'The Artist Knows He Is Ready'

A young reader complains that he’s “good with words” but doesn’t know what to write about. It sounds as though he seizes up when he sits down at the keyboard. To call his condition “writer’s block” would be premature. He’s too inexperienced for that to be happening already. The only way I know how to find a worthwhile subject, one that gives me plenty of room to domesticate and make my own, is to start writing – about what is unimportant, though it’s nice to get an invitation. Build up momentum and let it carry you. Reading helps – much of writing is a response to what has already been written, explicitly or otherwise. So does paying attention. I know from experience that tedium is often the product of my own dullness or laziness.

The ever-thinking Jules Renard writes in his journal on May 9, 1898: “Inspiration is perhaps merely the joy of writing: it does not precede writing.” This makes sense not as theory but practice. Even a tiresome writing job brings with it the pleasure (if not the “joy”) of satisfaction for an obligation fulfilled. Every such accomplishment is an opportunity to learn something – about the subject at hand and especially about words and how to artfully arrange them. The word we’re hovering gingerly around – Out of embarrassment? Out of vanity? – is inspiration. It’s a discredited idea, and certainly a lot of romanticized nonsense has been written about it, but Nabokov was a believer. I remember first reading his essay “Inspiration” in the Saturday Review while hitchhiking on the Ohio Turnpike in January 1973. Sumptuous as always with metaphors, Nabokov writes:

 

“One can distinguish several types of inspiration, which intergrade, as all things do in this fluid and interesting world of ours, while yielding  gracefully to a semblance of classification. A prefatory glow, not unlike some benign variety of the aura before an epileptic attack, is something the artist learns to perceive very early in life. This feeling of tickly well-being branches through him like the red and the blue in the picture of a skinned man under Circulation. . . . It expands, glows, and subsides without revealing its secret. In the meantime, however, a window has opened, an auroral wind has blown, every exposed nerve has tingled. Presently all dissolves: the familiar worries are back and the eyebrow redescribes its arc of pain; but the artist knows he is ready.”

 

[The line from Renard can be found in his Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).