Be Careful what You ask for

Questions Writers Ask
by Karen Speerstra
Robert D. Reed Publishers; 2010


Undeniably, the epigram is limited by its very pithiness, as it always attempts to marry profundity to brevity, broad statement to precision, and irony to earnestness. In Karen Speerstra’s ample collection of quotes on writing Questions Writer’s Ask, the epigram (not to mention the writers and critics who coined them) is on full display in all its glorious wit, wisdom, pomp and pettiness. Organized around 20 questions that writers often ask and laid out like a loose and occasionally repetitious conversation, a wide variety of writers, past and present, provide the answers.

It’s the kind of guilty pleasure teachers, writers, and those who write about writing (bloggers!) will delight in, especially when reaching for a quote and you can’t quite put your finger on who said it, or exactly how it goes. It’s hard not to be won over with witty gems like this one from Nabokov in the introduction: “Turning one’s novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.” One of those pleasures are the moments of recognition when we see our own experience reflected in a quote and feel at once that we belong to the club, as I did at J.P Donleavy’s remark from the chapter “Why do Writer’s Write, anyway?”: “The purpose of writing is to make your mother and father drop dead with shame.” Or this in the same chapter from Nelson Algren: “You don’t write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich. A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.”

Of course, the epigram can easily fall pray to oversimplification as in this one from Tolstoy: “There is nothing in the world that should not be expressed in such a way that an affectionate seven year old boy can see and understand it.” I mean, do you know any seven year old that could tackle War and Peace? And why an affectionate boy? Do we only talk down to boys who are surly and aloof? It’s a bit too simplistic to work as statement, and too specific to work as metaphor. The epigram can also fall victim to stylistic or metaphoric excess, as it does here with Gertrude Stein: “To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write.” How do we know that to write is to write without at least one more to write is to write? And in this overblown bit from Isaac Asimov: “I write for the same reason I breathe—because if I didn’t, I would die.”

All of this points out the seductive power and the folly of the epigram, even the quotation lifted out of context, and of our ambivalence towards that very pithiness we mistrust and the skill in it that keeps us quoting and wishing we’d thought of it. In the best hands these epigrams have a power to convey some experiential truth that undeniably reminds us of our priorities as writers. This from James Joyce: “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!…On and on and on and on!” Speerstra records the poignancy of what happens when we get caught between those warring priorities in this quote from Melville: “Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar…What I feel most moved to write, that is banned—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.”

The lingering question is how best to read a completely epigrammatic text? It can be rather like plowing through the Psalms of the Bible, some verses are striking, while others don’t especially move us. There is a certain amount of reinforcing repetition and it doesn’t matter in which order you read the chapters. Yet, if you take a single chapter and read it through you will discern Speerstra’s subversive humor. In fact she makes sure to capture writers not only at their wisest and wittiest, but also at their surliest. At one point, in the deliciously wicked chapter, “How do you handle criticism?”, Mark Twain, with increasing savagery, keeps horning into the conversation of quotes like a man obsessed with the “merits” of Jane Austen. Even as you laugh, quotes like this one from Borges—“A writer should have another lifetime to see if he’s appreciated”—bring home the sting of harsh criticism and indifference that is an unavoidable part of the writer’s life. In this chapter alone, you can certainly find quotes that make you question both the writer’s wisdom and the wisdom of being a writer. What I like most about Questions Writers Ask is the way some of our guides and their quotes act a little like unreliable narrators in fiction. Does being pithy and funny make what you say true? When there are contradictions between writers, who do you trust and who do you dismiss? A nobel prize winning novelist fueled by alcohol, or a children’s author we’ve never heard of? Speerstra isn’t interested in arbitrating. It is up to the reader. The kinds of writers and answers you are drawn to may say something about the kind of writer you want to be, or perhaps only about the skill of the epigramists themselves, perhaps least about their reliability as instructors in the writer’s life. It reminds me of the old adage: Be careful what you ask for, you might get it.