Walking Your Writing As You Would Your Dog
by Lawrence Sutin
Copyright 2010
My dog Murphy
Editor’s Note – This is an edited transcript of an extemporaneous lecture given to MFA students at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier in June 2009.
Introduction
The original title of this talk was “The Relationship Between Writing and Pet Ownership.” I chose that word “ownership” with full intention of taking advantage of the kind of ambiguities and ambivalent feelings that it raises in me in relation to the subject of animal ownership—or anything, right? What do we own? That is true in the case of animals, certainly, or it is possible for it to be true, as you think deeply about relationships to any animals in your life. And it is also true of our writing process. To me, one of the most interesting questions about writing—I haven’t solved it, and I know I never will—is the question of who is doing the writing. I do feel entitled to put my name on my work—I would be very angry if someone said, “Your writing is not you at all, Larry.” But at the same time, it’s not me, it’s not under my control, and yet I have an intimate relationship with it.
So this is in essence what I want to talk about today, this nature of the writing process as something that is and is not you, with which you have and need to have a relationship, and how that relationship plays out on a daily basis. If I imagine myself as a student in an MFA program, I would feel compelled to ask myself this question every day that I was in it: “All right, other than the degree credential, and the enhancement of my resume, and the desire to be published and famous—which are all givens—what would I like to leave the MFA program with?” And my answer to that question, the same answer that I would give every day as I was working on my drafts, is that I would like to leave owning my process. And so again we return to the tricky ambiguities of that term “owning.”
What I mean by “owning” in this context is that when I as a student left the program, I could go and pursue what I wanted to write with a sense of comfort and confidence in my relation to the process, a sense of my ability to value it and commit to it. I could give a living piece of writing, a work that I want to create, the time and patience and focus needed to create it. If you’ve got that, in my opinion, you have learned the most important part of writing, and the part that is most difficult for people to learn.
I am all in favor of craft—this is not a craft versus process debate. But what I have found about craft and my ability to learn from what we call craft is that while there were many craft lessons that I was capable of understanding and articulating as a young writer writing crap—which I did, voluminously—I didn’t know how to use craft because I hadn’t put in sufficient time writing and I didn’t yet have the confidence to put in that time.
If I were a runner and I was trying to achieve a good time running the mile, and I was reading books on running that told me how to move my arms, and so on, but I wasn’t actually running, how far would all that reading get me in terms of lowering my time? However important technique and knowledge and diet are to a runner, if you’re not running… it’s nothing. So that’s the relationship of writing craft to writing process: Craft needs to be applied in process. Process has to be extensive so that craft can have time to take life within you, so it ceases to be “craft” after a while, and instead becomes very much like your way of getting around in a neighborhood that you’ve become very familiar with. Which you don’t call “craft” or “orienteering” anymore—you call it getting from one place to another.
One more quick caveat before I go on to my subject proper—given my own experiences and temperament, I have to keep to dogs as my spiritual and analogical guides in this area of writing process. So those of you with experiences with different animals are free either to try to transpose my experiences with dogs to yours with your iguana, or you’ll just have to go along with the fantasy of owning a dog.
Okay, so I’m going to talk about five analogous points I see when comparing dog ownership and writing process. Here are five handy labels for each of those five points, listed in ascending order of depth of joy and heartbreak: Nondiscretionary Commitment; Depth of Affection; Faithful Obedience; Recognition of the Ineluctable Other; and Death.
Nondiscretionary Commitment
If you own a dog, the dog needs to be fed and walked, it needs to go out and take a shit, it needs to be kept clean and free of pests. You don’t get to decide that, in any particular week, you don’t feel like taking care of your dog. “I’m a little blue, so—forage, babe.” That to me is part of the analogy with the writing process—writing, like dog care, ceases to be a discretionary mode in which you now and then indulge. “Yes, this week I think I will write.” Oh, really?
I would be a screaming liar if I said I sit down and write 52 weeks a year and never stop. If horrible things happen around me, I am interrupted. I’m human. But allowing for the fact that you get occasional blows to the head, so to speak, and you may need to sit down for a bit, generally speaking, I consider my writing time non-discretionary. I don’t ask myself whether I’m going to write in a particular week, I write in a particular week.
I have a dog, and I walk my dog most days (my wife takes over when my classroom hours get in the way). I listen to baseball with my dog. I have conversations with my dog. Long conversations. I love spending time with my dog. I never wake up and say, “Am I going to spend time with my dog this week?” If I really had to ask that question, I shouldn’t own a dog. When you spend happy and caring time with a dog or with your writing process you find that the relationship between the two of you deepens, becomes more affectionate, becomes more knowing. The time devoted becomes precious time—time you cannot have in any other way.
When I say “nondiscretionary,” that’s almost a prudish way to describe the passionate gratitude and joy I feel in connection with my writing time. It’s not solely a matter of steel discipline, although it took steel discipline to devote the time needed to feel, at last, the gratitude and joy. Why steel discipline? Because writers deprecate themselves and get in their own way. I could, but will not, devote the rest of this lecture to all the bullshit that writers tell themselves that persuades them they can’t write, shouldn’t write—there’s so much monkey-mind babbling in all of us. But if you can get yourself to the point where you are connected to your process, your writing time will have become so integral a part of the rhythm of your life that you would miss it dearly if it were gone.
So the level of commitment of non-discretionary time is one key analogy I see, where you’ve connected to the process in such a way that you no longer need to persuade yourself that you should write. I went through years of learning this. I want to be clear—this is difficult. Because everything around us is geared to make us feel that writing time is a waste of time. Certainly if you’re not making any money from it. That’s a huge thing in our society—“You’re writing? Have you sold anything?”
I look at gardeners and the hundreds of hours they spend so they can have a basket of tomatoes to give you at the end of the summer. I think writers have at least as much right to their work time as gardeners. I say “at least” because gardeners are generally admired and praised for their efforts, while writers putting in time learning to write tend to be scoffed at or pitied or humored. I can say this: If your relationship with your writing process does not become as automatic as walking the dog, you won’t keep writing. Because you’ll get battered down by all the forces that will stop you from writing. Ultimately the source of encouragement and strength for our writing has to come from ourselves. It’s not that the world is hostile. You will find an audience, you will find people who love your writing, you will have friends and family who are supportive. But the bedrock is our writing process. I don’t know how anyone could keep on writing if they did not have a deep sense of knowingness, of comfort, with the process. I truly don’t. For those of us who are engaged in writing for as long as we can last, the writing process becomes a sanctuary—a source of sustenance.
Depth of Affection
What do dogs and writing both bestow? They bestow an understanding and an open heart. A willingness to allow you to show your love, or your vision, in an environment that rewards sincerity.
Why is the dog humankind’s best friend? Presumably, because dogs, if you are kind to them, will nearly always be kind to you. They respond to us in an open way no matter what other human flaws we might possess. Hitler’s dog thought he was a great guy. The degree of intimacy you develop with your writing process, with your dog, allows you to discover distinctive new aspects of yourself. I say “discover” because you don’t know those aspects in advance of writing. You discover them in the process of writing.
We don’t know everything we think and feel—that’s why we write. We are accessing other aspects of ourselves when we write. If I could truly compose books in my head while I walked around, I don’t know that I would want to sit down and write them out so as merely to recapitulate an experience I’d already had. No matter how much thinking you do in advance, it is always a new and surprising experience when you write, because your writing voices take over and those voices are not the you that you thought you already knew. Ludwig Wittgenstein knew about this in his own way. He once wrote: “I really do think with my pen, because my head often knows nothing about what my hand is writing.”
This process of developing fondness, care, personal affection, for your process, for your dog—what’s really extraordinary about it is that you find that you are rewarded for being exact, for being truthful, for being daring, for discarding silly perceptual and cognitive inhibitions that serve as our habitual armor in daily life. So it’s a new realm, and very much like the realm you create with the dog you love. It’s a lot friendlier than other realms. You get to talk in a high voice if you want to, you can be silly, affectionate, kissy. Or you can just stare at each other with deep understanding conveyed through a previously unknown language that can span any imaginative gap between the canine and human species. The dog’s like—fine, I’m ready for fun, how far do you want to take this? People will not spend time like that, I have learned.
What I’m trying to convey by this extended analogy to quality time with your dog is that writing allows you complete freedom of expression. You can go anywhere, you can do anything you want. It’s the most untrammeled of art forms, in a sense that there is no special effect you can’t achieve in your writing. There’s an extraordinary freedom in writing that is playful, affectionate, and rewards what I would call the best of our creative selves. Readers crave writers who risk conveying what they truly know. They just crave it. Like dogs crave walks.
Faithful Obedience
This is not about the dog’s obedience to you. Dogs don’t need my lecture on faithful obedience—I’m talking about our all too human attempts at faithful obedience to the dog, to the process. The obedience, if heartfelt, soon fosters a happy harmony. Taking the dog for a walk isn’t a chore, it’s an exploration in which you and the dog watch the conception of pet ownership vanish—the dog never held that conception, by the way, it was always only you—and together you experience in its place the shared narrative of the walk which can go in any direction it wants and from which the entirety of the world and its ideas and desires can be sniffed at in the wind.
When I was talking about nondiscretionary commitment before, I was talking about commitment to the time needed for process to take hold of you. And if “take hold” sounds too fearsome, consider the enticing rewards. The more you write, and the more you understand how you write, the more fully you will discover the startling range and depth of your writing voice—or, better, voices. Because over time you hear different voices, and you pay attention to them all, you let them guide you and inspire you. You don’t get to choose what you want to write about—which always sounds insane to anyone who’s not a writer. It means that you have to renew, on an ongoing basis, your relationship with your emerging and shifting writing voice. You gradually learn to say, “Oh, I see. This is my voice as it wishes and needs to be now.”
So it takes faithful obedience. I really did not get to choose the books I’ve written. But I’ve had great fun learning the kind of obedience that allows me to recognize what’s going on inside my head with all those voices and how to cooperate with them so that they and I can flourish together. You do have to be faithful and obedient. I’m not kidding here. You have to be faithful in the sense of believing in the value of undergoing the process, of getting to know the voice or voices better and better. And you have to be obedient. You have to treat the voices right. You don’t get to shout at them. They don’t like it when you complain to yourself about how crappy your writing is—they think you’re insulting them, and they find that unjust, for they know their own value even if you seem to have lost sight of it. They would prefer you simply to say: “I will be back tomorrow. I will fill pages—fill screens—with words. And I will keep doing this until I reach a kind of understanding of what’s going on, because this is not a one-person expedition, this is a dance. This is a time together.”
When you’ve walked with a dog long enough, you and the dog start doing a walk where you’re both almost oblivious of each other and the patterns you’re taking. I get to walk my dog in a place where he’s off-leash. I can hear the jangle of his dog collar as he’s running around and I’m lost in my thoughts, and at the end of the walk I scarcely know what’s happened. Every day the walks just keep getting better and better.
If I can just give you a practical writing maxim: “A good writing day is a day on which you write.” Don’t judge your writing on a daily basis. It’s silly.
Recognition of the Ineluctable Other
There is a famous prose poem by Jorge Luis Borges, entitled “Borges and I,” in which he talks about the fact that there’s this Borges who writes books and then there’s this Borges—the me—who’s just kind of hanging out and it’s not really clear who this other Borges is. Who is doing the writing, asks Borges in essence, if the writer is not clearly known by the man whose name the writer seems to have assumed.
Nor is the dog clearly known by its erstwhile owner. For a long while—not among people who actually lived with animals, but among theorists—it was believed that animals possessed instincts but not souls and hence could neither think or feel as we humans could. Aquinas and Descartes both held that animals were incapable of suffering, which is a useful belief for a species that makes frequent use of its fellow animals for food and labor. These days, scientists and animal researchers are willing to say that animals can think and feel. I applaud the modern science that has documented the complexities of animal awareness. Still, I feel certain that we humans don’t yet know animals very well. They are different from us. I’ve lived with my dog now nine and a half years. I share a bed with him. He looks at me, I look at him… God knows what I am thinking, much less what the dog is thinking.
The dog is a flea-scratching analogue to the muse that inspires us. “Muse” is one of the most common terms used by artists and writers to allude to the creative “other”—but there are of course many other ways of making this same point. Writers throughout time have invoked or prayed to or wrestled with or engaged in some kind of contest or struggle with an other. I encourage you, if you believe that there is an other in you, to formulate your own relationship to it. We were talking earlier about faithful obedience, but now we’re even going beyond that. Now we’re going into what gives our writing life its daily meaning and push. We’re talking about the inner pulse of who else we are when we are writing.
As I said, one name for that who else is “muse.” Just now I happen to be reading The Voyage of Argo, a 3rd Century BCE epic in four books of the story of Jason and the Argonauts composed by Apollonius of Rhodes. I have noticed that the tone employed by Apollonius for his invocations of the muse shows a very interesting progression: In Book I, “Preparation and Departure,” the invocation goes (in E. V. Rieu’s translation from the Greek): Moved by the god of song, I set out to commemorate the heroes of old who sailed the good ship Argo up the Straits into the Black Sea, and between the Cyanean Rocks in quest of the Golden Fleece. That’s perfunctory. Apollonius was cocky at that point in the writing: He knew the story of Jason already, it was a cherished mythic narrative in his culture. He’s saying to the muse, “Go ahead and add your inspiration to my well-planned embarkation.” Apollonius knows all of the crew of the Argo, all of the pitfalls to come. The first book of The Voyage of Argo is not the best part of it. He’s warming up—and is unaware that the muse is putting as little into him as he put into his invocation of her.
Book II doesn’t offer an invocation to the muse in its opening lines. In a long, dull introduction to my edition of the book, the translator discusses many ambiguities in the text, but not the fact that there’s no invocation to the muse in Book II. Alas—and let this be a warning to writers everywhere who dare to write without suitable invocations of thanks for the occasion and opportunity to write—Book II is little better than Book I despite all of the obvious opportunities for narrative drama. But—all of a sudden, Book III, we’re getting to the heart of it: Jason and Medea, that tragic love affair. Now all of a sudden the muses are being invoked again by Apollonius, and in particular he invokes Erato, the muse of love and wedding songs. Come, Erato—and by the way, “Come?” Dog command…? Just saying!—Come, Erato, come lovely muse—note that now it’s “lovely muse”—stand by me and take up the tale. How did Medea’s passion help Jason to bring back the fleece to Iolcus? You that share Aphrodite’s powers must surely know; you that fill virgin hearts with love’s inquietude and bear a name that speaks of love’s delights. Guess what? Our writer’s starting to feel a little bit out of his depth. He’s thinking, “I am entering difficult territory here, the story is becoming emotionally intense. Help me, dear and beautiful Muse!” And Book III is easily the best part of The Voyage of Argo—it is thrilling.
In Book IV, where the plot really thickens, and a lot of horrific stuff is going to happen to poor Medea, we have a different sort of invocation once more. This time Apollonius knows who is boss, who has gotten him through Book III and will get him through Book IV if he just keeps moving the pen in the manner in which she instructs him: Now tell us, Muse, in your own heavenly tongue—“YOU tell it.” Before it was, “Please help me tell it,” now it’s, “Please, you do it. You’re so good at it.” …in your own heavenly tongue how the Colchian maiden schemed and suffered. Speak, Daughter of Zeus; for here your poet falters and the words fail to come. What drove her to desert her home? Was it the frenzy of a star-crossed love? Or must we call it panic?
That really tells you everything you need to know about the range of devotion that is required and how you move from perfunctory to a serious sense of wrestling. Let me also quote Lorca, here. Now, bear in mind that when he’s talking about the muse and the angel and the duende, he’s all in favor of the duende but he’s disparaging toward the angel and the muse, because they are not his lovers. So just take what he has to say in terms of what you can use. I don’t endorse his partiality for the duende but I do find his comments useful. Here’s Lorca:
Angel and muse come from without; the angel gives radiance, the muse gives precepts (Hesiod learned from them). Gold leaf or fold of tunics, the poet receives his norms in his coppice of laurels. On the other hand, the duende has to be roused in the very cells of the blood. We must repel the angel, and kick out the muse, and lose our fear of the violet fragrance irradiating from eighteenth-century poetry, and of the great telescope in whose lenses sleeps the confining, ailing muse. The real struggle is with the duende…. To help us seek the duende there is neither map nor discipline. All one knows is that it burns the blood like powdered glass, that it exhausts, that it rejects all the sweet geometry one has learned, that it breaks with all styles….
Some of you may have experience with angels and muses and even the duende. I realize that there are many additional ways to talk about “the other” in writing. And I encourage you to use whatever ways delight you, or to set the whole matter aside as irrelevant. But for me, as a writer, remembering that the other IS—that I am not wholly in charge of this process—clarifies so much of what I have to do to write a book.
Death
Sorry. Dogs die.
The analogy here is that both you and the process change over time. You’re not the same writer throughout your life. You change as a person as well. Everyone does it differently—some people get sillier and more childlike as they get older. I’m not saying we progress in this perfect, predictable line. But whoever you are right now, you will not be quite the same person or writer in two years, and in eight years, you’ll be different again.
The dog dies. The process alters. The book ends. There is uncertainty. There is shift. There is transformation. You need to establish the relationship anew. You need to get used to the idea that you will find another dog. Which feels so unfaithful to me. But I’ve learned that it’s how it has to be. That’s the kind of transformation that happens with dogs and in writing too.
Different voices emerge, different book possibilities pose themselves. You will have to explore aspects of your territory and voice that you did not think you would, or didn’t even know you had, and you should not be surprised when that happens. As a matter of fact, it’s a great joy that it happens.
Conclusion
The writing process has dog breath. I’ve slogged through many days. It’s not perfumed at all. I’ve said don’t judge your writing, but there are days when I feel like I’m being breathed on by a particularly stinky dog. But the truth is I kinda like dog breath. I am a very great lover of dogs. And the only way you can continue to write, in my opinion, is to love to do it. Love not only the cocktail parties, but also picking up the dog shit.
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Great article!