What Must We Write?

In her essay “In Praise of Panic,^[1]” novelist Stephanie Danler writes about the necessity of staying close to your own core emotions. In one jokey passage, she writes:

Writing can be taught. It’s not magic. It’s a technology for communication, and one can only hope it is our most enduring one. The best way to become a better writer is to read as widely as possible and then find a subject that keeps you up at night. There, I just saved you two years and fifty thousand dollars on an MFA.

But jokes aside, I think we can only write well about things that keep us up at night. We talk about a writers’ themes, but I think those are only externally applied names for the writer’s barely-identified inner obsessions, the itch they just have to scratch over and over again.

Joan Didion wrote five novels and ten books of nonfiction between 1963 and 2021. They’re all different. They’re all about different places and times and characters. But at the root of all of them, I think, is the question of what we do when we discover we’ve been lied to. So many of her stories are about someone who’s been betrayed: by their culture, by their men, by political forces that emerge from across the horizon, by their belief that they’ll be protected by beauty or money. To use a sports analogy, she writes about people who learned the rules and played the game, had some early successes—and then all their points were taken off the scoreboard and the rules changed, never again to be explained at all. 

That’s a reasonable thing to write about for a girl born to Sacramento wealth and political power in the 1930s and ‘40s, who saw everything about California’s social structures come apart in the 1950s through 1980s. Someone took her silver spoon away, and she never recovered. (And I say that as someone who deeply admires her work. Joan Didion taught me how paragraphs work.)

Walter Tevis wrote six novels, all of which are about someone with an early sense of mission and mastery, a clear arc toward success, derailed by one’s own distractions and vices, but later (usually, not always) to recover a more mature version of that first mission. 

• Eddie Felson, the pool player distracted by gambling and gamblers, who remembers in the end why he plays.
• Thomas Jerome Newton, the alien who comes to take Earth’s water for his dying planet, and discovers alcoholism instead.
• Beth Harmon, the chess prodigy who loses her drive to drinking and uppers and anger, but who emerges with a purer respect for the game and her talents. 

That’s a reasonable thing to write about for a boy with rheumatic fever who lived in a children’s convalescent hospital for a couple of years, a boy who became a man who lost a prodigious writing talent to two decades of gambling and drinking and teaching college. A man who finally quit it all, moved to Manhattan and wrote for four brilliant, scorching years before dying way too young. 

Every writer has only one tale to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more precise, more and more reverberating.

James Baldwin

Kenzaburo Oe’s work is inescapably linked to his life as father to a disabled son. Nevada Barr’s mysteries are all about a person who deeply loves the innumerable forces and expressions of nature, but whose National Parks job inevitably brings her into disappointing contact with mere humans.

Write what you know, they say. I know nothing of being a championship-level athlete at the end of high school, or of raising an adoptive daughter. I know nothing of driving a plow truck or raising field corn, of running a tavern or being a structural engineer. But I do know what it means to look like I’m doing okay from the outside, and know that I’m collapsing inside. I know what it means to have my work not pay off, and have to build a new life from old skills. I know what it means to have to choose between a good thing and another good thing.

Write what you know. Find a subject that keeps you up at night. Every writer has only one tale to tell.

And you may not recognize what that is for a long, long time.

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^[1] In The Sewanee Review, Fall 2023.