Navigating the Perils of Writing
By Casandra Garza Reséndez | Published on September 19, 2023
A few years ago, when I was in my senior year of college to obtain a degree in Spanish literature, I was assigned to read the 1958 novel The Empty Book (in Spanish, El libro vacío) by Josefina Vicens for a seminar on contemporary Mexican literature. I remember thinking that it was a shame that Enrique Vila-Matas had not included José García (the protagonist of The Empty Book) in Bartleby & Co (2000), a novel in which its protagonist sets out to make a compilation of authors and characters who all of a sudden decide to stop writing. Vincens’s novel follows José García’s daily struggles with writing, his desire to completely abandon this activity, but also his inability to do so. His solution to get out of this labyrinth is to buy two notebooks: one, which is the one we are reading, is a kind of diary or notepad where he records ideas that could be crystallized into something better, something worthy of notebook number two. As the book’s title suggests, José García never considers any of his babbling in notebook number one good enough to be transcribed into number two, so this one remains “empty”. What follows are some quotes from The Empty Book (translations into English are my own) with which anyone for whom writing is part of their job could surely identify:
“How absurd, my God, how absurd! If the book does not have that ineffable, miraculous thing that makes a common word, heard a thousand times, surprise and shock; if each page can be turned without the hand shaking a little; if words cannot stand on their own, without the scaffolding of argument; if simple emotion, found without searching for it, is not present in every line, what is a book? Who is José García? Who is this José García who wants to write, who needs to write, who every night feels hopeful in front of a blank notebook and wakes up panting, exhausted, after having written four or five pages in which all that is missing?”
“I thought it was easy to start. I opened a notebook, purchased expressly. I prepared a plan, made a kind of outline. With block letters and Roman numerals, very well drawn, I wrote: Chapter I. — My mother. But I immediately felt fear. No, I can’t start with that.”
“But of course, I was deliberately lying. I don’t write for myself. They say that, but deep down there is a need to be read, to go far; there is a longing for magnificence, for expansion. So I thought that I couldn’t use personal situations and feelings that would reduce, that would localize the interest. And the struggle began to capture the concept, the broad idea, from among the pile of straw accumulated in my notebook number one. That’s what’s difficult. From the previous paragraph, for example, I like this: “return, through memory, to possess with greater awareness what we commonly only use.” I think: concerning this, concerning this we have to add something! But the phrase remains like that, dry, dead, without the heat it has when I use it to justify myself.”
As can be seen in these quotes, one of the constant emotions José García experiences is insecurity about his writing, together with the frustration, disappointment and exhaustion that this entails. His inner critic considers the words he chooses insufficiently expressive, and the fear of public exposure paralyzes him. His reflections may be very similar to what I sometimes have come to think when words simply do not flow on the page or screen.
These past days of self-observation I experimented with writing at different times of the day, and what I discovered is that during the mornings, perhaps because I feel more worried or anxious about the activities of the rest of the day, for me it is better to write without much structure and overthinking, sometimes even alternating Spanish (my mother tongue) and English in the same sentence. In the style of José García, this would be my “notebook number one”. Later on, once I have attended my classes and completed my to-do list for the day, I return to what I wrote in the morning to see what is valuable and polish it; in other words, this is what I transfer to “notebook number two”. I am not always pleased with the result and I tend to correct my texts over and over again, but I like to think that I am still in the development stage of my writing skills. Whether we like it or not, as students, scholars or writers, writing takes up a significant portion of our lives. Given this, how can we build a better relationship with our writing?
