Time to write isn’t a luxury

OZICK
Time to write isn’t a luxury, that goes without saying. It’s what a writer needs to write. But to have it coextensive with one’s whole youth isn’t absolutely a good thing. It’s unnatural to do anything too much. “Nothing in excess,” especially when everything else in the case must be in excess: the reading-hunger, language-hunger, all the high literary fevers and seizures. That kind of “excess” is what defines a writer. An image of the writer came to me the other day: A beast howling inside a coal-furnace, heaping the coals on itself to increase the fire. The only thing more tormenting than writing is not writing. If I could do it again, I would step out of the furnace now and then. I’d run around and find reviews to write, articles; I’d scurry and scrounge. I’d try to build a little platform from which to send out a voice. I’d do, in short, what I see so many writers of your generation doing: Chasing a bit of work here, a bit there, publishing, getting acquainted. What you do, in fact. Churning around in the New York magazine world. What I did, a child crazed by literature, was to go like an eremite into a cavern and spin; I imagined that I would emerge with a masterpiece. Instead I emerged as an unnatural writing-beast, sooty with coal dust, my fingers burned and my heart burning up. Have you read Lost Illusions?

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