Crash Course

Any Good Books

July 2018

Crash Course: Essays from where writing and life collide

Robin Black (2016, Engine Books)

   Robin Black got a late start as a writer. In her twenties and thirties, she was raising three children, in the complicated circumstances that are commonplace these days. The opening essays in this book talk about what else was going on psychologically, how desperately she wanted to be a writer, and how angry she was that she was standing in her own way. "I no longer want the record sanitized, this story of mine, replete as it is with good fortune, to be recast as only a happy narrative, or as one in which everything fell into place with no damage done. You can't be that frustrated for so long, nor that filled with self-loathing, then emerge without sustaining injury."

   Crash Course is a book of essays about those injuries, and what Black learned from them about writing. She has written it at just the right moment, when she's still in sympathy with the difficulties she faced, but not overwhelmingly embarrassed about them. She's clear-eyed and careful about self-pity: " 'No Whining' makes a fine motto, but there's value nonetheless to understanding why this pursuit feels so difficult at times, why the writer's existence can be so isolating, and even so frightening; and there's value to exploring whether it's possible to restructure one's perspective to make it less so." Indeed, as it turns out, uncertainty is probably the key to creativity. The writer writes to find out, which means she starts out not knowing, which is bound to be uncomfortable. "And certainty? It closes doors. Ends discussions. Shuts other people out."

   That uncertainty means that Black starts every story not knowing if it will work. She also doesn't always know when she'll know it's not working: she worked on her first novel for four years. She felt she didn't have time to fail at her first novel, since she was in her forties–but three drafts later, she had to admit defeat, and the time was 'wasted' after all. Being a writer means accepting that the one piece out of ten that gets to publication shares a process with the nine that didn't. "We are all struggling here. We are all making false starts, falling in and out of love with our own words, facing hard truths about something we have labored on for what seems like an eternity. And we are haunted by the belief that it's a whole lot easier for everyone else."

   That could be true, but it's probably not. Everyone else is also feeling competitive, envious, and discouraged, in between bouts of inspiration. Some days we can live in that enviable state where only the work itself matters; other days, the rejection letters represent the verdict of Literature. By the end of the book, Black sounds calmer and wiser than when she began, even though her narrative voice is otherwise occupied lately. I don't think it's because she's achieved Success, exactly, but because she trusts that, when she has something she needs to say, she'll be able to say it.