{"id":111,"date":"2013-12-01T12:28:28","date_gmt":"2013-12-01T12:28:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.history.qmul.ac.uk\/writingmatters\/?p=111"},"modified":"2024-10-02T08:42:50","modified_gmt":"2024-10-02T08:42:50","slug":"i-write","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.history.qmul.ac.uk\/writingmatters\/2013\/12\/01\/i-write\/","title":{"rendered":"I Write"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Katherine Angel<\/strong><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Katherine Angel, this week’s guest author, is finishing a book on ‘Female Sexual Dysfunction’ in American psychiatry, and holds a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Queen Mary, researching the history of psychiatric classification in the US and Europe. She is the author of <\/em>Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult To Tell, <\/a>published in the UK, the US, Germany and Holland.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

In Nicolas Winding Refn\u2019s film Drive<\/i>, Ryan Gosling responds to his neighbour asking him what he does by maintaining an uncomfortably long silence, watching her carefully, and eventually saying: I Drive. When people ask me what I do, I have begun adopting this active yet evasive formulation. I Write, I say, remolding The Driver\u2019s deliberately gnomic statement, if not his toothpick and his sideline in getaway driving.<\/p>\n

I write. I\u2019m a writer. Writers write because they need to write, because they have to write, because they have no choice. Marilynne Robinson once said that what writers have in common is a frustration with the \u2018thinness and inadequacy of ordinary speech\u2019. And Tom McCarthy has said that \u2018If there\u2019s one thing writing isn\u2019t, it\u2019s straight-up talking.\u2019<\/p>\n

I write in order to ask questions that I don\u2019t think can ever be fully answered, even if we must continually seek to answer them. Is it possible to tell a historical story \u2013 a narrative \u2013 about anything, and especially about the self, given its instability, its fragmentation? Stories \u2013 true stories \u2013 are also always in some sense false, because we can\u2019t ever tell the whole story. As soon as we start to say anything, we are omitting something else, we are leaning on one part of the world, and ignoring another. And, as Wittengstein said, \u2018an explanation must end somewhere\u2019.<\/p>\n

The curious thing about writing is the shift of gears, after publication, from writing to speech \u2013 to Tom McCarthy\u2019s straight-up talking. People ask you to explain what you have written; to re-cast it in ordinary spoken language. Which, in one sense, is kind of nice, and very lucky indeed. And in another is profoundly challenging. Because if I were really able to say what I had to say through speech, I wouldn\u2019t need to write. Writing, for me, is a wrestling with the language that we have, over-determined and saturated as it is \u2013 particularly around women and sexuality \u2013 in order to try to undo that language. Writing is a way to use language in order to dismantle it; an attempt to use our shared language in order to resist the sometimes coercive, dulling effects of that language. It\u2019s a search for language, given the frustrations of language. Just as we are creatures who desire not to desire, and to get beyond our desire, so we are creatures who want to use language to get beyond language. And we are, then, of course, doomed to fail\u00a0 \u2013 though what a privilege and a pleasure to make the attempt.<\/p>\n

Years ago, I heard Will Self say, on some radio programme or other: \u2018In the economy of ideas, nothing is wasted.\u2019 I have drafts and drafts of chapters, articles, talks, fragments \u2013 many of which bear a trace in things I have published. Sometimes a visible trace, sometimes a less visible one. It can take a long time for me to work out what form, and what voice, is the right one for the thoughts that I have. Working out how to say the thing you want to say is part of working out what it is that you want to say. It can be arduous, and it can be confusing. It\u2019s a curious pleasure, one I don\u2019t feel entirely in control of \u2013 which is, I think, part of its pleasure.<\/p>\n

Two things are, I think, crucial to writing. Both involve not fighting yourself. The first is an awareness of the scale that suits your way of thinking. Twyla Tharp talks about this in her book The Creative Habit<\/i>, from which, about six years ago, the phrase \u2018close focal distance\u2019 jumped out at me, and released me from some illusions. I am able to think and to write if I start off examining something up close; zooming in and trying to capture the detailed texture of it, and then, thinking from that place, moving back outwards. If I try to resist this, it\u2019s agony, and I get nowhere but frustration. The second thing is refusing to be convinced that anything is beneath your notice.\u00a0 If I have any advice for anyone writing, it\u2019s this: pay attention to what intrigues you. Don’t be a snob about your interests. Everything is relevant \u2013 and will yield something. Maybe not in this book, in this thesis, in this essay; but at some point, it will rear its head \u2013 if it matters. So: write everything down; capture everything that strikes you, no matter how fragmentary or fleeting it might seen. Be generous with your own curiosity. On the other hand: don\u2019t<\/i> worry about writing everything down or capturing it all. Trust yourself. If you need to write about something, it\u2019ll insist on being written about. It\u2019ll come back, and make you write it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Katherine Angel Katherine Angel, this week’s guest author, is finishing a book on ‘Female Sexual Dysfunction’ in American psychiatry, and holds a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Queen Mary, researching the history of psychiatric classification in the US and Europe. She is the author of Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult To Tell, … Continue reading I Write<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.history.qmul.ac.uk\/writingmatters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.history.qmul.ac.uk\/writingmatters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.history.qmul.ac.uk\/writingmatters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.history.qmul.ac.uk\/writingmatters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.history.qmul.ac.uk\/writingmatters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.history.qmul.ac.uk\/writingmatters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":113,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.history.qmul.ac.uk\/writingmatters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111\/revisions\/113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.history.qmul.ac.uk\/writingmatters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.history.qmul.ac.uk\/writingmatters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.history.qmul.ac.uk\/writingmatters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}