Craft Talk

When people ask me what I do, I sigh and answer that I’m a writer. I sigh because that’s a preemptive strike against their yawn. And they will yawn, after pressing me about what it is that I’m writing. Copy, I say. They look blank. Feature stories, I add, and they might perk up until they hear that the stories aren’t for Vanity Fair.

I hate disappointing them. I hate them being sad for me. So I go on to say that I’m also writing a novel. And of course they ask What Is It About. I used to give a synopsis, but yawn! I have thus reduced my novel’s subject to one line: nineteenth-century gynecology. No one, and this is not an exaggeration—not one person—has ever asked for more.

Writers, in my opinion, shouldn’t talk about their writing, at least not while they’re writing it. The talking chews the sugar out of the gum. By the time the writer gets down to her computer or notebook, the energy is gone. And anyway, how do we know what we’re writing until we’ve written it? We shouldn’t know. “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader” (Robert Frost). Why is surprise so important? Familiarity of a certain kind, to my mind, is the writer’s worst enemy.

What is this certain kind of familiarity? More on that…