Writing Past Dark

Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction, and Other Dilemmas in the Writer's Life, by Bonnie Friedman. This is a slim, fascinating book that was first published in 1994. It's one of those "writing sucks sometimes/most of the time, so here's how to deal with it" books. It became more interesting for me when I looked up Bonnie Friedman and discovered that she has written only one other book: a memoir about being in psychotherapy for writer's block. (Of course I intend to read that one as soon as I find it at a used bookstore.) So why is this woman qualified to dispense wisdom about writing when she keeps not finishing her own books? I don't know. She does seem to have a freelance career, so I guess that's it. And she also went to Iowa. It seems to me that Iowa fucked this particular writer up pretty badly. She talks about the program and how it taught her all about "strategy" and about form, but stifled her ability to write. "I, for one, managed to do only less and less. I wrote some sentences, studied them, and wrote them over again. Meaning drained from them while I worked. When all the meaning was gone I set my writing aside for the day and took a walk. My brain felt like a wad of chewed gum" (55). She later adds, "It was tempting to write stories like a suit of armor: hollow, but impervious to attack" (57).

As the title suggests, Friedman writes about some of the dark aspects of being a writer. She talks about going into bookstores and checking the jackets of new books to see if the authors are younger than her (which I'm sorry to admit that I do.) She talks about how difficult it is to be happy for friends who are more successful. That essay, the one on envy, is the first in the book, is the reason she was asked to write the book, and is also probably the best. The rest of the essays are interesting but meandering, and it's hard to trust her. Except that the whole point is not to trust HER, this writer who has only written a book about how to write. She doesn't have the answers, but nobody else does either.

Like many other lines in this beautiful mess of a book, this also rings true for me: "So many of us were good in school, and we wanted to be good in school some more. We needed someone to say, Don't be good in school anymore. Be done with school. Be in school, but be done with school. Writing teaches writing. Your writing will teach you how to write if you work hard enough and have enough faith" (60). I don't know if Bonnie Friedman really believes that, or if she believes it but is unable to put it into practice.

I think this book does lose a little in its history, in the fact that she's not joyfully publishing imperfect novels like Julia Cameron, Natalie Goldberg, and Anne Lamott are. Maybe it's just a sad commentary on the way the writing workshop machine can work, the way the publishing machine can work. Nevertheless, it's a book with sharp shards of dazzling beauty, shattered stained glass pieces that don't quite fit together. And those pieces alone would make it worth reading.

February 17, 2007