Why I Have Not Written Any Of My Books by Marcel Benabou (April 2018)
French author Marcel Benabou muses on the great challenge of writing all the books he has yet to write in this 1986 book. This tongue-in-cheek reflection came my way via a loyal TOA reader who thought it fit nicely with my “books I’m not writing” series from the end of last year (1).
This book had a quality some writing has where it is nominally about one thing (the books Benabou has yet to write) but is really about something else (writing, or perhaps the challenge of writing). An extended metaphor, some might say, or perhaps simply a reflection of reality – if writing weren’t so challenging, surely no book would go unwritten.
I think anyone who has created anything will understand this feeling. Writer’s block, as some call it, is not an affliction limited merely to the paid writer. Who has not sat, stoop-shouldered and bleary-eyed, staring at the laptop in vain as the search for the perfect email salutation reaches a third hour? Or how about the experience of trying to find the perfect words for a simple birthday card? It is a wonder that those who have ever struggled to write would then commit to writing more, perhaps professionally, but I suppose that’s the true definition of a writer: someone who writes, sometimes, when able, and willing.
Unfortunately, as Benabou points out, being unfit for writing has little relationship to the desire to write. It seems like once the bug bites, there remains little choice but to scratch away until the words align into paragraph-ready sentences. And is the job done after that? Of course not, not in any sense, for the real torture of writing comes when proofreading a completely illegible paragraph. All that work to feed the backspace key!
I suppose the real torture for Sisyphus came not in pushing the boulder up the hill but in watching it roll back down to the bottom. If Sisyphus were a writer, perhaps his eternal punishment would have been to sit at a blank Microsoft Word document, the vertical line winking knowingly at him, compelled to write while knowing that each word he typed into the program was destined to disappear into the ether the moment his fingers stopped hitting the keyboard.
Footnotes / the fourth law
1. Thank you for the recommendation!
It’s always interesting when a real life thing ‘happens’ because of something I wrote on TOA (don’t worry, reader, it’s only been little things here and there so far, reader, nothing major, but still). It speaks to a larger idea that I maybe will write about someday – for all the time we humans spend talking, it is actually extremely rare when something we simply say changes the world around us.
My general rule of thumb for TOA reflects this understanding in a way – for the most part, I simply pretend TOA doesn’t exist. Even if I am sure that I am speaking with someone who read a post, I still speak as if the post never happened. Although this approach means I repeat myself from time to time in the company of loyal readers, I think this is the fairest way to do it – the last thing I want to do is create the illusion that I am imposing my rubbish on any reader.
