THE WRITER'S DESK

In the course of the culling of books I've spoken of on my DeCluttered Creative blog, I came across a wonderful volume I'd half-forgotten I had, Jill Krementz's book of photographs of writers at their desks (now sadly out of print.) Krementz is a wonderful photographer and the images are beautiful, clear and luminous, telling: a young Susan Sontag working amid a pile of books and papers, her trademark streak of silver hair barely yet in evidence; E.B. White typing in a spare wooden space, rather like a barn, with open water out the window; Georges Simenon standing, smoking a pipe, with his hands resting on a desk lined with such pipes, all arrayed with mathematical precision.

But it is the brief words added by each writer pictured that I value most, maybe because I am a fellow writer myself or just because they seem even more intimate, even more personal, than the representations of the authors themselves. These little captions are not about desks so much as about process, that more interesting and infinitely deeper subject.

"It's very simple, really. You have to go to the typewriter, that's all you have to do," says Terrence McNally. "I'm a writer. I don't cook and I don't clean....Dear child, this place is a mess—my papers are everywhere," Dorothy West noted amusingly, her desk indeed a mess but her eighty-seven-year-old face a beacon of warmth and clarity. Simenon, not surprisingly in a man who lines up his pipes, notes that "The beginning will always be the same; it is almost a geometrical problem." I could go on, but I won't, if only because this might be a book you would enjoy seeing in its totality. As I write this Amazon has it available only at the prohibitive price of $199, but Alibris has copies beginning at about twenty bucks.

There are many messages within these pages, but perhaps the most evident is that there is no such thing as "a" writer's desk or "a" writing process. There are desks and tables and beds and kitchen counters, there are morning writers and night writers and sober writers and drunk writers, there are pencils and word processors, there are rituals and the lack of rituals. Someone, I now forget who, once said to me that asking how writers write is like asking how lovers make love, a question just as foolish and futile. And the comparison to lovers is apt, maybe, because one thing all the writers under Krementz's scrutiny do share, as her book radiantly shows, is a passion for the book, the story, and the word.

CLUTCH TIME: starting to write again

Over the past few weeks I've been working on my own writing again, for the first time since a delicious residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts last fall.

The chance to get back to my own stuff should be something to celebrate, but it doesn't quite feel that way. The pages I've already written seem at once stale and overwritten, never a combo that heartens a writer. I feel oddly distanced from them, a little as though someone else wrote them, but worse; if someone else had really written them, I wouldn't feel nearly so mean or so critical. Sometimes I sit down with them and new pages just flow. Sometimes I sit down with those new pages and the whole thing suddenly stalls. I feel a little like I did back when I was learning to drive a stick shift. It's clear that the damn car can move...it's just not clear when, or how much, or where it's all going, the Autobahn or the ditch.

I know from experience that this discomfort will pass, and that some of the pages I'm so jerkily writing now will turn out to be at least a little bit better than they feel. At least, I'd like to think I know that. It doesn't actually sound very convincing at the moment. No matter how many times I manage to re-start my writing when it's stalled, it always seems like this latest try will be my first failure. I'll let you know how it goes--from the Autobahn, or the ditch.