Writing and Aging: from "Ages of the Avant-Garde"

I think that aging has made a difference in my writing in a very important way. Young writers are usually very deeply involved with their ego and they confuse their writing with their image. They think of their writing as the thing that is going to present them as a person to the world. As you get older either you realize that writing has nothing to do with you or you simply give up on trying to enhance your personality through your writing. You realize that in fact the writing is more important than you. I don't mean in the way of sacrificing yourself but that in order to be a happy person, successful, a person who is admired or sought after or even sexy, the best thing is for your writing to be good rather than to keep thinking of whether this is the way you want to present yourself.

I didn't realize when I started writing that this was the case, although I was not a baby. I was close to thirty. Therefore I was not that involved with the question of my image. But I see it a lot in the students that I work with. I can see that the way they write is the way they want to be seen. If somebody wants to be seen as smart and sharp and worldly then the writing comes out that way, because that's how they want to attract people. This is mostly women who want to present themselves as sensitive, and the writing comes out that way. I believe that there's a creative system inside of us. It's a system that's almost physical. I can compare it with the digestive system or the respiratory system. There are a number of parts of oneself that are involved in creativity. The only way that the system is going to function well is if you don't encumber it with the question of personality or how it will benefit you.

For me, and I don't know if it's the same for most writers, it has been very good. The older I got the more sexual my work became, for the same reason. If a character of mine started doing the most grotesque sexual thing, I let it do it because the character was doing it, not me. It had nothing to do with me.

On the other hand, I don't think that I'm aging an hour. Part of it is because my mother is one-hundred-and-two years old, and when I'm with her I'm a baby. In comparison to my mother I'm a kid. I have energy and I can go up and down the stairs, and I do this and do that—it's not entirely true. I do this like any old lady, but I'm younger than she is.

I feel that my work has more energy every year that passes. There's a kind of courage—of voice, of style, and of emotion, the same thing that I said about sexuality. The sexuality just comes out of the character. It's not my sexuality. This is something that may be difficult to understand for someone who is not a writer, because our dreams are supposed to be connected with our psyche. Our creativity must be connected to our psyche but I think in some way our creativity goes aside of it, too. It has its own independence, and if you free it, if you let it be free, it can do things that amaze you and surprise you and there is an energy in allowing it to be outside yourself, and watching it as if it's in front of you, and you are looking at it. That's what I mean by energy. The writing is not asking me for permission but it is taking force and just going. It can be an energy of imagery, not necessarily that the characters are energetic.

The more I write, I see that it has to do with...