all this, drives the work to where it needs to go.
Once we accept this fact of writing life we move out of the parking space and go somewhere. Why? Because we are the drivers. We are writers.
