- Seducing the demon 节选：
I am going to write because i cannnot help it.
charlotte bronte
wrting is the first anti-depressant. it came before prozac or effecxor. and it was cheaper. all you needed was a blank piece of paper and a pencil, as my father used to say. if you were lucky, you might even make some dough. but even if you didn't, you were doing something godlike-emblazoning words of fire on a tablet of stone and handing them to Moses, any Moses. So what if there were a lot of shalt nots"? Interesting enought, just writing "shault not" cheered you up.
i think writing elevates my mood because it's a way of imposing order on chaos. ....memory is always impure. we tend tomake up narratives for ourselves that grow stronger with each retelling. of course they depart from what really happened because what really happened was not fixed in language. what efer is not fixed in language drifts away. once we create a narrive, the underlying events diffuse like fog. a great deal of ink has been wasted on autobiography versus fiction, when the truch is that all autobiography is fiction and all fiction is autobiography.
there is in writing- or any creative work- a kind of fuck-you impulse. Part of the energy comes from sheer rebelliousness. I will show you! a ertier says. I am not who you think i am. Sometimes you have to get mad just to begin. YOu think you are all alone in this-but battalions of dead wrtier who faced the same challenge are shouting in your ears. (Margaret Atwood calls writing "negotiating with the dead.") You have to drown them out when they keep you from hearing yourself. They are alternately encourageing and stifling. You have to invent a voice that will make all their voices obsolete. You can't do this without grit, aggression, a kind of madness. No one really asks for a new book, but you need to write it. And your need will eventually infect your reader.
if you want to be a nice person, don't write. there is no way to do it without grinding up your loved ones and making them into raw hamburger. it's hard to do it and keep a social schedule. the essential chapter will sometimes arrive on the night of a dinner party. your job is to be always ready. writing is not a life.
鐜涢泤