My wife says "I write bullshit." She sees any quest for meaning as foolish, be it putting words on paper to discover something or even going on a paper trail for our ancestors as foolish activity for any old man. Me? I "think" with the keyboard. I discover, qualify, and even, at times, justify my written searches for meaning. I guess you can say its therapeutic bullshit, but it qualifies as my thoughts are, at that point, forever preserved on paper, and, sometimes, that is just enough to give me some pleasure ... to realize I have worked things out in my view, to reach new destinations, or just to sail in circles while enjoying the meaningless view of the print. It's habit forming and often times self-justifying.
I also write when the spirit hits me squarely between the eyes. The spirit -- anger, praise, or working through mixed feelings -- most often qualifies as editorial revenge or just discovering more about myself. Finding my talents (or my lack of) and refining my feelings about issues and related subjects is like working a puzzle to me. Cormac McCarthy, one of the great novelists of American literature says, “I don’t know why I started writing." I don’t know why anybody does it. Maybe they’re bored, or failures at something else."
I believe there is a lot of truth in that statement -- writing and thinking can cure boredom, and reignite worn hearts and minds. Plus, I find plenty of failed expressions along the search for meaning. However, I never find writing words boring. It is the art of stringing words and sentences together in a modicum of meaning that frustrates me so: I know what I want to relate but I am often unskilled enough to be profound or even close to finding the big truths that I and others seek.
Without practice, writing with purpose is very difficult: it often stalls our brain motor activities into a drifting mode, desperately seeking verbiage to justify the purpose of the print. When I stumble upon a "hit" I believe suitable for an audience, I feel elated and strangely connected in both time and purpose! I sprint towards the keyboard, unfurl the sails, and set course featuring strong winds of change. My mind delights in sharing even if the audience is minute. I only wish I could elicit more response to my words.
All of this brings me to writing for discovery. This exercise scares the shit out of most, so they never warm up with free-writing or just capturing preliminary thoughts on paper. I free-write all of the time to develop fluency of thought and pen. It can be tossed away later or saved for future exploration, but some of my best free-writing leads to purpose and qualifies meaning. I find it indispensable as a tool -- a first step for any written project. Just write your own strong thoughts down and let the conscious and subconscious blend them into some very sound point. This approach can make words and sentences take strange, surprising turns, which can surprise both the readers and the author.
The three basic elements of paper writing you seek are presented in sequence here for clarity. However, incorporating new ideas as they come up in the writing process often requires moving back and forth between your argument and your evidence.
- Stage One: Close Reading for accurate response
- Stage Two: You Need an Argument
- Stage Three: Selecting and Analyzing Evidence
- Introductions, Transitions, and Conclusions
Slipping to Stag Two: The first draft of an argument is usually only a rough approximation of what you'll ultimately discover as you proceed with analysis of an idea or text/ The most important elements of your thought will be obscure to your reader if your argument doesn't ultimately transmit the full content or potential of that thought. "Genius," says Aristotle, "is the ability to state the obvious: to express a complex thought so clearly that it will suddenly appear simple and noncontroversial." E = mc2, for example.
No matter how simple you believe your thesis to be -- always write with a mind for possible strong rebuttal (rebuttal that must be countered) while considering how to destroy such a decent argument against your thesis. Many an essay writer correctly chooses "changing horses" to his opposite defense when he finds little support other than emotional, weak support on his sides. What else can he do? Change his evidently weak position on the topic ... and learn in the process emotion is useless in argumentation.
His mistake of not switching sides? In his zeal, he is determined to convinces others to his views by delivering hasty thoughts in a dictatorial tone with little or no logical argument for bedrock, which is as dangerous as a defense attorney posing a weak question open for a good answer in a court of law. "Never ask a question you cannot logically answer -- a bumbling reply reeks of defeat.
Thinking on paper is not for the weak of heart. Gloria E. Anzaldua. most famous as an American scholar of Chicana feminism, cultural theory, and queer theory loosely based her best-known book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), on her life growing up on the Meivo-Texas border and incorporated her lifelong experiences of social and cultural marginalization into her work says:
“Why am I compelled to write? . . . Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and anger . . . To become more intimate with myself and you. To discover myself, to preserve myself, to make myself, to achieve self-autonomy. To dispel the myths that I am a mad prophet or a poor suffering soul. To convince myself that I am worthy and that what I have to say is not a pile of shit . . . Finally I write because I’m scared of writing, but I’m more scared of not writing.”
– Gloria E. Anzaldúa
Such fear of writing is justified but as Anzaidua puts it, she writes to dispel the myths that she is a mad profit ... but because she is scared of not writing, more than writing about her unique views. Loneliness becomes a writer's very good friend, one he may draw upon for inspiration and continuous argument. Why? It feels "right" to a person's self, no matter the subject. Some may call that vindication.
It makes me recall a verse in the Battle Hymn of the Republic" by American patriotic song writer and abolitionist writer Julia Ward Howe during the American Civil War. Howe adapted her song from the soldiers' song "John Brown's Body" in November 1861, and first published it in The Atlantic Monthly in February 1862.
"Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His truth is marching on.
"He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat;
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on."
Now I'm not sure of being on the right side of the judgment; however I am certain of the stirring,uplifting feelings of righteousness in the Union the song created as it resounded in the campfires of troops at night. "His truth is marching on!" Such purpose of Holy lyrics stirs patriotic crowds yet today.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
Justifying the death of your own countrymen must have taken a tremendous toll on Union soldiers. Yet slavery and succession are evil products of the devil.
What if the Union sentiment was not widely expressed, just weakly felt. It would have definitely resulted in embarrassing defeat. God knows slavery is wrong, and his servants cannot risk stubborn succession, even though based on monetary riches. Cut the nonsensical romantic crap of pride, tradition, and a tolerable way of life for whom they considered subhumans, and you can appreciate the great sacrifice of the Godly-supported Union -- a group supporting a true cause of justice.
Writing takes guts and stamina because the opposition is always seeking a way to destroy democracy and bring more violent vision into focus. As I consider the division in this country, I finally have reached a stalemate of advocating right -- people want revenge without sacrifice, and it is a desire based upon solely on personal acquisition of money and defense for violence. Politicians shooting assault rifles and bragging about "stopping people at the border" by any means relates to me a horrible change of heart for the downtrodden and innocent patriots we adore.
One party now wants power and retribution. They are bent on revenge they cannot even conceive. Why? They fear greatly any loss of White privilege and minority acceptance. Their static and defensive ways do not support needed change and indefensible growth. They chant "Make America Great Again!" while ignoring fantastic advances in the rights of black and brown and yellow human beings. God protects and defends all -- not just those of Pilgrim ancestry and Eastern European roots. Immigrants are vilified as drug dealers, rapists, and murderers who must be walled in another country for little or no reason. I say fix the system, do not erect artificial hindrances to problems we too long neglected ourselves. Benefits would abound in compromise and stricter, larger enforcement of what we already possess.
I see dark days ahead for America as division and hatred are more routinely substituted for unity and compromise. Many people in the U.S. now look for a scapegoat -- they blame the opposite party for all the woes of incomplete, hard work requiring negotiation and hands-on action. They force power through hatred.
Why do I write about such topics? Maybe my wife is right in that 99% of my words are editorial bullshit. Still, it takes one spark to ignite a fire, and I reserve the right to express my written opinion. One match in the darkness can offer exceedingly great vision. Consider Gandhi, King, or Kennedy and their fearless contributions. Please, try writing to offer more light to cut through the blackness. We need pens and keyboards bent on action now more than ever before.
"Gertrude Stein, when asked why she wrote, replied, “For praise.” Lorca said he wrote to be loved. Faulkner said a writer wrote for glory. I may at times have written for those reasons, it’s hard to know. Overall I write because I see the world in a certain way that no dialogue or series of them can begin to describe, that no book can fully render, though the greatest books thrill in their attempt.
A great book may be an accident, but a good one is a possibility, and it is thinking of that that one writes. In short, to achieve. The rest takes care of itself, and so much praise is given to insignificant things that there is hardly any sense in striving for it.
In the end, writing is like a prison, an island from which you will never be released but which is a kind of paradise: the solitude, the thoughts, the incredible joy of putting into words the essence of what you for the moment understand and with your whole heart want to believe.
James Salter: Why I Write
“To write! What a marvelous thing!” When he was old and forgotten, living in a rundown house in the dreary suburbs of Paris, Léautaud wrote these lines. He was unmarried, childless, alone. The world of the theater in which he had worked as a critic for years was now dark for him, but from the ruins of his life these words rose. To write!
One thinks of many writers who might have said this, Anne Sexton, even though she committed suicide, or Hemingway or Virginia Woolf, who both did also, or Faulkner, scorned in his rural town, or the wreckage that was Fitzgerald in the end. The thing that is marvelous is literature, which is like the sea, and the exaltation of being near it, whether you are a powerful swimmer or wading by the shore. The act of writing, though often tedious, can still provide extraordinary pleasure. For me that comes line by line at the tip of a pen, which is what I like to write with, and the page on which the lines are written, the pages, can be the most valuable thing I will ever own.
The cynics say that if you do not write for money you are a dabbler or a fool, but this is not true. To see one’s work in print is the real desire, to have it read. The remuneration is of less importance; no one was paid for the samizdats. Money is but one form of approval.
It is such a long time that I have been writing that I don’t remember the beginning. It was not a matter of doing what my father knew how to do. He had gone to Rutgers, West Point, and then MIT, and I don’t think in my lifetime I ever saw him reading a novel. He read newspapers, the Sun, the World-Telegram, there were at least a dozen in New York in those days. His task was laid out for him: to rise in the world.
Nor was my mother an avid reader. She read to me as a child, of course, and in time I read the books that were published in popular series, The Hardy Boys and Bomba, the Jungle Boy. I recall little about them. I did not read Ivanhoe, Treasure Island, Kim, or The Scottish Chiefs, though two or three of them were given to me. I had six volumes of a collection called My Bookhouse, edited by Olive Beaupré Miller, whose name is not to be found among the various Millers—Mrs. Alice, Henry, Joaquin, Joe—in The Reader’s Encyclopedia, but who was responsible for what knowledge I had of Cervantes, Dickens, Tolstoy, Homer, and the others whose work was excerpted. The contents also included folktales, fairy tales, parts of the Bible, and more. When I read of writers who when young were given the freedom of their fathers’ or friends’ libraries, I think of Bookhouse, which was that for me. It was not an education but the introduction to one. There were also poems, and in grammar school we had to memorize and then stand up and recite well-known poems. Many of these I still know, including Kipling’s “If,” which my father paid me a dollar to learn. Language is acquired, like other things, through the act of imitating, and rhythm and elegance may come in part from poems.
I could draw quite well as a boy and even, though uninstructed, paint. What impulse made me do this, and where the ability came from—although my father could draw a little—I cannot say. My desire to write, apparent at the age of seven or eight, likely came from the same source. I made crude books, as many children do, with awkward printing and drawings, from small sheets of paper, folded and sewn together.
In prep school we were poets, at least many of my friends and I were, ardent and profound. There were elegies but no love poems—those came later. I had some early success. In a national poetry contest I won honorable mention, and sold two poems to Poetry magazine.
All this was a phase, in nearly every case to be soon outgrown. In 1939 the war had broken out, and by 1941 we were in it. I ended up at West Point. The old life vanished; the new one had little use for poetry. I did read, and as an upperclassman wrote a few short stories. I had seen some in the Academy magazine and felt I could do better, and after the first one, the editor asked for more. When I became an officer there was, at first, no time for writing, nor was there the privacy. Beyond that was a greater inhibition: it was alien to the life. I had been commissioned in the Army Air Force and in the early days was a transport pilot, later switching into fighters. With that I felt I had found my role.
Stationed in Florida in about 1950, I happened to see in a bookshop window in Pensacola a boldly displayed novel called The Town and The City by John Kerouac. The name. There had been a Jack Kerouac at prep school, and he had written some stories. On the back of the jacket was a photograph, a gentle, almost yearning face with eyes cast downward. I recognized it instantly. I remember a feeling of envy. Kerouac was only a few years older than I was. Somehow he had written this impressive-looking novel. I bought the book and eagerly read it. It owed a lot to Thomas Wolfe—Look Homeward, Angel and others—who was a major figure then, but still it was an achievement. I took it as a mark of what might be done.
I had gotten married, and in the embrace of a more orderly life, on occasional weekends or in the evenings, I began to write again. The Korean War broke out. When I was sent over I took a small typewriter with me, thinking that if I was killed, the pages I had been writing would be a memorial. They were immature pages, to say the least. A few years later, the novel they were part of was rejected by the publishers, but one of them suggested that if I were to write another novel they would be interested in seeing it. Another novel. That might be years.
I had a journal I had kept while flying combat missions. It contained some description, but there was little shape to it. The war had the central role. One afternoon, in Florida again—I was there on temporary duty—I came back from the flight line, sat down on my cot, and began to hurriedly write out a page or so of outline that had suddenly occurred to me. It would be a novel about idealism, the true and the untrue, spare and in authentic prose. What had been missing but was missing no longer was the plot.
“Latent in me, I suppose, there was always the belief that writing was greater than other things, or at least would prove to be greater in the end.”Why was I writing? It was not for glory; I had seen what I took to be real glory. It was not for acclaim. I knew that if the book was published, it would have to be under a pseudonym; I did not want to jeopardize a career by becoming known as a writer. I had heard the derisive references to “God-Is-My-Copilot” Scott. The ethic of fighter squadrons was drink and daring; anything else was suspect. Still, I thought of myself as more than just a pilot and imagined a book that would be in every way admirable. It would be evident that someone among the ranks of pilots had written it, an exceptional figure, unknown, but I would have the satisfaction of knowing who it was.
I wrote when I could find time. Some of the book was written at a fighter base on Long Island, the rest of it in Europe, when I was stationed in Germany. A lieutenant in my squadron who lived in the apartment adjoining ours could hear the typewriter late at night through the bedroom wall. “What are you doing,” he asked one day, “writing a book?” It was meant as a joke. Nothing could be more unlikely. I was the experienced operations officer. Next step was squadron commander.
The Hunters was published by Harper and Brothers in late 1956. A section of the book appeared first in Collier’s. Word of it spread immediately. With the rest I sat speculating as to who the writer might be, someone who had served in Korea, with the Fourth Group, probably.
The reviews were good. I was 32 years old, the father of a child, with my wife expecting another. I had been flying fighters for seven years. I decided I had had enough. The childhood urge to write had never died, in fact, it had proven itself. I discussed it with my wife, who, with only a partial understanding of what was involved, did not attempt to change my mind. Upon leaving Europe, I resigned my commission with the aim of becoming a writer.
It was the most difficult act of my life. Latent in me, I suppose, there was always the belief that writing was greater than other things, or at least would prove to be greater in the end. Call it a delusion if you like, but within me was an insistence that whatever we did, the things that were said, the dawns, the cities, the lives, all of it had to be drawn together, made into pages, or it was in danger of not existing, of never having been. There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.
Of the actual hard business of writing I knew very little. The first book had been a gift. I missed the active life terribly, and after a long struggle a second book was completed. It was a failure. Jean Stafford, one of the judges for a prize for which it had been routinely submitted, left the manuscript on an airplane. The book made no sense to her, she said. But there was no turning back.
A Sport and a Pastime was published six years later. It, too, did not sell. A few thousand copies, that was all. It stayed in print, however, and one by one, slowly, foreign publishers bought it. Finally, Modern Library.
The use of literature, Emerson wrote, is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it. Perhaps this is true, but I would claim something broader. Literature is the river of civilization, its Tigris and Nile. Those who follow it, and I am inclined to say those only, pass by the glories.
"Over the years I have been a writer for a succession of reasons. In the beginning, as I have said, I wrote to be admired, even if not known. Once I had decided to be a writer, I wrote hoping for acceptance, approval.
"A great book may be an accident, but a good one is a possibility, and it is thinking of that that one writes. In short, to achieve. The rest takes care of itself, and so much praise is given to insignificant things that there is hardly any sense in striving for it.
"In the end, writing is like a prison, an island from which you will never be released but which is a kind of paradise: the solitude, the thoughts, the incredible joy of putting into words the essence of what you for the moment understand and with your whole heart want to believe."
(From "Don’t Save Anything: The Uncollected Essays, Articles, and Profiles of James Salter," by James Salter, courtesy of Counterpoint Press. Literary Hub.November 29, 1917.)
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