Why We Write (13 page)

The drug

When I went to Sarajevo in ’93 and I was with these other freelance writers, and we were reporting on this incredible story, I went from being a waiter to being a war reporter in the course of three weeks. Seeing your name in print for the first time—nothing can compare to that.

By the time you’re at the level where you might be on the
Times
list, it’s just part of your business. There are beautiful, beautiful books that never make the list, and there’s complete garbage on the list. Every writer knows that. Everyone knows that whether you get on the list, or how long you spend on the list, is not entirely a reflection of the quality of your work.

There are moments in the field, or at your desk, when you can’t believe what’s flowing through you and coming out on the page. It’s the hand of God, or whatever you want to call it: you’re writing way beyond yourself.

There are musicians who talk about a solo they’ve done and they have no idea where that came from. There are athletes who set world records and say, “I performed so far outside my abilities, I don’t know what that was.” It happens to writers, too. That’s the thing we’re all looking for. That’s the drug. Seeing your name on the
Times
list is such a pale, empty experience compared to that. You can’t even compare them.

Writership versus readership

I do this sort of split thing when I’m writing. I’m very aware that I’m writing for readers, and I do everything I can to engage them, to make my writing accessible and compelling.

At the same time, I try to be completely disinterested in what I think people will like. I’m writing for myself. I want to learn about the world, and writing is the way I do it. You can’t know people’s tastes, anyway. No one could have predicted that
Perfect Storm
would be a hit. A fishing boat that sinks in a storm? The publishers don’t know. Readers don’t know. Nobody knows.

In every book I’ve written, there were moments when I thought, I can’t put this in, I’ll lose half my readership. In
Perfect Storm
it was the physics of wave motion. Who wants to read about that? But I said to myself, The story demands it. Waves sank this boat; you gotta explain how waves work.

So I put the physics in, and I thought, If no one reads it, so be it. If the author thing doesn’t work out, I can always go back to tree work. It wouldn’t be the end of my life. I’m going to write the best book I can. That said, if I put in a topic I think readers will be resistant to, I work extra hard at my language to make them eat their spinach. I don’t like spinach, but if you add enough garlic I’ll eat it.

Why I try to write well

Now I know I have an audience, so I feel a huge responsibility to write really well.

When I was writing
War
, I felt such urgency. There had
been a hundred books about the last two wars; who was I to add to the pile? I wanted to write something profound and powerful and useful. Something that people would read. I felt I had to write something extremely profound about the topic.

I wrote
War
in six months. Writing it tapped into something emotional and intuitive in me. I was completely psychologically saturated. I’ve never had that kind of experience before or since. Every night I was dreaming it; I was back with that platoon. I was also making the movie
Restrepo
about it while I was writing the book.

I’ve tried to figure out what good writing is. I know it when I read it in other people’s work or my own. The closest I’ve come is that there’s a rhythm to the writing, in the sentence and the paragraph.

When the rhythm’s off, it’s hard to read the thing. It’s a lot like music in that sense; there’s an internal rhythm that does the work of reading for you. It almost reads itself. That’s one of the things that’s hard to teach to people. If you don’t hear music, you’re never going to hear it. That internal rhythm in a sentence or a paragraph, that’s the DNA of writing. That’s what good writing is.

I pay an awful lot of attention to language. Language is really important to me. It takes longer to write that way, but it’s worth it.

M
ary Karr is a writer in possession of a rare and formidable gift. Her prose reads like poetry, and no wonder. Years before
The Liars’ Club
landed on the
New York Times
list and stayed there for more than a year, earning Karr a prominent spot in America’s literary landscape, she was a published poet. Her plainspoken, devastating poetry made her the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize—not bad for a girl from a southeast Texas refinery town.

In the winter 2009 issue of the
Paris Review
, Amanda Fortini reports on her two-year-long effort to complete her interview with Karr. “She had started [
Lit
] over twice,” Fortini wrote, “throwing
away nearly a thousand pages, and had been working long hours to meet her deadline.”

“It doesn’t matter how bleak our daily lives are,” Karr told Fortini. “We still fight for the light. I think that’s our divinity. We lean into love, even in the most hideous circumstances. We manage to hope.”

This is the paradox that powers the words of Mary Karr. She writes from one end of the existential continuum to the other, from the bleak to the divine, from darkness to light.

Mary Karr

Why I write

I write to dream; to connect with other human beings; to record; to clarify; to visit the dead. I have a kind of primitive need to leave a mark on the world. Also, I have a need for money.

I’m almost always anxious when I’m writing. There are those great moments when you forget where you are, when you get your hands on the keys, and you don’t feel anything because
you’re somewhere else. But that very rarely happens. Mostly I’m pounding my hands on the corpse’s chest.

The easy times are intermittent. They can be five minutes long or five hours long, but they’re never very long. The hard times are not completely hard, but they can be pretty hard, and they can go on for weeks. Working on
Lit
, I threw away two thousand finished pages. Prayer got me through it. That’s what gets me through everything.

I usually get very sick after I finish a book. As soon as I put it down and my body lies down and there’s not that injection of adrenaline and cortisol, I get sick. I have a medium-shitty immune system so that doesn’t help.

All of that said, writing feels like a privilege. Even though it’s very uncomfortable, I constantly feel very lucky. For most writers there’s a span of twenty years or so when you can’t write because you’re doing eighty-seven other things. It’s really just the past year that I haven’t also been raising a kid and teaching. There are more demands on me to do other damn things—touring and lectures—but they’re not horrible.

If I couldn’t write I’d be very sad. I think I’d do something that had to do with the body. I’d be a yoga teacher or a gym coach or a massage therapist. Of course, none of that would address my need to write. That’s why I’m still writing.

Writing drunk, writing sober

I got sober twenty years ago. I wrote my first two books of poetry while I was still drinking. I revised the second one in the loony bin.

I knew I was going to die if I didn’t stop drinking. I didn’t
know how, exactly, but I knew it wouldn’t be pretty. I didn’t write at all for the first fifteen months I was sober. I couldn’t concentrate. Every time I sat down I’d start crying. My mind was too agonizing a place to sit in. It was the struggle not to drink, and also, a lot of feelings came up that I’d been running away from. You know the only way out of those feelings is through them, but you don’t have the skill set to get through them. It’s trial by fire. People who get sober show more faith than any saint. We step off the cliff into an abyss. It’s really dark.

When I went into a mental institution after I stopped drinking, my writing took a great leap forward—or at least people started paying a lot more for it. I was more clear and more openhearted, more self-aware, more suspicious of my own motives. I was more of a grown-up.

I had a spiritual director who was also sober who said to me, “You’ve tried antidepressants. You’ve tried psychotherapy. You’ve tried LSD, cocaine, drinking your brains out. What if the solution to all of your problems was to develop a spiritual practice, and you’ve never tried it?”

It was seven or eight years after that when I converted to Catholicism. Since then I’ve been a lot less depressed, a lot less self-centered, believe it or not—as someone who writes memoirs, how dare I say that, but it’s true. I’m a lot less worried about my ego, which makes me a better writer.

The myth of the rich and famous author

Before I was a teacher I tended bar. I was a receptionist; I had a strange business career in telecommunications. When I first got
sober I was on retainer as an editor with the
Harvard Business Review
. My son’s twenty-five, and I started teaching when I was pregnant with him.

I taught a class at Harvard; I got five thousand dollars. I taught a class at Tufts; I got three thousand dollars. I taught a class at Emerson; I got fifteen hundred dollars. For the five years I was teaching in the academic ghetto around Boston, I couldn’t live on my earnings. So I continued to write business articles for the
Harvard Business Review
. It didn’t help my writing one bit, but it permitted me to keep eating, which permitted me to keep breathing.

I still don’t support myself as a writer. I support myself as a college professor. I couldn’t pay my mortgage on the revenue from my books. The myth is that you make a lot of money when you publish a book. Unless you write a blockbuster, that’s pretty much untrue.

Starting when I was five, I always identified as a writer. It had nothing to do with income. I always told people I was a poet if they asked what I did. That’s what I still tell them now.