Everyone knows what an obsessive is.
He’s someone who washes his hands every two minutes.
Or organizes her fruit by ascending size and color.
Or can’t leave the house without tapping the corners of the oriental rug twelve times with his bare toes.
Obsession – especially of the cute and cleanly variety – has become a fixture of our popular culture. It’s hard to tune into a TV show these days and not encounter a wacky obsessive who uses his bent worldview to help solve crimes, for instance (Monk); or whose pathological squeamishness only adds to her sex appeal — in a “please save me from myself” kind of way (the character Emma Pillsbury in Glee).
Of course, there’s a dark side to fixation. Stalkers are obsessives. Terrorists, too. An overly rigid attachment to an ideology being a defining symptom.
(Not that we know anything about that in this country.)
On the other hand, obsession has benign faces, too. You’re obsessive if you make too many lists, plan too far in advance, or are slow to get rid of old newspapers.
The phrase “obsessive behavior” is a great catch-all, the way “hysteria” was a few generations ago. Just as “hysteria,” a word with its roots in the female reproductive system, described behavior that was outside the male-dominated norm and thus disturbing, “obsessive,” with its roots in the language of siege and invasion, implies an intensity that can look from the outside like demonic possession.
There’s good obsessive – “After years of false starts, Silicon Valley entrepreneur finally perfects new sushi-recognition software for the iPhone – and bad obsessive – “Woman found in apartment with hundreds of cats; leaves millions for development of feline contact lenses.”
Being unable to finish something for fear it won’t live up to perfection is a classic symptom.
Think: architect Antoni Gaudi’s unfinished masterpiece, the Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona.
Being unable to finish something for fear it won’t live up to perfection is also a classic symptom.
Think: “I won’t make a dent in the guest room tonight; I’ll clean it tomorrow.”
Obsessive behavior, which almost always involves the desire to control something or someone, generally arises out of a feeling of lack of control.
That feeling is something that writers – at least this one, anyway – know a thing or two about.
It’s hard to describe the feeling of submission that’s a daily part of writing fiction. Even if you know – or think you know – the direction your story is going to take, there’s still a scary moment, every single time you sit down to work, when you have to quiet your mind, relax your fingers, and start listening.
It’s an active kind of listening that happens by way of the hands. Sometimes it’s like being dragged bodily into the monitor; other times it’s like hurling yourself against a door that refuses to open.
The composer Danny Elfman said it beautifully in an interview in the New York Times last week. Here’s his description of what it takes to be a successful composer:
“…you have to be able to relax, take no shape and fall into a new place and re-form yourself.”
But what does it mean to “take no shape,” or, as I put it a little more prosaically, to “quiet your mind?”
I think it means to open space within yourself for something new.
The poet John Keats invented a memorable phrase – “negative capability – ” to describe the way an artist must be able to encompass great doubts and contradictions. The greater that capability, according to Keats, the greater the artist.
Being so studiously neutral requires the ability – temporarily, mind you – to suspend everything you think you know about the world: your cultural conditioning, your prejudices, your preconceptions, your highly developed sense of right and wrong, and…not know them.
This means letting go of the person you think you are for a while.
In my experience, that condition of “not-knowing” is essential to writing. And it’s both fearsome and addictive.
So how do writers cope with it?
A lot of them are driven to drink.
Others develop superstitious, self-comforting habits, either of behavior or of the mind.
Like obsessively researching pinball machines, mud oven construction, or premature pond drainage.
Or, for instance, by writing a weekly column about the things that obsess them.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 07 October 2010
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
