THE CHRYSALIS FROM READER TO WRITER IS NEVER PAINLESS

Reading is play whose aim is itself. Writing, on the other hand, is a game that the writer can lose.

Traci Johnson ,Some loves never leave your bones, like salt in the sea, they become part of you and you carry them

I realized I had a few more things to say about the reader becoming a writer — or maybe more accurately this reader becoming this writer, so here you go — (also writing a piece on blocking scenes, and another on SINNERS and hopefully those will land soon).

If you're a writer like me who came up through reading — who leapt into writing because of the joy and glory of reading — you may also have struggled with (and continue to negotiate) the transition between reader and writer. Perhaps for some it is a natural progression, but definitely not the case for me. I was like that kid who becomes so possessed by watching a sport he picks up the ball, only to discover that being enraptured by a sport as a spectator is one thing, playing the sport is quite another.

While I cannot speak for anyone else: reading for me was always pure play. (Says a lot about my immigrant childhood that learning to read in English and enjoying that reading was more attractive than everything else on offer.) Reading is play with game-like elements. (The puzzle game, for example. The mimesis game, for example. Games arising from the literary form, from the narrative challenges. But whatever the games within, reading for enjoyment is not a competitive game that one can lose at. One does not lose in reading because one doesn’t understand the foreign languages within or the gnomic puzzles of the text. As Huizinga notes, True play knows no propaganda; its aim is in itself, and its familiar spirit is happy inspiration.

Dropping a book because it’s boring or fails to hook the imagination is not losing. Putting down a book is not the end of the game or of play. As long as another book is picked up, it simply signals a switch in direction, not a definitive decisive judgment. The same way that playing children will tire of one activity and shift to another without ever breaking their play state.

It is no surprise that reading — play with game elements that you cannot lose — tends to catch fire among adolescents (pre- and full). In this unstable, impossibly liminal period of confusion, hormones, physical changes, scrutiny, categories, despairing comparison, conformity pressures, and competitive games at every level, reading becomes for many of us a source of relief, release, shelter, joy. Adolescence smashes us apart and we all need something to put ourselves together — and for me and my tribe, reading was that force of reconstitution.

At the level of play, reading gives so much. It allows us to play while we’re reading and it allows us to relive that play in our memories — the glorious afterglow of stories — and therefore play again — and best of all it allows for the possibility of deep play that Diane Ackerman so aptly described:

In rare moments of deep play, we can lay aside our sense of self, shed time’s continuum, ignore pain, and sit quietly in the absolute present, watching the world’s ordinary miracles…When it happens we experience a sense of revelation and gratitude. Nothing need be thought or said. There is a way of beholding that is a form of prayer

So yes, for me reading is Play with Game elements whose aim is itself.

Writing, on the other hand, is a Game with Play elements whose aim is to provide readers with an opportunity of play — a game crucially that the writer can lose.

How does the writer lose?

Either we fail to write the Story or for whatever reason the Story does not work.

The writer plays the Writing Game against themselves — especially the parts of themselves that are unavailable to the conscious mind — and against the form.

Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. Under ideal circumstances, the more we play the game, the better we get at it. Under ideal circumstances, losing games has a paradoxical ability to make one better. Under ideal circumstances a single loss doesn’t end a career or even the season. You just pick up the ball and head into the next game and the next one.

In another place I quoted Alejandro Jodorowski Failure doesn't exist. It's only a change of direction. One could argue that the collapse of a novel / story / essay / poem is not the loss of a game, only a change in direction. For some that might be the case. But if you go at your writing the way I do — the way I used to go at baseball — the way writing (I would argue) demands it be approached, with what Bernard Suits called a lusory attitude — if you put shit on the line in your writing and you risk and dare, then loss must be a possibility and therefore a story coming apart will feel like a loss. That’s the whole point of risking and daring — loss must be possible and without the possibility of loss there is no risk or dare worth its name. That doesn’t mean that you have failed as a writer or as a person but only that you suffered a loss with this one piece of work, a sign that there’s more to learn and that you must, ala Jodorowski, seek the adjustments, the change in direction that will bring success next time around.

In spite of how similar these functions might appear, chrysalising from reader to writer represents, in fact, a fundamental shift.

Like jumping from spectator to player.

The reader never loses the reading play-game. The writer can lose the writing game-play.

The reader experiences the play-games the writer enables in the work. The writer strategizes how to enable play-games in their work.

The reader experiences the spell. The writer crafts the spell (and cannot ever experience the spells they cast).

Sometimes the spell goes off correctly; sometimes it doesn’t, and even when it does go off well the writer can only hope that the spell finds its enchanted.

Given how hard it is to write one should be not surprised that some of us who have embarked on this hard road often find ourselves in the midst of our labors reliving the joys of reading — the echoes of which I spoke of earlier — and which often only makes the task at hand harder.

I was and continue to be one of those in whom the reader is very strong and which, if I’m not careful, can make the writing harder rather than easier.

What helps is understanding the two modes that war within those of us who are reader-writers. And having compassion for those moments when in the face of the challenges and rigors of writing we revert to the playfulness of reading.

Reading’s aim, as Huizinga recognized, is in itself. Writing, however, not only makes the play of reading into a game that the writer can lose, it also transforms into something instrumental.

For some, this instrumentalization is a golpe with no aftershock, but not all of us recover equally from the pain of that chrysalis and we must be sympathetic to the discomforts and phantoms such transformations can leave behind.