#michael cunningham

I’ve come to believe that there’s a fine line between what we refer to as “talent” and an equally inexplicable proclivity simply for keeping at it—for writing a sentence or paragraph over and over until it begins to come, haltingly, to life; for sitting there and sitting there until, finally, after an agonizingly long period, something I can only call transformation begins to occur. If you write a sentence often enough, if you keep trying it in different ways—find a less expected word in lieu of the obvious one, cut this or add that, look for resonances and associations that emanate beyond literal meanings, think in terms of a line’s rhythms and how it syncopates with the line that comes before and the one that comes after—if you zap the sewn-together corpse with enough electricity, it finally stirs, and opens its eyes. As Marilyn Monroe said, “I wasn’t the prettiest, I wasn’t the most talented, I just wanted it more than anybody else.”

My apologies, then, if apologies are called for, to our parents. It’s one of the fundamental inequities. People who’ve undertaken the work of parenting, who’ve survived tantrums and childhood terrors, who’ve tended to pets they never wanted and gone to pageants and softball games and made trips to emergency rooms, can still expect no mercy. I suspect many of us reinvent our families as we grow up. We reconsider them either as more or less than they were, more harmonious or more embattled, more neglectful or solicitous. The only difference for writers is that we set down our imaginings as the official version. It’s probably best, for families, if none of their children grow up to be writers.

Can you bear it if I compare the writing process to being in love? Both require an unfaltering interest in other people’s experience of being themselves. Both arrive with mysteries at their hearts. Familiarity grows, but in a love affair, and in the writing of fiction, you bump up eventually against the unknowable—the animating force you can circle around but never quite penetrate; that which is traditionally known as the soul. Both offer, in theory and often in practice, the end of loneliness. Writers have been writing about love for centuries. And about war, and defeat, and joy, and holiness…The list goes on. And on. We love stories, all kinds of them, because they awaken in us lost memories of lives we happen not to have lived. The best stories are the ones in which we experience, as we read them and after we’ve read them, a simultaneous sense of revelation and recognition. What we want, what we have every right to want, is our own biographies as lived by others.

We are, writers, readers, and everyone, whether we love our lives or not, compelled to watch time blow it all away. It’s the beauty and tragedy of us. We strive to see the horizon beyond the horizon. We do our work, we fall in love, we make plans and harbor the most extravagant hopes even as we know where it’s all headed. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep. I for one am not going to argue with Shakespeare. Like any writer, I’ve spent my life trying to preserve time, so that others will be able to open a book and not only see but feel that which rises up off the pages; to smell and taste; to hear, if faintly, songs that no one has sung in a century or more. We persist in the effort, even as we know that almost all our efforts will fail to one degree or another. It’s like trying to drive a nail into a pool of mercury.