Writing Commandment Number Four: Be Purposeful

4. Be Purposeful

Lately I've been thinking a lot about the responsibility of a writer, if there is such a thing.

I wrote an earlier post in which I claim (with the help of Stephen King & others) that writing is a form of telepathy. Writing is a solitary act, yet it obviously invites others to participate after the act is completed.  My words and ideas, as I sit in my writing burrow (which is actually a little known place called Starbucks), are my own, yet they become yours as you read them.

This is a humbling concept.  To think of my words flooding another's mind is invigorating, surely, but also intimidating.  As a writer, I offer these words on the page, and the reader is free to converse with it, even disagree with it, but once I send it off, I am no longer active in the debate.  The writer must say what it needs to say or be left vulnerable to the reader, who, presumably, will have something to say about it.  It is up to me, the writer, to answer the questions of the reader, within the writing, before the reader has asked them, before they've even thought them.

How is one to do this?

You must know what is you mean to say, and say it.

That is not to say you have outlined the entire story and are closed to anything the text has to say about itself.  As any writer will tell you—if they are serious with themselves—The text, the story, is its own entity. It does have its own agenda, it leads you places, it skips parts and cuts characters and offers resolutions you may never have discovered if you tried to write the entire thing in your mind before setting it on paper.

This is what a first draft is for. Set down the story.  Follow it, move with it, figure out what it wants, but set it down.  Once you have done this you can, you must, figure out what it wants to say, and say it.
Revise it until it is clear.  Joyce Carol Oates says, "For the serious writer, writing is revision. For nothing is ever as good as it could have been" (In fact, she takes this Be purposeful commandment so far as to say, "The first sentence cannot be written until the last has been written").

The point is, there is no good writing that 'just happens,' inspired or otherwise.  You can't sit down with a character or a scenario and just write and write and write until you find something that resembles an ending.  Of course you could, but you should never leave it at that.

You need to ask what the story is about, what is it saying, what is it doing, who is it speaking to, and then revise, revise, revise.

At the same time, though, if I am causing these words, these ideas, to flood into your brain and potentially cause you to change the way you look at the world, the purpose of my story better be something of worth.

It's often said (and I won't deny the claim) that writing is therapeutic.  But if its only purpose is to help its author work through some unresolved issues, it will not be as powerful as it could be.  Writing needs to move out of the author's own sphere of thinking and into the world it has been created in.

But what is this worthwhile something? 

It's almost definitely going to be different for every writer writing.  And, for that matter, every reader reading.

Stephen King says (and I promise I'll stop talking about him, sometime): 'The job of fiction is to find the truth inside the story's web of lies..." Of course fiction isn't true, but it ought to offer a truth about the human experience.

The novels and stories that have most affected me, that have literally changed the way I view the world—Leo Tolstoy's, Anna Kerenina. Philip Roth's, American Pastoral. Lloyd Jones's, Mr. Pip. Carol Shields's, Stone Diaries. Emma Donoghue's, Room. Cormac McCarthy's, The Road. Don Delillo's, Falling Man. Lorrie Moore's, "People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling In Peed Onk." Joyce Carol Oates's, "The Girl With the Blackened Eye. Any of Alice Munro's stories. And I'm sure there are others—these stories have offered a true depiction of the world we live in.

None of them are identical, obviously.  But somehow they have managed to get outside of themselves and into the world, showing the reader something significant about this thing we call, Life.

As I write this, I have a picture of myself at seventy, eighty maybe, playing sudoko or working on a crossword puzzle, looking up from the newspaper (or some digital version), saying, "Who said that? Oh that wasn't me. That was some pretentious twenty-something-year-old who didn't have a clue, as if he had a sniff what Real Life was back then."

But for now—before I've even published a single work (don't tell anybody), before anyone would have any reason to listen to me—I'm willing to say that if you want to be taken seriously as a writer, as an artist, you must Be Purposeful.  You must figure out what your story needs to say, and say it in a way that is worthwhile to the reader, in a way that causes the reader to be forced into a confrontation with the true human experience, pleasant or otherwise.

At least that's what a young writer might think...