Maybe I’m going about this the wrong way. I’ve spent a lot of time in the past few days thinking in big headlines like: “What Is the Writer?” and “The Difference Between Artist and Writer”.
Living with an artist (yes, Mark) gives me lots of time for comparing myself to him and him to myself, backwards and forwards, upside and down. I’m realizing that concentrating on being a full-blown writer ultimately means this: sitting alone in a room with armwarmers and glasses.
my trusty Peruvian armwarmers
I love the creatures I find when I’m alone in my room. Mystical creatures who roam the landscapes of my dark mind, who are transformed and made immortal by choice of words. Rhythm! Rhythm! My beautiful children, sleep on my fingertips, ride the foams of imagination.
But then there are the dreaded Hours Inbetween . . . Sitting at a wild party, realising I have nothing to say. Want to get to know me? Come to my readings. All I have to say, I say there. Thinking: “Get me back on the stage so that I can show you 100% of myself. This person you see now, she’s not even 50% me. Let me write and I will show you who I am.”
So we come to the realisation that as a human being who does not write, I am a merry extrovert. But as a writer currently working on something, I am an absolute introvert – and there’s no finding me, no catching me on the phone, no getting me to meet up. I recently participated in a “guerrilla exhibition” in the neighborhood. I exhibited my collages. Or rather: I hung them up and ran away. A journalist caught it on camera:
writer escapism © Südwest Presse
Where does the human end and the writer begin? How to balance the two? Or rather: remember the film The Hours? The soul of the writer caught on 35mm. And the dialogue between Clarissa (Meryl Streep) and the writer Richard always stayed with me, ever since I first heard it so many years ago:
Clarissa Vaughn: You don’t have to go to the party, you don’t have to go to the ceremony, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. You can do as you like.
Richard Brown: But I still have to face the hours, don’t I? I mean, the hours after the party, and the hours after that…
It’s all about the hours. The hours between performing, the hours between writing. Who are we then? Who is the writer when she just put down her pen and goes grocery shopping? How do we balance between so many worlds?
I swear it would be easier to be a rock star. I’m looking at Amanda Palmer in her underwear, cheekily playing the piano, suddenly tearful, brutally honest, beautiful as she bares her breasts and spreads her wings.
Being a rock star seems like such a delightful way to balance the extroverted nature with an extroverted art. Writers live in their heads, among joyful creatures no one else can see, that they can smell taste touch. That they have affairs with, whose flesh they dig into and whose souls they shudder. Writers fly in their realms like gods – and the higher we fly into the sky, the less anyone can see of us from the ground.
How invisible are you in your life, Gabriel Garcia Marquez? How did you balance writing with living, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry?
Maybe it’d be easier with an alternate ego. You have to be careful with alter egos though: I had one once but she was useless because she forgot she was a writer and just got drunk.
So let’s invent one right now and we can call her “Kohl Eyed Sonq’o”. She’ll be the rock star when I just put down my pen. She’ll be the one who talks at parties. She’ll remind me to be bold, bare my breasts and spread my wings. Above all: she will be the rock star in the writer.
Writers, don’t get stuck in your heads. Find a way to live in both worlds.
A Journal on Being a Writer 