On Writing, Part Deux

Writing with "confident humility," plus, wise words from Jim Harrison, Mary Karr, and the Hillbilly Dalai Lama

Me, after coming off deadline

Editor’s Note:  Have a question about why this piece is called “On Writing, Part 2?” Because Matt already wrote “On Writing” back in 2022. And he is a sequentially-oriented person. Have less obvious questions? Give it your best shot and Ask Matt at askmattlabash@gmail.com. They don’t have to be great. Matt is a connoisseur of mediocrity.

Editor’s Note, Part 2: Yes, Matt knows today’s the third anniversary of January 6, but he’s not writing about that this morning. He did, however, put a commemorative party planning announcement out yesterday.

Dear Matt,
I don’t necessarily want to be you when I grow up. One of you is plenty. But I would like to do what you do. Not overusing em dashes, but writing for a living. Yet I seem to have trouble letting go when I sit down at my MacBook. Any advice on what I should be thinking about when trying to do so?
Kenny T.  

This seems like a question I should answer, since as of this writing, there are 8.1 billion people in this world, and roughly half of them have Substacks. The very first thing you should do is get a PC. Apple is the devil. The second thing you should do when thinking about how to write is to think about how not to think about how to write. By which I don’t mean to suggest you shouldn’t be your own ruthless editor. (I, for instance, wanted to set this off with an em dash, but opted for parentheses instead, since I am my own pitiless prison warden.)  But when overthinking about how to run, you can paralyze yourself into never even trying to walk. Motion is your friend. It gives you rearview perspective on where you’ve been, and brings you closer to where you think you want to go, or helps you realize that you picked the wrong destination, and need to head elsewhere.

Stay in motion. But also, don’t be afraid to sit still. Sorry, but as a writer, you need to get comfortable with embracing contradictions, since your subject (presumably life), contains a countless number of those.

Too many writers are forever in motion. Thinking they need to react to every cultural hiccup, burp, and fart, and therefore, don’t sit still long enough with their thoughts to have any thoughts worth having, let alone expressing. It’s not a crime to sit still for days or weeks or months, thinking about a subject, letting your mind butt up against it, unwinding its complexities and paradoxes, so that when you do say something, you’re worth listening to. The internet has sped up all of our metabolisms, fooling us into believing that he who clocks in most regularly is worth hearing out, often due to the quantity of their pronouncements rather than the quality of them. Writing for a living involves balancing these two things. Because if you don’t write often enough, you’re not going to make any kind of living. But if you write too much, you risk saying things when you have nothing to say. This is a tension you will forever feel. The faster you recognize and embrace that tension, the easier it is to live with.

Remember, always, that words should bring pleasure of some sort. Even if you’re describing painful things or events. Words are like musical notes at our disposal which contain within them damn near every possibility, to help us sing every song in the songbook. As well as songs that have not yet been sung. (Hopefully, your future tunes.) I’ve been doing this professionally for three decades, and have yet to exhaust words, even if I overuse plenty of them. I’m particularly partial to “Slapnuts,” a name I first heard my wife’s country uncle call me — affectionately, I choose to believe.

There are infinite combinations of words that can help us and our readers go to places we haven’t been before. Though most writing that resonates is about striking chords of recognition in others, to give voice to what people already know in their bones, but have not yet verbalized to themselves. It is your job as a writer to find those words, and arrange them in the proper order to elicit such reactions and memories and forgotten epiphanies, as well as to jog new thoughts. This is not overly easy. If it were, everyone would be doing it. And though everyone writes nowadays on their social media-oversharing forums of choice, too many are clearly unable to do that. If you are, then maybe you should become a writer. The world’s not going to miss you too much if you don’t. God knows we have enough writers already. But the world won’t begrudge you if you beautify or illuminate your little corner of it, either. Illumination and beauty being something of which there’s never an oversupply.

Too often, these days, especially in journalism world, we’ve given up pleasurable writing for its own sake in order to forcibly educate, or denigrate, or to pound polemical nails into reader foreheads. Just the other day, an old friend of mine — a journalist whose prose I revere as much as any other’s  — passed along a New Statesman piece posing the question: “Why does no one write like Tom Wolfe anymore?”  As a lifelong Wolfe fan, I’d say it’s a fair question which the author does an admirable job of grappling with. Though the easiest and most obvious answer is that nobody writes like Tom Wolfe anymore for the same reason nobody plays basketball like Michael Jordan. Because Wolfe/Jordan were singular talents in their fields, and did things other people in their game aren’t capable of doing.

Though as my friend pointed out, what’s most notable is that few even bother to attempt to fall short of the glory of Wolfe:

Literary talent is always rare, what's rarer today than earlier eras is the ambition -- who wants to worry about developing literary skill when the main goal is owning the libs or stopping the fascists from banning "My Mommy is a Daddy" from the local preschool? Politics has ruined all that. I can't really speak for other kinds of nonfiction. There must be good stuff out there, but I never see it. Way back when, even a mainstream hack like Jimmy Breslin had higher aspirations and everyone at the New Yorker wanted to be Thurber or White or Liebling.

As I recall Wolfe himself once saying  — for the life of me, I can’t find the precise quote, so I’m paraphrasing — politics wreck everything. But whether or not you’re writing about the world’s second oldest profession (Ronald Reagan once quipped that “I’m beginning to think it bears resemblance to the first”), you should approach what you write with confident humility. By which I mean believe in what you’re doing, or try to if you’re not quite sure of it. Write with gusto, like you mean it and there are stakes. But also, be humble before words. There is always the chance they will fail you, or more likely, you will fail them, since they already exist independently of you, and are there for the taking. Your job is to find the right words to put in the right place. Mary Karr nicely summed up this tension in The Art of Memoir: “As with everything I’ve ever written, I start out paralyzed by fear of failure. The tarantula ego—starving to be shored up by praise—tries to scare me away from saying simply whatever small, true thing is standing in line for me to say.”

So don’t write scared.  And try to do one of two things with your writing. Think new thoughts, or at least thoughts you haven’t heard expressed 100 other places in the last two weeks. Or, since there is nothing new under the sun (including this phrase), try to state the same thoughts more artfully or truthfully than you’ve heard them expressed elsewhere. Because truth and beauty are their own reward, both for the writer and the reader, if the reader has any taste. Some don’t. Some people merely read to have their prejudices affirmed or to adopt the latest signifiers of their chosen tribe. Which is a sad way to read or live. So maybe you’re better off without them.

Lastly, don’t forget to live, so you have something to write about. Writing shouldn’t be a substitute for life, but a reflection of it. Take it all in. Notice things. Write them down, and don’t assume you’ll remember them, because even stagnant lives pass by in a blur. “Beware, o wanderer, the road is walking too,” Jim Harrison once wrote, ripping off Rilke. And speaking of my late sensei Harrison, of whom I have written here before, he was a man whose life and work blended seamlessly, often indistinguishable from each other. I’ll let him take us out with a lengthy quote from his collection, The Search For The Genuine, with a hat tip to Literary Hub for this excerpt, since I read the book on audio and wouldn’t have had it laid out before me otherwise:

To answer this question has put me into a sump, a well-pit, a quandary I haven’t visited in years. Here are a number of answers. My love of life is tentative so I write to ensure my survival. I try to write well so I won’t be caught shitting out of my mouth like a politician. To the old banality “Eat or die,” I add “Eat and write or die.” After writing I often read Brillat-Savarin, also cookbooks, on the toilet. Then I try to cook as well as I hope I write. After a nap, I write again, in the manner of an earthdiver swimming in the soil to understand the roots and tendrils of trees. I anchor myself to these circular life processes so as not to piss away my life on nonsense. I hunt and fish because it helps my writing. Novels and poems are the creeks and rivers coming out of my brain. I continue writing in bleak times to support my wife and daughters, my dogs and cats, to buy wine, whiskey, food. I write as an act of worship to creatures, landscapes, ideas that I admire, to commemorate the dead, to create new women to love. Just now while listening to the blizzard outside I poured a huge glass of Bordeaux. This is what I call fun! Rimbaud said, “Everything we are taught is false.” I believed him when I was eighteen and still do. Writers are mere goats who must see the world we live in but have never discovered. I write to continue becoming an unmapped river. It suits me like my skin.

Bonus Track: Here’s the man Kinky Friedman calls “the hillbilly Dalai Lama.” I just saw Willie Nelson play last summer at the age of 90, and if the outlaw country legend has lost a step, it was lost on me. Willie, more than most, has made a life of walking his own path, writing his own songs his way. In fact, he wrote a song about it, called “Write Your Own Song.”

Sample lyric:
You call us heathens with zero respect for the law
We are only songwriters just writing our songs and that's all
We write what we live and we live what we write is that wrong
If you think it is Mr. Music Executive
Why don't you write your own songs