The Solitary Writer

By Matthew Manera

The writer’s occupation is a solitary one. Whatever else writers do in their day-to-day lives, when it comes to creating a story or a poem or an essay, they are necessarily alone with the page. In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke makes it clear to the young Franz Xaver Kappus: “What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours – that is what you must be able to attain.”

Often, when I sit alone in my writing chair, I imagine other writers sitting alone somewhere at the same time in their writing chairs. I imagine them writing about the experience as I am writing about it now. In his poem “I Wonder How Many People In This City,” Leonard Cohen writes, “Late at night when I look out at the buildings / I swear I see a face in every window / looking back at me, / and when I turn away / I wonder how many go back to their desks / and write this down.” As writers, we can always feel the presence of future readers hovering somewhere out of sight in the corners of the room and we are comforted in our solitude by these sympathetic voyeurs. Like a character in a movie, we are being observed, and, like that character in the movie, we have our own soundtrack playing a harmony line that weaves in and out of our solitude Or so I like to imagine.

Sometimes, though, when I take the pulse of my room, nowhere can I find my comforting voyeurs; sometimes, no matter how hard I listen, I can’t hear the evocative soundtrack. But there is something I can feel; I can feel; I can feel that mysterious force – whether it comes from within or from without, I don’t know and don’t want or need to know – guiding my hand across the page. For Ted Hughes, this mysterious force is the Thought-Fox “[setting] neat prints into the snow” of the clean, white page, “[entering] the dark hole of the head” until, suddenly, “the page is printed.” For me, it is the feel of the fountain pen in my hand; I hear it rhythmically, gently scraping its lines and curves into a space that was previously empty. The perfect soundtrack.