“Beyond the Process” by Ryan Lackey
In anticipation of our fourth volume of the Simpsonistas series—an anthology composed of work by friends of the Project as well as participants in our programs—we are pleased to share this essay by recent Simpson Fellow Ryan Lackey.
Ryan’s powerful reflection on writerly life, titled “Beyond the Process,” is one of many brilliant works forthcoming in October 2022.
Like most writers, I think, I’m hugely hypocritical. If anyone—friends, students, other writers, strangers—asks, I say that I believe in the lunchpail theory of writing, which holds that writing does not begin with magical, Aeolian inspiration, that it’s not about finding the proper form to contain an amoebic blob of genius. Instead, writing is about showing up every day, about putting the butt in the chair and words on the page, about process rather than product—and a dozen other clichés besides. I say I believe this because I think on some level I do. As a model of creative work it’s relatively democratic—and, crucially, it’s teachable. There’s no pedagogical model I’ve seen for manifesting inspiration, no syllabus that explains Orphic possession. But the lunchpail theory comes prepackaged with a whole apparatus of techniques, skills, and methods designed to make writing seem possible. Undoubtedly, they make the teaching of writing possible, at least hypothetically.
I say I believe this—and then I stand around, waiting for inspiration, wondering why I haven’t written anything. When stunned by the realities of day-to-day life—politics, paperwork, email, Twitter—all I want is to be shocked into activity by an idea so obviously and overwhelmingly electric that it provides its own self-sustaining energy. I imagine leaping up, running to my desk, and clattering away at my keyboard—all this in a kind of blurry cinematic time-lapse—until I emerge from the fugue and re-enter the world with something polished and publication-ready. This has never actually happened.
The thing is, the lunchpail theory has its own problems. Sometimes its emphasis on process sounds more like plodding, and there isn’t much room for pleasure there. At worst it makes writing seem downright Sisyphean, and it’s worth remembering not only that Sisyphus himself never claimed to be happy, but also that Camus never claimed to be happy while writing his essay about Sisyphus.
Emphasizing process just defers the question: if the point of writing is the process, what’s the point of the process? What makes it worthwhile? Why would anyone want to reproduce in their own lives the image of the grim writer at the grim desk, everyday, working grimly? It’s almost gnomic or koanlike: you write because you write.
For me, at least, workshop is one way—maybe the only consistent way I’ve ever found—to break open process and find something inside that’s worth holding on to. There were seven students in my workshop at CalPrep, a charter school in Richmond, California. All seven are girls, none are white, and they shared in the beginning a tentative enthusiasm about writing that seemed familiar to me, the kind of feeling that arises when you’d like to do something but aren’t quite sure if you really can: a graduate student at karaoke, or a cat below a high ledge.
One easy story would attach to this enthusiasm and frame the members of the workshop—Mikaela, Alexia, Fernanda, Jasuara, Aquetzalli, Cristal, Janeli—as the energetic counterbalances to the stony process model, as writerly innocents whose ideas and fantasies haven’t yet smashed against the rocks of reality. But that story, to my mind, conjures up a stereotypical image of the “beginning writer,” someone eager and sincere but unsophisticated, in need of a robust grounding in form, craft, and technique. This image is unfair and untrue. The writing that came out of the workshop was both sophisticated and well-grounded; often it was beautiful.
The point, however, isn’t that my students were already clever and accomplished writers before I arrived, although this is true. My goal isn’t to distinguish my students, any students, as prodigies or adepts, unusually blessed by the spirit of genius that the process model (thankfully!) tried to abolish. The point is that workshop, at least for me, made possible a new experience of the everydayness that the process model champions but also drains of color. Ours was an everydayness whose emotional texture was not struggle or firm-jawed perseverance. To be sure, neither the 8:30 start nor the facemasked impossibility of coffee were always pleasant, exactly. But workshop was that rare and underappreciated thing: an obligation, a responsibility, whose obligatoriness was part of its significance and its pleasure. Workshop was an everyday (or, more properly in our case, a biweekly) complexity—sometimes awkward, sometimes confusing, always exhausting by its end. It’s no surprise: maybe the most legitimate writing cliché is that writing is emotionally and physically tiring. So is teaching; so is learning. All these, though, writing and teaching and learning, were done in collaboration, and this was, selfishly, the best thing about our workshop: the opportunity it offered for writing done in process, but done together.
At its best, our workshop didn’t try to cultivate genius or produce tirelessly workaday writers. We didn’t try to become new people. My students didn’t become writers; they already were. Instead, together, we made writing the object of shared attention. Not aimlessly, not purposelessly. Not for the abyssal sake of writing itself, even. We wrote for ourselves, and we wrote for each other. We took the friendly and serious confines of the workshop as a focusing lens for particular acts of writing.
What I believe, with this workshop in mind, is that when we talk about process, we ought to have in mind a destination, a telos. We’re always writing towards something, for someone, from somewhere. What workshop added to the process model was exactly this sense of emplacement, sociality, rootedness. If writing is about process, if the lunchpail theory is the best alternative to a rarefied picture of genius, then we ought to imagine process in the real world, you might say. A process that begins, in some cases, with the writer alone at the desk, but does not end there.