August 8 is the first anniversary of “The Language Game,” and it should not pass without some celebration. I would like to mark the event with some thoughts on the very difficult pursuit of writing.

            My first thought is to agree with Johnson that “A man may write at any time if he sets himself doggedly to it, for nothing excites a man to write but necessity.” The wait for inspiration is the path to procrastination. The deadline is the surest means to getting composition done. A writer needs an outside hand to force him to the tentative product of the moment, for he is never fully satisfied with what he has written.  Philip Roth, for example, can read his completed work and say, “Well, that isn’t what I mean either – but it’s more like it.”

            Necessity doesn’t have to be a deadline, however. There are many occasions when an idea keeps bothering me; it stands off there, tantalizing, daring me almost to come to grips with it, grind it down, sharpen it laboriously.  What a writer must work for as he writes is that the process, though it grinds slow, grinds sure. That too is necessity.

            A second thought that occurs to me is the way one looks at the process of composition. Walker Gibson of the University of Massachusetts proposes that instead of writing about a subject as though in search for a map of its real nature, one should write about it as a potter handles “with tentative fingers a shapeless glob of clay. Something will emerge, but who knows what? The success of the finished pot (should) not be measured in terms of accuracy. What’s an accurate pot?”

            The  value of the composition (of the pot) will be the influence of the writer on his material, how effectively he has reacted to and affected the material at hand.  That, after all, is the real subject of his composition. It is not the supposed objective reality of his topic, but how he has come to grips with it, grappled with it, shaped it into a focus that he can cope with effectively. Thus, the writer tells us as much about himself in his writing as he does about the glob of clay with which he started.

            A third thought involves the assumption that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.  A good piece of writing, though bounded by focus, constantly beacons the reader beyond those bounds.  Call them vibrations, if you will, which suggest analogies and projections within the experience of the reader often quite different from the perceptions of the writer. A good piece of writing does not lead the reader to the last line and allow him to get away without more thought on the subject.

            A fourth thought is that a writer cannot write only from the limited world of his own first-hand experience.  He must supplement his awareness by vicarious experience; he must read and exploit the thoughtful observations of other writers, writers who have organized the chaotic realities of existence into a form that is at least understandable to them. Without reading, a writer has little to say, for though he may have the inclination, he does not have the time to discover everything for himself.

            And last, but probably most important, writing is a solitary activity which allows one to get to know himself. In an age that discourages being alone, writing demands a privacy closely akin to meditation, a patience experienced only in serious conversation, and a disinterested objectivity hoped for in an impartial judge. Conversation with others is excellent preparation for writing, but the act of fleshing out a thought and discovering what one really understands at a particular moment must be done in solitude.

            Writing “The Language Game” during the past year has been a demanding, often frustrating, yet rewarding experience, and this is one birthday that I am happy to celebrate.

           Bill Reynolds