A Starting Place

“And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven't written. (And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it's reserved for the great-that is for "great men"; and it's "silly." 

Besides, you've written a little, but in secret. And it wasn't good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn't go all the way, or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty-so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time.”
― Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

I have always been a zealous and even gluttonous reader who unfortunately retains only about 10% of what she reads.  I am always left with just some aura of the text, though the specifics float away like dandelion spores not long after I've closed the last page.  This is why I'm insanely impressed with myself for not only remembering having read Cixous' essay (Okay fine, the title initially escaped me, as did most of the content), but for recalling enough of the phrasing to quickly locate the passage that has been rattling around in my head since I first encountered it.

I read this essay in graduate school and while my highlighter had been easily swiping here and there over the punchy prose, I stopped in my tracks when I reached these two paragraphs.  I instantly felt the you, become me.  Not because I had ever considered serious writing to be reserved for men (I think I had learned everything I felt about wanting to write from women like Atwood, Morrison, Woolf, Shelley, and even earlier, from Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary and the very scandalous V.C. Andrews), but because Cixous had just completely accused me of the very thing I'd been guilty of since I had had my first little diary as a kid.  I mean, my first diary had a combination lock on it.  My impression from age 7 was that writing was private and secret and its purpose merely catharsis. And somehow I had never evolved past that, despite having recorded the daily darknesses of of my teenage years, the wild drama of my twenties and the new relative calm of my early thirties.

Writing for me had always been as necessary as it was mortifying.  It was something I did alone and for myself, filling the pages of  little journals and notebooks and then stockpiling them in my closet.  I would have frequent shudders of panic imagining that I would one day be killed in an unexpected accident, and the people I love would sit around drinking coffee and pouring over my clumsy, imperfect scrawl of ideas, reading lines out loud to one another in a, "Hey guys, get this!" kind of way.  My words were always ones that "didn't go all the way,"  and it was because I never let them. In order for them to go anywhere really, you need to actually revisit them, wrestle with them, interrogate them, say them aloud, and I considered most of what I wrote to be too unbearably bad to ever look at again.


I find there to be nothing more embarrassing than bad writing.  When people approach me with their screenplays or short stories or (even worse) their poems, I squirm with discomfort.  Because it takes a lot for writing to be really good, and while I'm always beyond impressed by other people's confidence in letting it out of their pants (to keep Cixous' metaphor rolling), I am absolutely the worst critic of the craft.  One cliche, and I'm out.  And what can be harder than stringing words together that have never before been strung?

So I read Cixous' 2 paragraphs and saw myself so clearly that it seemed stupid that this epiphany took so long to clobber me over the head.  That the thing I like to do the most can be so accurately likened to the primal, awkward, act of masturbating.

So I have spent the past few years pushing myself to find the one thing a writer needs to really be able to call herself a writer : an audience.  I've braved a few open mic nights with poems I forced myself to revise and even submitted a few to poetry contests and literary magazines just to force the words out of my hands.  And while my emotional armor is fragile when it comes to criticism or rejection, I have already felt the prideful rush of accomplishment that comes from crafting, rather than just spewing out, a piece of writing.

I do not dismiss the need to write privately and without purpose; this kind of writing is good for the psyche and is often the most honest sort.  But without a purpose beyond the needful release of words, I will continue to bury them before they've had a chance to become anything more than just ejaculate.  So I have borrowed (and completely taken out of context) a title from Whitman (a poet who knew a thing or two about sexual inuendo) that I think sums up my need for creating an actual space for my writing, outside of the pent-up, aching pages of the journals shoved under my mattress.


So yes, Ms. Cixous. Why don't I write?