JOAN DIDION

\7hy I \iTrite

This $ey is a.lapted from a R€8e.6' tlcture delivered ii ihe

Univ$ny of Glifornia at Berkdey.

Of course I stole che rirle for rhis .alk, from George Orwell.One reason I stole it was thar I like the sound of the words:

\fty I wrire. Therc yorl have three shon unambiguous words

rhar share a sound, and the sound they share is chis:

IIIIn many ways wriring is the act of saying l, of imPosing

oneself upon other people, ol saying litn to ne, see it ry u,x!,

cbange yau niad. Iti an aSgressive, even a hosrile act You can

disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordi-

nar€.lauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, wirhellipses and e\asions-with the whole maoner of intimating

rathei thao claiming, of alluding rarher rhan srating-burrhe.e's no gefting around the facr rhar seffing words on paperis the racric ofa secret bully, an invarion, an impositioo of rhewriter's s€nsibility on rhe readers most prvare space.

I stole the tirle nor only because the words souoded rightbut because they seemed to sum up, in a no-Donseffe way, all Ihave to tell you. Like many wrirers I have only this one sub-ject," this one area": rhe r ofw.iring. I can bring you norepons from any orher front. I may have orher inrer€sts: I am"interested," for example, in marine biology, bur I don'r far-ter myself that you would come our ro hear m€ ralk about it. Iam not a schola!. I am oor in the l€ast an inrellectuat. which isnor to say that when I h€ar rhe word "inreile.tual" I reach formy gun, but only to say that I do not thiok in absrmcts. Dur-iog the years when I was an undergmduate at Berkeley I tried,with a kind of hopeless lare-adolescent energy, to buy sometemporary visa into the world of ideas, ro forge for myself a

mind that could deal wirh rhe abstrac.In short I rried ro rhink. I failed. My arrenrion veered

inexorably back ro the specific, ro rhe rangible, ro whar waqg€nerally consid€red, by everyone I knew theo and for tharmatter have knovn sioce, rhe periphertrl. I would rry to con-template the Hegeliaa dialecric and would find myselfconcen-trating insread on a flowering pear tree ourside my windowand .he panicular way rhe perals fell on my floor. I woutd rryto r€ad linguistic theory and would lind myselfwondering in-stead ifthe lights were on in the bevarron up rhe hill. When Isay that I was wondering ifthe lighrs x'ere on in rhe bevarronyou might immediarely suspecr, ifyoudeal in ideas ar all, rharI was regist€ring the beBtron as a political symbol, rhinkiogin shorthnnd abour the military-iodustrial complex and its rolein the university community, bur you would be wroog. I waq

ooly woDderins ifthe lights were on ir the beurron, and howrhey looked. A physical fact.

I hnd trouble graduating from Berkeley, nor because ofrhh inability to deal with idea!-I was majoring in English,and I couid locate the house-and'sarden imagery in 7,, Prl-truit afd hAt

^s well as the oext persoo, "imagery" beiog by

de6nicion the kind ofspeciGc rhat got my attention-but sim-ply because I had neglected ro take a course in Milton. Fo!

reasons which now sound baroque I needed a degree by rhe end

of that summer, and the Enslish department 6na11y agreed, ifI would come down from Sacnmento every F.i&y and talkabour rhe cosmology of Pdradile L|n, to certify me proficientin Milton. I did this. Some Fridays I rook the Greyhound bus,

other Fridays I caught the Southern Paci6c's City ofsan Fran-

cisco on the last leg ofits tnnscontinental tdp. I can no long€rtell you wherher Miltoo pur rhe sun or the earth at the center

of his ]Jr,:,i\erse 1n Paradite Lort, the centml question of ar least

one century and a topic abour which I wrcte ro,ooo wordsrhar summer, bur I cao stilt recall th€ exacr rancidity of rhe

butter ifl the City of San Francisco's dining car, aod the way

the rinted windows on the Greyhound bus cast the oil refin-eri€s around Carquinez Straits iotoa gray€d and obscurely sini-st€r lighr. In shoft my atceotion was always on the periphery,

on what I could see and taste and touch. on rhe 6utter. and theGreyhound bus. During those years I was rraveling on what Ikoew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew thatI wa! no legitimate residen! in any s,odd of idex. I knew Icoutdn't think. Al1 I knew then was what I couldn't do. Ali Ikoew then was what I waso't, and it rook me some years ro dis-

Y.hich was a writer.By which I mean not a "sood" writeror a'bad" writer but

r8 The Irriter on He. \(/orL My I 'Jrrire r9

simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed aod passiooa.e

hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had mycredentials been in order I would never have become a writer.Had I b€en blessed with even limited access ro my own mindthere would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to6nd out what I'm thioling, what I'm lookinS at, what I see

and what it means. Vhat I want aod what I fear. \fhy did rheoil rennerie' around Carquinez Strairs.eem srnrster to me inrhe summer of r9j6? \flhy have rhe night lights in the beva-

tron burned in my mind for rwemy ye n? lYlbdt i gli g an inthele Pntuft! ir ry nind?

When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking,quite specifically, about irnages rhar shimmer around theedges. There used to be an illustratioo in €very elementarypsycholog) 6ook rhoriog " cat dmrn by i parienr in vrryingstaSes ofschizophrenia. This €ar had a shimmeraround it. Youcould see th€ molecular srructure breaking down at the very

edges of the cat: the cat became the background and the back-ground the €ar, everyrhing interacting, exchanginS ions. Peo-

ple on hallucinoaeos describe rh€ same perception of objects.

I'm nor a schizophrenic, nor do I take hallucinogens, but ceFrain images do shimmer for me. Look hard enough, and you

can't miss the shimmer. ICs rhere. You .ant think roo muchabout rhese pictures thar shimmer. You just lie low and letrhem dev€lop. You stay quiet. You don't talk to many people

aod you keep your nervous sysrem from shorting out and youtry ro locare rhe car in rhe shimmer, rhe grammar in the pic-

Just as I meaor "shimmer" literally I menn "grammar" lit-erally. Grammar is a piano l play by ear, since I seem ro have

been our of school the year the rules were mentioned. A11 Iknow about grammar is irs innnite power. To shift the struc-

,o The \viiter oD Her rwork

rure ofa senrence alters rhe meaoing of rhar senrence, as de6n-itely and ioflexibly as the position ofa carnera alters th€ mean-ing of .he object photographed. Many people know aboutcamera angles now, but not so many know about sentences.

The arranSement of th€ words matters, and the affangementyou want can be found in the picture in your mind. The pic-ture dictares rhe armngemenr. The picture dicra.es whetherthis will be a seorence with or without clauses, a sentence thatends hrrd or a dy ing-falJ senrence. long or short. a(rive or pa.s-

sive. The picture tells you how ro arrange the words and thearmngement ofth€ words tells you, or tells me, what's goingon in the pict]ure. Nata bene:

Ir tells you.

You don'. tell it.l,et me show you wha. I mean by pictures in the mind. I

beBanPkf It a! ]t Lay! )ust as I have begun each ofmy oovels,with no notion of "character" or "ploC' or ev€n "incident." Ihad only t$o pictures in my mind, more about which later,md a rechnical inrenrion, which was ro writ€ a novel so ellip-tical and fast that it would be over before you noticed it, a

novel so fast that it would scarcely exisr on rhe page at all.About the picrures: the first was ofwhite space. Empty space.

This was clearty rhe picture rhar dictared rhe narrarive inLen-

tion of the book----a book ia which anyrhing rhar happened$ould happen off the page, a "whire" book ro which the reader

would have to bring his or her own bad dreams----and yet thispicture toid me no "srory," suggested no situation. The secondpicture did. This second picture was of something actuallywitnessed. A young woman wirh long hair and a short whitehalrer dress walks rhrough the casiao at rhe Riviera in ksVegas at one in the morning. She €rcsses the casino alooe andpicks up a house tel€phone. I watch her because I have heard

her paged, and recognize her name she is a minor actress I see

aroud l-os Angeies from time ro rime, in places like Jax and

once in a gynecologist's office in the Beverly Hills Clinic, buthave never met. I know nothing about her. V/ho is paging

her? \fhy is she here to be paged? How euctly did she come

to thisT I! was precisely rhis moment in Ias Vegas that made

Pldy lt ar lt lay berin to tell i$eifto m€, but the momeot ap-pears in the novel only obliquely, in a chapter which begins:

"Idaria made a list of things she would never do. She

would never: walk through the Sands or Caesar's alone after

midnight. She would never: ball at a pany, do S-M unless she

wanted to, borrow furs from Abe Lipsey, deal. She wouldnever: carry a Yorkshire ir Beverly Hills."

That is th€ beginning of the chapter and that is also rhe

end of the chapter, which may suggest what I meaflt by

I r€call having a number of pictures in my miod when Ibegan the novel I just 6nished, A B00k afcalnna, Ptu)er' As

^marrer of fact one of these pictures was of that bevatron I men-

tioned, although I would be hard put to tell you a story inwhich nuclear energy 6gures. Another was a newspaper photo-

graph or a hijacked 7o7 burning on the desert in rhe MiddleEasr. Another was the night view from a room in which I once

spenr a week with paratyphoid, a hotel room oD the Colom-

biao coast. My husband and I seemed to be on the Colombiaocoasr represeoring rhe United States of America at a 6lm fes-

ti\al (I recall invoki^s the name 'Jack Valeori" a lot, as ifitsreiteration could ma&e me well), and it was a bad place to have

fever, not only because my indisposition offended o,-rr hosts

bur because every nighr in this hotel the genemtor failed. The

lighrs went out. The elerator stopped. My husband woutd go

ro the event of the evening and make excuses for me and I

The W.iter on Her \{/ork \Y/hy I write ,3

flould stay alone in rhis hotel room, in the dark. I .emember

sranding ar rhe window trying to call Bogora (rhe telephone

seemed to work on rhe same principle as the generatoi) and

watching the niSht wind come up and wondering what I was

doing eleven degrees off the equator with a fever oI Io3. The

view from that window de6nitely figures in,4 Boak of ConmnPral*, as does rhe burning 7o7, and yet none ofthese pictures

rold me the srory I needed.

The picture that did, rhe picture that shimmered and

made rhese othe! images coalesce, was the Paoama airPort nt 6A.M- I was in this airporr only once, on a plane to Bogod thatstopped for an hour to refuel, but the way it looked that mor^-ing remaioed superimposed on everythina I saw uotil the day Itoi,shea A BaaA af Canman Puyt, I li\ed, in tbzt

^irport for sev-

eml years. I cao stil fed rhe hot air when I step off the plane,

cao see the heat already rising off the tarmac at 6 ^.M.

I can

feel my skin damp and wrin.kled on my legs. I can feei the

asphalr stick to my sandals. I .emember the big tail ofa Pan

American plane floating motionless down ar rhe end ofthe tar-mac. I remember the sound of a slot machine in the waitingroom. I could re1l you that I remember a pdticular woman inthe airport, an American qom n, ^ aneamericaw, a &innor-teanetica,la

^bont fony who vore a big square emerald in lieu

of a wedding ring, but there was no such woman there.

I put rhis woman in rhe airport later. I made this woman

up, just as I latet made up a country to put th€ airport io, and

a family to run the country. This floman in the airport is nei-

ther catching a plane nor meetiog one. She is orderinS tea inrhe airpoft .offee shop. In fact sbe is not simply "ordering" tea

but insisting that rhe water bs boiled, in front of her, fortweoty minutes. \'hy is this woman io this airport? why is

she going nowhere, here has she been? \a/here did she ger

that big ememld? What derangemeot, or disassociarion,

makes h€r believe thar her will to see the i'ater boiled can pos-

sibly pre\ail?"She had been going to one airport or another for four

monrhs, one could see ir, looking ar rhe visas on her passport.

Alt those airports where Charlolte DouSlas's passport had been

sramped would have looked alike. Somerimes rhe sigo on thetower would say "Bienvenidos" and sometimes the sign on thetower wouid say "Bienvenue," some places were wet and hor

and orhers dry aod hor, but at each of these airporrs the pasrel

concrere walls would rust and stain and the swrmp off rhe

runway would be lirrered wirh the fuselages of cannibalizedFairchild F-227t and the water would need boiling.

"I knew why Charlotte rent to the airport eveD ifvictordid not.

"l knew abouc airports. '

Thes€ lines appear abouc halfway thtotgh A B00k af Con-

n1n Pr4er, b$ I wrcte rh€m during the second week I workedon the book, long before I had aoy idea shere CharlotteDouglas had been or why she went to airports. Until I wrotethese lines I had no character .alled Victor" in miDd: thenecessity for mentioning a name, and the name "Victor," oc-

curred ro me as I wrote the senterLce. I Anau ulry Charlatte u,err

to the ai$\rt so\$ded inconple.€. I ktu|o \fi1 Cba otte *ent tatbe di4nd e!.n if Vntur did rot carried a little moie narrative

d.ive. Most imponant ofall, unril I wrote these lines I did notknow who "I" !vas, who was telling the story. I had intended

until that that the 'I" b€ no more than the voice ofthe author.a nineteenrh-centuiy omniscieot oarraror. But there it was:

"l koew why Charlotte wenr ro rhe aiiport even ifvictordid not.

"I knew abor:t airports."

24 The lrrirer on Her vork \X/hy I V.ite 2t

This "I" was the voice of no author in my house. This "I"was someone who oot only knew why Charlotre went to theairport but also knew someooe called 'Victor. ' Who w1s Vic-tor? Who was this narrator? \ghy was this narra.or telliog me

rhis sroryz Let me rell you one .hin8 about why wdters write:had I known the answer.oany ofthese questions l woutd never

have need€d to write a novel.