Writer’s Mixed Motives
By Ralph Keyes
One of the more challenging aspects of being a writer is having to acknowledge such less-than-stellar reasons for writing. Ego. Anger. Envy. Spitefulness. Getting even. Showing off. To name just a few. Edna Ferber’s list of reasons to write included “Dislike, displeasure, resentment, fault-finding, imagination, passionate remonstrance, a sense of injustice — they all make fine fuel.”
The narcissism of writers has often been noted (not least by writers themselves). What’s seldom added is that it takes something as powerful as an unquenchable thirst for attention to trump the paralyzing fear of self-exposure all writers confront. Self-absorption is an occupational hazard of writing Or, should we say, a prerequisite. Why write at all if not to draw attention to one’s self? Robert Frost thought a writer’s prayer might be, “Oh, God, pay attention to me.”
The source of that hunger for attention routinely proves to be some slight, or many slights, left over from childhood. I’ll show them. They’ll see! The anger implicit in a drive to show them can be a rich source of energy. Writer after writer has acknowledged anger as one of the main reasons they return to their desk every day. Flaubert said the main thing that kept him writing was “a kind of permanent rage.” When an interviewer asked Philip Roth if he had a “Roth reader” in mind while writing, the author replied that actually he was more likely to have an “anti-Roth” reader in mind. “I think, “How he is going to hate this!’ That can be just the encouragement I need.”
John Gardner thought the psychological wounds that drove novelists like himself ‘feeling responsible for a fatal childhood accident, not feeling worthy of parental love, shame about one’s origins, embarrassment about one’s looks’ “all these are promising signs.”
No motive is too low for art,” Gardner concluded, “finally it’s the art, not the motive, that we judge.”
In the end, there is no other conclusion to draw. If writers tried to limit their motives to attractive ones there would be no writing, at least none worth reading. It is often the least attractive reasons to put words on paper that produce the very best writing. We find it hard to put down what is written with intensity, and nothing makes writing more intense than the writer’s need to settle some scores, get back at a few bullies, and show an eleventh-grade English teacher that his essay on The Scarlet Letter deserved better than a B-.
March 18th, 2007 at 8:35 pm
I’m sure that I’m guilty of many of the mixed motives you mention. Certainly I’m trying to prove my high school English teacher, Mrs. Schroeder, wrong when she told me, “You are the least likely college material I have ever taught.”
But I was surprised than no one mentioned writing as an effort to have an impact, which seems so obvious, and which I think has motivated me.
There is one more benefit to writing. In all of life, in the organizations you might have started, in relationships in which you were involved, the history of your behavior is in the hands of others. And I have been impressed by how different their memories of me are from my own, how history is continually rewritten. But writing a book…..ah, the words are mine and will be centuries from now. exactly as I wrote them. I find that quite satisfying, and perhaps even motivating.
March 20th, 2007 at 9:02 am
You’re certainly right, Richard, and I hardly meant to imply that negative motives were the only ones driving writers. But I don’t think they’re given their proper due, especially among non-writers. That’s why I was so struck by Pamuk’s list of his own reasons for putting words on paper.
March 21st, 2007 at 6:18 am
Exactly!