On Saying What’s Difficult

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How Stephen King Helped Me Grapple with My Nonfiction Project

Earlier this week, for reasons I’ll discuss below, I happened upon a Stephen King quote from On Writing. Here it is:

“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them—words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”

I was doubly surprised to read this quote. First, I was surprised that it came from a fiction writer: I’d always thought of “Say out loud, with moist eyes, the thing that means most to you” as more of a nonfiction thing, since it seems to involve a turn-to-the-camera directness that I don’t associate with (good) fiction.

Second, I was surprised to hear it from Stephen King. I read On Writing when I was about 20 years old, and I found it mostly annoying, a book of floaty pontifications “on writing” that aren’t very efficient at telling you, in plain language, how to write. I’m sure that’s how I would have found the passage above, at the time.

This time, though, I felt that Stephen King beautifully expressed something I feel, and had been only dimly aware of feeling. I’m at work on a nonfiction manuscript, and am encountering a lot of emotional instability around it. The straightforward reason, to paraphrase King, is because my treasure is treasure to me, and I don’t want to learn that it is not treasure to others.

When I look more closely, it’s tricky to find what about this hurts so much. It seems very grown-up, and not very painful, to accept that life is much bigger than what is life-defining for me. Marine biologists don’t need to drop their research to read what I, or anyone, has to say: in fact, they probably wish we would relax our own preoccupations for long enough to watch their lovingly edited YouTube video of a translucent shrimp that glows like the furnace of creation. How can you not think this is the coolest thing? we both ask, refreshing our analytics hopefully.

And I feel quite excited to share what I treasure with people who do appreciate it, however many people that is; it certainly doesn’t have to be the whole world. Even one person who took the time to explore my mind, as best I can organize it for them in words, would be such a gift. I’m a bit afraid that I could not best arrange myself for them, but I feel that, probably, I could. Something about the work involved is scary, though, like the home of my mind suddenly having houseguests. There’s also something about saying my dearest truths in a way that I can’t take back, which feels like having houseguests forever, even as I continue to renovate. Whatever; these are more musings than obstacles.

Here it is, if this resonates with anyone else: it’s loneliness and insecurity. Life is a bright, stained-glass thing, and I question whether I have the right to distract others from theirs to invite them to look at mine. Would they even like it? Intellectually, I’m sure they would. I’ve just been rather lonely for a long time, and I’m not sure what to do with the opposite feeling, or even how to want the opposite feeling, or even what to call it.

Writing, In Quotes

When the writers.com staff went to AWP in march, we printed up some lovely stickers to hand out. That meant diving deep into the archive of quotes on writing, looking for things that are inspiring, pithy, and not too overused.

You can learn a lot about a field this way, by seeing how quotes tend to bucket into themes. Here are a few buckets I found for writing overall:

Writing is Powerful

“A word after a word after a word is power.” ―Margaret Atwood
“You can make anything by writing.” ―C.S. Lewis
“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” ―Anne Frank

Writing is Hard

“The first draft of anything is shit.” ―Ernest Hemingway
“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” ―Thomas Mann
“Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.” ―Norman Mailer

Writing is Scary

“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” ―Sylvia Plath
“I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged.” ―Erica Jong
“Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.” ―George Orwell

Writing is Necessary

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” ―Ray Bradbury
“Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.” ―Grace Paley
“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters.” ―Virginia Woolf
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” ― Maya Angelou

Writing is all these things, and what emerges from these quotes is that we are not alone in feeling the challenge and the discouragement and the hope of adding our voices to the cacophany of being. I’m personally finding that kind of overwhelming, and again, it’s intellectually comforting to know that lots of famous names have felt similarly. However, the underlying realities that generated these quotes are there for each of us to process in our own ways. In my case, I feel that this is definitely a combination of growing as a writer and as a person, which I’m happy to approach as two intertwined processes that reinforce one another.

One other element to name is the breathless quality that emerges about writing itself. (Of course, a quote must be interesting, so quotes will tend to sound emphatic about something.) As time passes, I feel more and more that this breathless quality is warranted. I dislike drama—perhaps especially the bourgeois, low-stakes drama of struggling to be A Writer—but the plain truth is that writing anything you really care about is dramatic. It is naked and scary, forlorn, hopeful, an offering, a bid for connection, a gesture of love. It is beautiful.

If you really like any of these stickers, or if there are any quotes you want to see stickerized, let me know, and we can see about setting up a little sticker shop. Why not?