I came into the living room and rolled my eyes at the sight of Frodo on the television screen. Don't get me wrong-- I liked all the Lord of the Rings films the first ten or so times I saw them. Except for the time that mom subjected me to a line-by-line of the differences from how it was in the books.
A.: Can I change the channel or turn off the TV?
Mom: Sure, I'm not watching it. But you know, I have a theory about this: writers feel what's going on around them. Writers, they don't try-- it just comes to them. Tolkein's writing was allegorical, so was-- what's her name, the woman who wrote Harry Potter. It comes to them, and they have to put it in writing.
A.: You know, Malcolm Gladwell had a really interesting piece about that in the New Yorker a month or so ago...
Mom: Did he agree with me?
A.: Not quite...
Mom: Then he's wrong. I know.
Mom went on. About allegory, about left and right brains, about how everyone knows that (whatever that is), about how she doesn't care about what the New Yorker has to say-- they just write what they want.
Mom: Don't tell me there's no such thing as intuition.
A.: I don't recall saying that.
Mom: It's how three people knew that you were okay and one even knew you were on the train.
I didn't say, "you should have called a psychic last night to find out whether I was still at Cabot's."
Mom: People have intuition.
A.: I'm not disagreeing with you about that...
Mom: No! It's a left brain thing, everyone knows that.
A.: Mom, I'm leaving.
Mom: Wait, listen to me.
A.: I don't even know what we're talking about anymore.
Mom: Are you saying there is no such thing as intuition?
That's perhaps the most enjoyable part of trying to have an adult conversation with mom. If you disagree with her about something, she'll generalize that to everything remotely related to what you're talking about.
Mom: Logic alone can't fix everything. This reality will come to you. I think in part you already understand it. You've made a lot of good decisions-- except, of course, deciding to major in psychology. Maybe you needed to do that too to set yourself on the right path, although in that case it was an awfully expensive way to experiment.
More about left brains, right brains, Pushkin, Bulgakov. She was still going when I got up and left to blog.
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10 months ago
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2 comments:
I've been reading (and really enjoying) your blog all Thanksgiving, and somehow your mother managed to hit upon the one opinion that drives me crazy.
My sister insists on claiming that my job as a full-time writer was easy, b/c writers just intuit everything and write down all of the stuff in their imagination. It's so much fun, right?
She still doesn't quite understand why I quit my 60 hour a week job to start a family -- because it was "so easy" for me.
This is something only a non-writer would claim. In my opin, writing is kind of like sports in that we put a lot of work into making the extremely hard look effortless. And that's why you would never find a working writer that would claim that their job is easy. Ever. And writers have been around for quite a while now, so that's a pretty long record of "not easy."
I don't disagree that we intuit a lot of what we write, but if we wrote down exactly what we intuited it wouldn't make much sense -- that's where stuff like craft and manipulation comes in.
Just b/c you love what you do doesn't mean that it's easy. In fact, I would argue that it's easier to do something that you don't love.
However, I don't bother to correct people so much anymore, because there's something in people working miserable jobs (especially Americans) that needs to believe that when you do something you love that it's easy. That's the real American dream. And it's totally bogus. But it seems too sad to burst their bubble.
oh, and great New Yorker article. seriously every artist should read it.
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