On Writing – John Updike

For the past year I’ve become fascinated with great writers, many thanks to Ben Casnocha for tipping me off to Tobias Wolff, John Updike and some good literary blogs.  The following comes from the L.A. Times blog, Jacket Copy.  See full post here.

It’s always interesting to hear someone talk about their passions, but even more so when it is a writer.  That their job is one of communicating and story-telling makes their descriptions more potent and memorable.

A pitcher might say that he likes pitching because he’s always been good at it and he likes the roar of the crowd, or a pilot might say he flies simply for the freedom of traveling through the skies (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry being a glaring exception).  It’s not that they don’t love what they do, but few have the ability to express it in a way that wholly represents their passion.  A writer on the other hand will give you an answer like the following from Updike:

Why write? As soon ask, why rivet? Because a number of personal accidents drifts us toward the occupation of riveter, which preexists, and, most importantly, the riveting gun exists, and we love it.

Think of a pencil. What a quiet, nimble, slender, and then stubby wonder-worker he is! At his touch, worlds leap into being; a tiger with no danger, a steamroller with no weight, a palace at no cost. All children are alive to the spell of pencil and crayons, of making something, as it were, from nothing; a few children never move out from under this spell, and try to become artists. I was once a rapturous child drawing at the dining-room table, under a stained-glass chandelier that sat like a hat on the swollen orb of my excitement.

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