Eliminating possibilities...

...while not falling...

In an interview with Linda Kuehl published in the Fall-Winter 1978 issue of the literary magazine The Paris Review — the writer Joan Didion, sitting in her and her husband’s living room in their house on the ocean north of Los Angeles on an August morning, said the following:

“I think of writing anything at all as a kind of high-wire act. The minute you start putting words on paper you’re eliminating possibilities.”

Having been sitting here writing for quite a number of years now, I would say that those words of Joan Didion’s — “eliminating possibilities”” — do capture the anxiety, the scariness of serious writing. It occurs to me at this instant that perhaps that is why I’ve liked writing ever since I was a tenth-grader at Redford High School in Detroit. Living a normal middle-class life in a neighborhood with tall, serene oaks and leafy horizontally branched maples, everything calm, even boring, most of the time, I could scare myself silly just by sitting down in front of a typewriter. And then get an “A”!

The other way I scared myself was by climbing the maple in our front yard as high as I could go, moving upward until the next-higher branch was unreachable or dangerously flimsy.

I just looked up the number of words in English, and the answers say that there are more than a million words in the English language, about 170,000 in active use and somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 used by most people their daily lives. I’m going to guess that writers trend a bit upward, whatever upward means — maybe 200,000? —although I’ve never thought of writing as a numbers game.

So how can it matter if you eliminate possibilities when you have so many words leftover to choose from?

That isn’t what Didion was talking about, of course. “Eliminating possibilities” doesn’t mean eliminating words. It means eliminated ideas, ways of thinking, ways of taking the reader to the next thought, the next page. If you go one way, then you can’t go another.

In her career, Didion started out in the days of typewriters and pieces of paper, and so did I. Typing on a piece of paper and changing your mind required pulling the piece of paper out of the platen and starting over with a fresh piece of paper. That was a very visceral way of eliminating a possibility — scrunching up the piece of paper and throwing it into your wastebasket.

Writing on a computer has changed that elimination of a possibility into a very smooth, effortless process so that the writer, as I am doing right now, can change his or her mind, his or her direction ten times in ten sentences and not remember what the previous nine were.

This does not change, however, the high-wire act feeling of putting down each next thought and wondering if it’s the right next thought. Once you are standing on the wire, whether it’s a paper wire or a pixels wire, you still have to find the exact center of the wire where your foot will be safe — where your idea will be the right idea.

All serious writers experience this scariness.

Maybe it’s why we write.

Is it the arrogance of thinking we won’t fall, we will eventually get it right? Or is it an enjoyment of the terror, being all alone in a quiet room, safe from every disturbance, but nonetheless walking along the wire?

A memoir, I discovered, is no different from any other kind of writing I have ever done.

You already know the story, right? It’s not like a novel where you have to make it up, figure out who the characters are. How hard can that be? But no, it’s the same, maybe even harder. Which parts of your life made you who you are? Which parts of your life will make your reader want to turn the page?

Didion, one of the great writers of her day, once described having these feelings upon finishing a piece: “Well, it’s not the ideal, it’s not the perfect object I want it to be, but maybe — if I go ahead and finish it anyway — I can get it right next time.”

A nice thought —if you don’t fall, you get to try again.