The Life of a Writer

What drives a writer to keep filling the pages year after year? For Mark Saba it’s not about chasing a perfect ending, but about staying with the moments and images that haunt him long enough to see what they have to say.

The Call to Write

If you ask writers why they chose to be writers, don’t be surprised if you are met with a look of utter dismay. For it is common knowledge among writers that being a writer has nothing to do with choosing and deciding. The writing life is one that chooses you. Like it or not, the writer accepts this destiny and tries to make the best of it. It’s a bit of work, it’s lonely, and no one will really care or even be aware that you have been assigned this task. I make this point because I am certain that there are young writers out there who need to hear these somewhat comforting words: you are not alone. I was once one of those new writers, writers who (I am doubly certain) will continue to be born, either by genetic make-up or circumstance.

A writer lives in a particular time bubble, a predicament that’s not really different from anyone else’s. A writer, however, has trouble ignoring that bubble, unlike the rest of humanity. That bubble holds everything the writer has seen, heard, touched, smelled, and thought. And none of those sensory perceptions or thoughts go away. They persist, keep calling to be reconsidered. Each day brings ever more of them; they must be compared, pondered, and addressed by one eternal question, Why? Writing is a way of trying to answer that question, but because it can never be adequately answered, you must try to answer it over and over and over again. You must try by inventing worlds through stories, poems, and essays that recreate the circumstances surrounding the why. But you will necessarily fail. That’s why you must start again, every time you sit down to write. Others may feel that you were successful in one particular piece of writing, that you have indeed shed some light on the eternal question. But you as a writer will never feel that. You will only feel that you must try again.

Searching for New Angles

How does a writer stay sane? By looking for new approaches, new angles for telling a story, new details that act as keys for unlocking the great Why. Because the complexity of life offers an endless supply of these, the writer will keep busy until his or her life has come to an end. The new approaches often surface naturally; they arise from the writer’s particular circumstances in the course of living. They cannot be predicted, or forced. They offer great opportunities for exploration. What will be uncovered along the way to finding a resolution to the problems these new approaches address? It’s a game, a satisfying journey, even if (as mentioned) it will probably come to a dead end.

Early Writing Years

I wrote my first novel when I was twenty three years old, a senior at Wesleyan University. It was to be an honors thesis. My fiction writing professor, a Pulitzer-prize winning author, tried to discourage me from tackling such an ambitious project at my tender age, but I resolutely refused her advice. I had taken so many courses up to that point in my academic life that this seemed like a final challenge. Nothing else—no thesis topic, research project, or any other senior commitment—could dislodge this idea I had to write a novel. I finally convinced her of my intention, and having seen the light in my eyes she said, “Maybe you should.”

I had started out at the University of Pittsburgh as a science major in preparation for pharmacy school, to which I was admitted in my second year. There I studied organic chemistry, pharmacology, physiology and anatomy, and a host of other courses that together reflected the academic intensity of a medical school. But I was also able to sprinkle in a few electives: drawing, Italian, architectural studies. In my third year I left the pharmacy school and headed in the direction of the humanities, picking up more Italian, philosophy, and art history. Eventually I transferred to Wesleyan and majored in English. So by my senior year I had covered it all. I was tired of listening to the expertise of others. I wanted to dig down inside me to find out what was there, what needed to be uncovered. The topic of my novel is what allowed me to do that.

Roots and Influences

I grew up in a seasoned Pittsburgh suburb, Brentwood, which bordered Carrick, a city neighborhood. My family, like most families I knew, didn’t travel much. We spent a week or two of the summer at various Pennsylvania or West Virginia lakes, and once or twice we made the journey to the New Jersey shore. Otherwise my world was secluded by the dense South Hills of Pittsburgh.

My familial roots, ethnic Ellis Islanders who came to America in search of employment, also kept the world I knew in check. It wasn’t until I reached Wesleyan in Connecticut that I began to detect subtle differences in the way and place I was raised compared to others. Classmates would look at me strangely when I spoke, making me aware for the first time of my southwestern Pennsylvania Appalachian dialect and accent. Many of them were cosmopolitan New Yorkers who had habits that were conspicuously different from mine. My roommate piled “nine or ten” slices of lunchmeat onto a sandwich, while I was accustomed to using two or three. I overheard a conversation about masturbation in which a student recounted her mother telling her that masturbation was “completely normal and healthy.” I could not imagine my mother ever addressing that subject, and I certainly would never have opened a conversation about it with anyone.

The result of this cultural shift in my environment led me to believe, after a time, that I needed to remember who I was. I needed to put it down in writing. So I chose as the theme of my novel to write about my family. But I did not write about myself. Instead, I constructed what I imagined to be my parents’ world before I was born. This was doubly therapeutic for me because my father had died when I was a toddler, so I was able to revisit him as my imagination built a story around my newlywed parents.

That novel, The Caged Skylark, earned me high honors in the English department at Wesleyan. My advisor, the chair of the English department, commented that it was most unlike what he might have expected to come from an undergraduate.

Evolving Themes

Subsequently, in my mid-twenties, I found other themes that consumed me to the point that I had to write about them in order to find peace. One was about sexuality and friendship, another a fantasy that explored the urban Eastern European neighborhood of Pittsburgh where my mother had grown up. I wrote about the dichotomy of Pittsburgh’s North versus South Hills residential areas, and what I determined to be a pattern of differences between them. By the time I reached my thirties, with two children, I wrote about my father’s Italian immigrant family and their psychological journey of living on a new continent while always remembering and comparing it to the old one. I likened their experience to a contemporary family’s experience of emigrating from a depressed Pittsburgh to a glowing California.

In each of these novella-length works I felt there was nothing else I could have written so honestly and pointedly about. If I had chosen other topics, ones that might have been covering the news but with which I had no intimate experience, my writing would have gone stale. I would have been spotted a fraud, the greatest danger to a committed writer. Whether or not anyone else will be interested in what you’re writing about seems inconsequential when you are doing something that leaves you no other choice but to get on with it. You simply must have faith that someone, somewhere, at some time, will recognize the integrity in your work, no matter what the subject. Readers must have faith in themselves as well, and not be guided by the dictates of publishers’ advertisements. It may not happen as often as we’d like, but writers and readers to find ways to connect, mostly by word of mouth.

The Writer’s Dilemma

Writers may often look for ways to escape from their work, work that is thankless and never-ending because it is always re-investing itself. It would be much better to be a heart surgeon or astronaut, because in those jobs you at least know what you’re up against. Writers, conversely, don’t ever know what the task will be, never mind its level of difficulty (or seeming impossibility) until they sit down to write. It’s no wonder may of them are driven to substance abuse, or worse, treating others with disrespect.

The problem is, no method of escape will endure. The excitement of winning the lottery will fizzle. Your sixth spouse will turn to cardboard. Another spring day will turn out to be just that. We must strive to stay relevant to a world that seems to disown us anew at every turn, a world that spars with the imaginary one that is always calling us to arms to defend it. And to further this unhappy predicament, it’s the real, tangible world that we adore, that we cannot live without. The writer’s interpretive imagination needs something to interpret! Not writing, not at least trying to respond to the imagination’s beckoning, can lead to a feeling of emptiness and despair. It’s best to keep working, and not give in to the temptations of escape.

Battling Two Worlds

This battle of worlds—tangible and imaginary—is not confined to the hours of writing. It is present at all hours, both wakeful and asleep, and influences all decision-making. Deciding on a passage of dialog between two characters in a novel is no different than deciding between vanilla and maple walnut ice cream at the supermarket. All angles of the choice must be considered. All implications pondered. Are there any ethical considerations? Long-range outcomes? How does the choice fit in with your past imaginary life? When does it become conundrum? Nothing is certain; nothing can be completely justified. A writer always sees all points of view, never a judgment. This can make for difficult living.

Life Beyond the Page

If a writer lives with a partner, they may find this bewildering and uncaring, as if the writer were never really all there. Why the blank stare, the inability to take a stand on anything, or blot out the rest of the world when making love? How could a blank page offer more than a human touch? I don’t know the answers to these questions. I only know that they exist. They are as valid as the writer’s dilemma. The writer will, of course, empathize with the other, but will be unable to solve the mystery. The only hope is that the answer be in the eyes, those windows on the universe that are too often taken for granted. It requires a bit of faith, the same faith that allows the writer to go on being a writer while living in a world that flashes constantly between beauty and despair.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Saba‘s book publications include fiction titles The Shoemaker, Two Novellas: A Luke of All Ages / Fire and Ice (winner of the Readers Views short fiction award), and Ghost Tracks: Stories of Pittsburgh Past; as well as poetry books Flowers in the Dark, Calling the Names, and Painting a Disappearing Canvas. His work has also appeared widely in literary magazines around the U.S. and abroad. Mark is also a painter, and recently retired as a medical illustrator from Yale University.

CONNECT WITH MARK SABA

Website: https://marksabawriter.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mark.saba.779  
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sabasardo/

THE SHOEMAKER

“A beautiful, poetic, ethereal read, The Shoemaker is the story of a great-grandfather and great-grandson connected by blood and by their passion for shoes. At first Manny has little time for his ancestors, but as his great-grandfather’s life draws magically closer, at times aided by benevolent apparitions, he begins to glimpse the answers to the questions about the meaning of life that have been plaguing him. Shoes play an important and enlightening role throughout the story and deliver so many gems I had to stop and savor, my favorite being that with a good pair of shoes, you can go anywhere and achieve anything. Masterfully told, the further you read, the tighter the threads the author has so expertly woven come together, leaving you, like Manny, with a renewed perspective of the meaning of family, home, and what to do with our precious time on this earth.” –Hilary Hauck, author of From Ashes to Songand The Things We’ll Never Have