Necessary Distance: Afterthoughts on Becoming a Writer (1994)

People have a tendency to ask a writer, Why did you become a writer? How did you become a writer? Every writer hears such questions over and over. You ever hear anybody ask a butcher a question like that? So, what's so special about being a writer? Maybe we are simply fascinated by people who are brave (or foolish) enough to go against - and lucky enough to beat - the odds. We seem fascinated in the same way by the lives of people in show business, and probably for the sane reasons the lives of writers interest us. It is also always amazing to see someone making a living doing something he or she actually enjoys. I never seriously tried to deal with the questions till I was asked to write my life-story. If my autobiography were going to make sense, I thought I'd better try my best to answer both questions. So, my speaking this way to you is an effort to answer these questions - for myself and possibly for others. I don't expect to succeed - but here goes. It seems to me that the impulse to write, the need to write, is inseparable from one's educational process - which begins at the beginning and never ends. In some sort of non-objective way, I can remember being an infant and some of the things I thought about and touched. I had a sister, but my sister didn't have a brother. I had no self because I was all self. Gradually, like any developing kid, I shed my self-centered view of the world: saw myself reflected in my mother's eyes, began to perceive the idea of a self. In a way it was at this point that my research as a writer, and as a painter, began. (For me, the two impulses were always inseparable.) The world was a place of magic, and everything I touched was excruciatingly new. Without knowing it, my career had begun. In his meditation on the art of fiction, Being and Race, novelist Charles Johnson says, AU art points to others with whom the writer argues about what is. He must have models with which to agree or outright oppose for Nature seems to remain silent. . Reading this passage reminded me of Sherwood Anderson's short story Death in the Woods, in which the narrator retells the story (we are reading) because his brother, who had told it first, hadn't told it the way it was supposed to be told. In a similar way, that early self of mine had already started its long battle with the history of literature and art. In the early stages of that battle, some very primary things were going on. By this, I mean to say that a writer is usually a person who has to learn how to keep his ego - like his virginity - and lose it at the same time. In other words, he becomes a kind of twin of himself. He remains that self-centered infant while transcending him to become the observer of his own experience and, by extension, the observer of a wide range of experience within his cultural domain. Without any rational self-consciousness at all, early on, my imagination was fed by the need to invent things. My older cousins taught me how to make my own toys - trucks, cars, houses, whole cities. We used old skate wheels for tires. Our parents couldn't afford such luxuries as toys - we were lucky if we got new clothes. Watching physical things like the toys we made take shape, I think, showed me some possibilities. (William Carlos Williams said a poem is like a machine. If I understand what he meant, I can see a connection between what I was making at age seven and poems and stories I tried to write later on.) Plus the newness of everything - trees, plants, the sky - and the need to define everything on my own terms, were givens. At my grandparents' farm, my cousins and I climbed trees and named the trees we climbed. Painfully, I watched my uncle slaughter hogs and learned about death. I watched my grandmother gather eggs from the chicken nests and learned about birth. I watched her make lye soap and the clothes we wore. …