Why We Write (18 page)

In her article she described my books as “pop fiction.” If your work is popular, that’s a sign that you shouldn’t be taken seriously. I wrote the magazine a scathing letter. I said, “Don’t hate me because I happen to sell more books than your
Paris Review
little darlings. Don’t try to make me the Wal-Mart writer. You know what? Popular is not a bad thing.”

The way that I define “pop” is like pop psychology: you already know how it’s going to end. My books are character driven, not plot driven. My books are not predictable. I mean,
Getting to Happy—
you don’t know if they’re going to get there. It’s a journey. That’s the whole point.

I’m doing basically the same thing that Chekhov, Virginia Woolf, Hemingway did. I’m telling stories about my world, in my time, in my own voice. No one held that against
them.

In a hundred years they’ll be able to eat those words “pop fiction.” I reject them right now. I don’t let anyone define me. I’m more interested in the story I have to tell. That’s what’s important to me.

So I’m going to keep on writing it the way I’m writing it.

“I
have worked really hard to defy categorization, to break down a taxonomy whenever it comes my way,” Rick Moody told an interviewer in 2002.

“Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem. It helps people know what section to browse, but I don’t care about that stuff. I’m trying to stay close to language first and foremost and make sure that the paragraphs sing, that it sounds like music to me.”

Indeed, since
The Ice Storm
was published in 1994, Moody’s books—not to mention his other artistic endeavors—would tax any effort to taxonomize his work. Besides a writer of memoirs, essays, novels, music criticism, story collections, novellas, and
combinations thereof, he’s also a singer, guitarist, and piano player in a band, which he describes as “woebegone and slightly modernist folk music, of the very antique variety.”

Born in New York City, Moody grew up in the Connecticut suburbs that have served as closely observed settings for many of his stories and novels. His reexaminations of the people and places of his youth included a critique of the Columbia University MFA program from which he’d graduated twenty years before. In a provocative 2005
Atlantic Monthly
essay, he wrote, “What if all you did in class was
assignments
? What if you rewrote one sentence all semester? What if everyone got a chance to be the instructor, and everyone got a chance to be the student? Then, I think, we’d be getting somewhere.”

Rick Moody

Why I write

I abandoned two novels when I was in sixth grade. I got maybe ten pages into each. One was about a kid who becomes vice president. I still have the weird little blank book that I used when I attempted to write it. The itch to do my job goes at least that far back.

Why do I write? To do better for myself than I am capable of doing with language, out there, in real time. To repair inabilities, to restore confidences. And, at this point, because I don’t know what else to do. I write just as I breathe and eat. Every day. Habitually.

It would be easier if I could say that
one thing
happens when I write, or, perhaps, a number of predictable things happen. But the truth is that a great number of things have happened, over the years, when I have been writing, and that these things are unpredictable, hard to quantify, and mutable.

I guess I have now been writing, if I date my writing from the first time I ever
rewrote
anything, for about thirty-three years. Publishing books for about twenty. Sometimes the writing is inspired or inspiring; sometimes it is destitute of anything but the need to keep working. I guess what I’m saying is that what happens to me is so variable that it would be kind of foolish to try to attach names to it. I do think, however, that just about whenever I am writing, or more accurately, whenever I
have written
, I feel better and more at peace as a human being. That doesn’t mean, unfortunately, that the literary product is any good.

Responding to George Orwell’s “four great motives for writing”

1. Sheer egoism. “To be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups in childhood, etc.”

Writing out of bile, e.g., or out of some personal desire for gain—that just doesn’t square with what makes literature useful, profound, etc. My reason is mainly neurotic, I suspect: I am never really comfortable
speaking
, and writing allows me the time and serenity to make better what I cannot do in speech. It’s a peaceful and cloistered space, the page, where I don’t feel pressured the way I do in the world.

2. Aesthetic enthusiasm.
“
To take pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story.”

Yes, this is a possible reason to write. I imagine I am trying to think about prose the way I think about music. I try to think of prose as a musical form, not just as a code we agree to use in order to advance a plot. Aesthetic enthusiasm is mainly what motivates me, because aesthetic enthusiasm has no particular narrative requirements.

3. Historical impulse.
“The desire to see things as they are, to find
out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.”

I sure hope posterity is interested in me, but I figure I’ll be dead by then, and you can’t take posterity with you when you are gone.

4. Political purposes.
“The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.”

A lovely sentence, really, and one I agree with. I think all art is political, but that some art, by being quiet about its politics, supports the status quo in a slightly sinister way. I have always tried to stake out political positions in what I do, but not in a manner, I hope, that is aesthetically dull (see number two), or too shrill, etc. I believe the two—aesthetics and politics—may go hand in hand. Even if that argument never sat well with the social realists nor with the art-for-art’s-sake crowd.

Responding to Joan Didion

“Writing is the act of saying
I,
of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying
listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.”

If it were just this, the first person, I would probably want to give up and do something else with my life. Although there’s inevitability to “I,” to a point of view that starts with self, it is not all there is. There is also “thou,” as embodied in the reader. I see a real exchange with the reader, who is free to bring what she wants to the work. In this context, writing is not as expression of self, but as
relief
from self (T. S. Eliot, I believe).

Responding to Terry Tempest Williams

“I write to meet my ghosts.”

Sounds interesting but might be too metaphorical and too hyperbolic for me.

Nomenclature

I am never terribly comfortable with the word
writer.

I had a teacher, when young, who said the word
writer
was unimportant. He said that all that was important was the work itself. And I sort of agree with this approach. I think there’s an instability that goes with writing, a lack of certainty, at least for me. This lack of certainty makes me more responsive to the world, more open to it. And so if I have to repel the word
writer
in order to maintain my openness and vulnerability to the world, then fine. I’ll let go of the word. I do use it sometimes for the sake of simplicity, or so as to avoid confusing people, but I never feel totally comfortable about it.

First break

The first break I got was having my first novel published after sixteen months or so of failing to get anyone interested in it. Seemed like a big break to me at the time.

I always sort of thought I’d be a failure. I still sort of think I might be a failure. So just having a book out in the world made me very happy. I didn’t much think, at first, about whether I was going to sell a lot of copies. I didn’t pay attention to that sort of thing. I still don’t. I don’t think I have ever, not even once, willingly checked to see how many copies anything by me has sold.

In the years since my “big break,” I have mainly made a living by writing, but also by teaching and doing campus workshops and appearances.

It’s really hard for me to calve off the writing part from the
just being alive part, and so I don’t imagine I can really find a “best time” that just refers to my writing life. I think maybe the best thing that ever happened to me was becoming a father in 2008, although a close second would be checking myself into the psychiatric hospital in 1987. That turned out to be a very good move. I am a better writer for having fewer demons, and I am more curious about the world and the people in it. So those of you thinking you might need your demons in order to be creative: I beg to differ.

Hard time

Writing is always hard. As we all know, there’s a lot of rejection involved.

Even now I find the rejection part of the job pretty challenging. I am not a strong enough person, in some ways, to live this life. I try not to envy other writers. I think nothing is worse for me, and for literature and the literary world. And don’t even get me started on reviews.

I don’t solve personal problems for myself by writing. The writing is the escape from the personal. Sometimes I
cause
problems, writing first and only thinking later. Those can only be solved in the usual ways, through time, conversation, willingness to reconcile, etc.