Babble and nonsense and typing and speech.

by ballastexistenz @ 2:59. Filed under Uncategorized

There are things that I don’t really want — would never truly wish for — but various nuisances make me wish they could change. This kind of thinking is incredibly narrow in scope, and does not take into account the real causes of the problem. It’s a kind of thinking I see all the time in other people, but so often presented without questioning it, without pointing out the errors in this kind of thinking, without pointing out the damage it does to present it as if it’s just fact.

I sometimes wish I could talk (note: talk here means in any functional sense to use speech for communication on a regular basis — it does not mean, make word-noises with my mouth). Not because I think there’s anything superior about talking. Not even because of most of the everyday nuisances of communication equipment usage. No, it’s a different nuisance.

People react to my writing differently than they react to the writing of speaking people. They act like what I have to say is more profound because I type to communicate — even though, if I could speak, I would be saying the exact same things. They also question whether I am really the one writing things more often, which is not something I see a lot directed at speaking people (even when they are using a form of echolalia less communicative than what I am doing in writing, and may in fact be repeating someone else’s words and concepts).

They also seem to assume an entire history that isn’t mine (usually of someone who never talked and then started using FC and then started typing independently), and then if I correct them they want the entire complex speech history explained in detail. Even if I’m way too tired to do it justice. (And if I’m too tired to do it justice, then I have to gloss over and oversimplify things in ways that they blame me for later when they find out that it was a glossed-over oversimplification.) And even if my life story isn’t really anyone’s business.

They also seem to assume that I am vastly, vastly different from people who speak better than I do (or have enough tricks set up to look like they speak well even if they’re just muttering a word now and then to people). Zilari and I have a lot in common even in terms of speech and communication history, but I bet people would put us in two totally distinct categories because we branched off in slightly different directions at one point with regard to the prioritizing of speech vs. writing in our brains.

Here is a big part of why I don’t understand or believe the whole thing about speech meaning you’re better at doing things:

If I were to speak, here is what my life would be like:

I would every few hours hit a level of shutdown that I now normally only experience during stressful trips to conferences and other unfamiliar and busy locations. I would freeze in place far more often than I do now. My mind would be filled with a constant painful buzzing haze that I could not get to go away no matter what I did. This would affect my ability to understand and react to my environment in an efficient (for me) way. I would be totally incapable of learning to do many of the things I have learned recently, and even if I learned them, I would be unable to perform them. I would not be baking orange bow knot rolls for fun, I would not be baking anything at all, I would in fact be routinely struggling with the physical act of getting food into my mouth. I would throw loud screaming fits on a regular basis (something I’ve managed to stop for the most part), I would still head-bang to the degree I used to (once per second for hours, rather than the occasional thing it is today), I would possibly even do violent things (something that is all but gone). I would walk into walls, walk into the street, and all those sorts of things, far more often. I would fail to notice many key aspects of what was around me.

And all the same people who come to all these weird conclusions about me because I don’t speak, would then decide that I was something they called “high-functioning” because even if all other abilities went down the tubes at least I’d be speaking.

And that is the position that all kinds of speaking auties are in right now.

By contrast, if my brain were to cut out typing (and all pre-typing activities) as well as speech (something it’s shown itself quite capable of doing in the short-term), many other skills would increase greatly. Typing may not be the extreme of a memory-hog as speech is, and may be far more comfortable and useful, but it’s still pretty processing-intensive. If I were to cut out language and the idea-blocks that go with it, there are all kinds of things I could do (and do do, when that happens temporarily).

And yet you’d probably call me lower-functioning because I wouldn’t even type at that point.

I don’t understand this. This is foreign to my brain. If I am not having to process words and the majority of abstract concepts, there are all kinds of things I can do. I can read the social mood of an entire room and the pattern of each person’s part in shaping it. I can sense dangerous situations and figure out what needs to be done to avoid them. I can feel my way through all kinds of survival-related tasks. I can draw on a vast reservoir of instinct and pattern-matching to navigate situations that words and abstract concept crap won’t let me do. (And I have done all these things, in situations where other people saw me as not typing and not responding to them and started doing things like waving their hands in my face.)

So I see a bizarre pattern here: The more standard forms of language and speech we use, the less many of us can do, but the “higher-functioning” everyone will claim we are (and will attribute all kinds of skills to us that don’t exist). The idea that speech and language are both processing-intensive tasks that detract from our ability to do other things doesn’t cross people’s minds. The fact that for some people the more speech they use the more assistance they will need for other things, doesn’t cross people’s minds either.

I type because communication in language is important for various purposes (both personal and more general) in my life, and it is the absolute most efficient way I have to communicate, and other methods are not feasible. It does not make me a different species of autistic person from people who speak, or from people who don’t speak or type. It does not determine what sort of autistic person I am as compared to others (other things determine that). It does have a negative effect on some skills, but that’s something I’m grudgingly willing to deal with given the consequences of not typing (although sometimes I wish there was some other setup available where language was not necessary at all). It certainly does not make me either more or less worth listening to than anyone else, and it does not make my ability to do day to day living skills automatically worse than people who speak (in fact for some of them speech might render them less capable of some things than I am, the same way it would do for me if I could still do it). It does not make me amazing (from a non-disabled “inspiration” perspective).

It seems though that whether you type or speak, if you’re autistic, people will stereotype you into one form of oblivion or another. Unfortunately that stereotyping can be a matter of life and death at times, so it’s not all that trivial.

'The First Poets': Starting With Orpheus

By CAMILLE PAGLIA
Published: August 28, 2005

Ancient Greece is the fountainhead of Western culture and politics. As Michael Schmidt demonstrates in ''The First Poets,'' the evolution from aristocratic rule to democracy in Greece was accompanied by the emergence of a strongly individualistic lyric poetry. While the Hebrew Bible, the other major source of Western literature, expresses a God-centered view of the universe, Greek literature gradually freed itself from the sacred to focus on the uniquely human voice.

Schmidt is the editor of PN Review, the founder and director of Carcanet Press and the director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University in England. His widely praised book ''Lives of the Poets'' (1998) was a 900-page meditation on English poetry in which his forceful, witty, sometimes partisan sketches revealed a mind deeply in love with literature.

In ''The First Poets,'' however, Schmidt seems less confident of his opinions. He is excessively deferential to authorities, even when gently rejecting their views. It is always a pleasure to encounter the lucid, astute prose of the late Sir Cecil Maurice Bowra (Schmidt's don at Oxford), but this book is clogged with too many pedestrian quotations from academics past and present. Whenever he is front and center, Schmidt himself is a fascinating guide who wins the reader's trust.

''The First Poets'' covers about a half-millennium of writing up to the third century B.C. Its chronological organization is ideally suited for those seeking an introduction to Greek poetry, although the book needs better maps of the Mediterranean world. Drawing on translators from John Dryden to Guy Davenport, Schmidt deftly explains the problems in translating ''vowel-rich'' ancient Greek into English, which cannot capture Greek's falling rhythms and vocal pitch.

A constant theme is the tragically fragmentary nature of the Greek poetry that we have. Only a fraction has survived, much of it by chance -- perhaps because it was quoted in an ancient letter or essay. Because of the fragility of papyrus and parchment, Greek literature was decaying by the Roman era. Schmidt stresses what we owe to the Egyptian desert, where papyrus discoveries are still being made in mummy wrappings and trash heaps. Ancient Greek poems today are often merely tentative scholarly reconstructions.

Schmidt has a sharp eye for material culture: he notes, for example, how the fine grain of papyrus (made from Nile reeds) promoted the development of writing because it gave ''the ability to vary letter-forms.'' Many modern words for books descend from antiquity, when papyrus scrolls -- some up to 100 yards long -- were used for storage. A ''volume'' (from the Latin volumen) literally means ''a thing rolled up.''

The book's profiles begin with Orpheus, the legendary father of poetry and music, whom Schmidt boldly treats as a real person: ''I take Orpheus to have been an actual man with an actual harp in his hand.'' After his wife, Eurydice, was lost in Hades, Orpheus turned to boy-love and was reputedly the first to practice it in his native Thrace. His death was gruesome: he was torn to bits by bacchants, and his severed head floated to the island of Lesbos, which was thereby impregnated with poetic genius.

Schmidt's chapters on Homer, while rich, seem too long for a survey book -- and we're still at the start of the ''Odyssey'' on the next-to-last page. Far more interesting than the excessive plot summary is Schmidt's treatment of Homeric diction as ''a composite of different dialect strands . . . as though a poet wrote in Scots, South African, Texan and Jamaican, all in a single poem.''

Much attention is devoted to controversies over the authorship of the ''Iliad'' and the ''Odyssey'': Was Homer a myth? Did one man (or even a woman) compose both poems? Was Homer merely a collator of inherited material? Schmidt makes Homer concrete by taking us on a lively fictionalized odyssey through his hypothetical life and experiences. As for those who allege there were two poets, Schmidt rightly scoffs, it's ''as though Shakespeare could not have written 'The Comedy of Errors' and 'Othello.' '' ...

Eileen Myles, 1998

WITH AMY KELLNER

AMY: So, what did you do today?

EILEEN: I learned how to canoe. And I'm readjusting, because I spent July on tour with these girls, Sister Spit. We did this amazing 20-shows-in-30-days tour, you know, where we slept on floors in anarchist bookstores. It was dazzling and funky and totally cool. So I went from there to here, which is this incredible big-lake-knotty-pine-looking place with great dinners and eighteen people I never met before. It's a big meltdown and now I'm getting used to it, and I'm writing, working on a new book called Cool For You.

AMY: Is it going to be Chelsea Girls, part two?

EILEEN: It's more about childhood. It's weird because its technically about female incarceration. I had this idea about how the outsider in art is really male. Because I always think that females are insiders, and that female rebellion starts someplace where you're really trapped, like mental hospitals or shitty jobs. So I'm exploring my narrator, the Eileen Myles character, from the position of being, like, a camp counselor, and in lousy jobs and institutions. I have an Irish grandmother who ended her life in a state mental hospital in the '50s, during my childhood. So I'm weaving a lot of my childhood in with the notion of work and jobs. It's totally about class.
AMY: Class is a big thing for you.

EILEEN: I come from an Irish-working-class-townie-in-greater-Boston reality. I went to U Mass (Boston) and we were constantly reminded during our education there that we were unique people for these teachers to be teaching because they all went to Harvard and we hadn't read James Joyce in high school. So we were very exciting because we knew so little.

AMY: That's not very encouraging!

EILEEN: It's how I learned about class. It was crossing the river, in a way. I went to college in the late '60s, and there was lot of political activity going on, but not at my school. We all worked in Filene's Basement, and there were a lot of Vietnam vets. It was already a very checkered class world view when I started to wake up and write, and be more me...

The Eternal Repository

Dodie Bellamy interviews Lyn Hejinian

On August 30, 1994, Lyn Hejinian and I talked in my living room, as we drank peppermint tea from Fire King mugs. This conversation is part of a larger project of mine, a study of the correspondence between Hejinian and Susan Howe (mid-70’s to mid-8-‘s), which is housed in the Archive for New Poetry at UCSD. This conversation’s very existence raises issues about the documentary value of intellectual exchange, issues familiar to readers of Lyn Hejinian’s poetry. What is the self? How does the “person” function in the larger world? How do women talk to each other? How do history and epistemology affect each other? How do we distinguish the public from the private?

Lyn Hejinian: Probably very few of us realize how intertwined our thinking is with our letter writing, our theorizing with the personal thing we say in letters. It is such an intimate medium. Even when you know some third party is going to be reading the letters some day, you still end up speaking intimately.

Dodie Bellany: It’s just the form that is seductive?

LH: I think so. I love the letter form. I think that’s the one reason I’m glad my letters are in the Archive.

DB: As you know, I’ve spoken with a number of people whose papers are housed at UCSD. You’re the only person who has no regrets.

LH: I love to writer letters. I love to receive them. And I still writer lots of them. I really do think the letter is a literary enterprise, and I always did even when I wasn’t thinking of being archived. My contemporaries and I have always insisted that our poetry is grounded in the world—and that’s really a place where the grounding can begin, the first workings out in stages of ideas, with the relationship of ideas to other things in life preserved. Maybe I’ll writer to Charles Bernstein tonight and tell him about my conversation with Dodie today, and I’ll say more about what I think about letters, and it will be an unfolding.

DB: Michael Davidson said the archives speak back and forth to one another—and after looking at them for a while, they really do. People you think don’t have any connection are suddenly mentioning on another, and it becomes this huge matrix, an organic web.

LH: I like that unfolding; it’s very process-oriented, letter writing, especially when you write a lot of letters over time to the same person.

DB: You seem to be a very private person. On the phone the other day Susan mentioned how careful she felt you were in your letters—and in one of the letters I read you were talking about how you didn’t like to talk about yourself, you didn’t like to reveal personal stuff. How does this feel in terms of having this public record there; is there any conflict?

LH: I think that when I sold those letters I was too cowardly to reread them, so I could delude myself that my archive was just literary. It wasn’t personal.

DB: How were you cowardly?

LH: Because I wouldn’t want to be revealed in all my pathetic singularity [laughs]. There’s some very serious negative aspects to selling one’s letters or to having one’s letters exist in an archive like that, and paramount among them is the question of privacy. Since I was the beneficiary of the money that came in from my letters, it would be slightly disingenuous or two-faced to complain too much about it. I made them public. But some people with whom I was corresponding, whose letters I sold, have felt, for various reasons, unhappy with that decision. Maybe your article will lead to a discussion of what the ethics of living people selling their own papers should be. For me it has been the sole lucrative thing I’ve done as a poet, until recently when I have gotten teaching jobs as an outcome of my poetic enterprises. But I’ve never gotten any money that’s worth speaking of for a poem. Royalties from books? They’re just pathetic; it’s ludicrous to even think about them. So getting twenty, thirty, forty, fifty thousand, whatever different people get for their archives—and mine was on the low end because I didn’t have that much stuff at the time, maybe two, three cartons…but I know other people who’ve had up to twenty-five, thirty, forty cartons, and I’ve heard of people getting as much as $200,000 for their papers. It’s kind of like getting paid for the debris of what you really do. If I sold what’s accumulated since I sold my papers to San Diego in 1984—say if next year I started thinking about selling the next ten years from ’84 to’94—I think I’m going to send a letter to everybody with whom I’ve corresponded and inform them of this decision, and give them the option of sealing their papers—to sell them but sealed. Or to not sell them at all.

DB: Unlike the letters of many other poets, your letters don’t complain about marginalization. They’re much more about building a community. You didn’t seem to feel you were this isolated being writing.

LH: I never have felt isolated. I yearn for more isolation than I actually have, in the sense of time for writing and contemplative time to thing about the sorts of things I write about. As a girl, until the mid-seventies when I moved to the Bay Area, I was very guarded and stayed out of scenes, partly because I had that romantic notion of the lonely poet, and I was attached to that; it made me feel poetical. Also, I think circumstances had kept me excluded or apart from scenes, like going to Harvard which was this old boy’s club. But I didn’t care—I thought those old boys were farts and stupid and untalented and pompous and boring. It had nothing to do with me. I guess I identified with people who seemed the centers of the universe, like Kerouac say, but thought of themselves as marginal. So if I could be like them how could I be marginal if they were the center of the universe? My career’s ended up so much better than anything I would have dreamed could possibly happen, that I could never complain about being excluded. So much good has happened. I don’t have any justification for being pissed off. As we’re looking at the end of this century and these huge anthologies that are coming out, this correspondence with complaints about being marginalized is going to look pretty ludicrous. The language poets, for example, are being taught all over the place. It’s not maybe the mainstreaming of the work, but it’s not by any stretch marginal...

Doing the work

Nicola Griffith

Even though I can list in my sleep the questions I'll get when this book comes out, I'll still be struck dumb when they're asked because the answers are all connected and about as easy to explain as why being alive is a good thing. People will ask, Where do your ideas come from? Why do you write what you write? Why do you write about the kind of people you write about? Why did you choose to work in the noir genre? Why make your main character a woman? but what they'll really want to know—and will be too polite to ask—is, Don't you think Aud, her personality and attitude to violence, is a bit, you know, unrealistic and over the top? As far as I'm concerned, life's too short to sidestep around anything so I'll just cut to the chase, and begin with this matter of Aud.

Aud is my commitment to excellence made flesh and walking around; she uses whatever it takes to get the job done. She is the tension between the joy and discipline that is my art (or craft or life or bane, depending) filed to a point and stabbed into the tabletop. She is a public challenge—to me and from me—because there's no way to disguise the meaning of a naked blade quivering in the wood: the game is serious, the personal stakes high.

Before I wrote, I sang, and before that I played various sports, studied martial arts and other things, but no one ever asked me why I sang (or loved using my body) because the answer is self-evident: it feels good. Singing is a visceral act: vocal cords thrum in the throat and set up a resonating hum in the diaphragm, muscles squeeze and air flows from lungs to throat to mouth to atmosphere. Get it right and you can feel the vibration in your bones—a sort of internal massage. Lovely. When I studied martial arts it was the sheer physical thrill—adrenalin, sweat, speed, balance—that made me want to throw back my head and laugh. Writing is no different. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I fizz and itch with my eagerness to write. I get to that keyboard and zzzsst, it's like sliding down a greased ramp into white water. There's nothing but light and liquid and weightlessness. If something hurts I no longer feel it; my music playlist ends but I don't notice. I'm riding the turbulence, bringing to bear every mind muscle I possess, flexing, leaping, diving, cleaving the water like an Olympic swimmer. It's a rush, an absolute joy.

Joy can take a swimmer, or singer or writer or karateka, a long way but at some point, if you're serious, you have to accept the discipline of work—which is of a different order than mere effort. An Olympic swimmer doesn't win gold by just swimming a long way every morning. He spends a mind-numbing number of hours setting his toes just-so on the starting block, bending, diving, taking two strokes, pulling himself out of the pool and back onto the block, bending at a very slightly different angle, and diving again. And again. Over and over. And if the angle thing doesn't work, he'll swear, and shrug, and start messing with the toe placement, then the arm angle, and the hand shape, all in the quest to shave another two hundredths of a second from his time. This kind of work is unglamourous, frustrating, repetitive and occasionally heartbreaking. It requires a discipline and commitment that, until I accepted that I'm a novelist, I'd never needed...

Sex, capitalism and antidepressants

Two writers wrestle with the impossibility of literature in a society that's afraid of the dark.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Rick Moody and Mary Gaitskill

Aug. 14, 2000 | Mary Gaitskill, author of the short story collections "Bad Behavior" (1988) and "Because They Wanted To" (1997) and the novel "Two Girls, Fat and Thin" (1991), and I have been corresponding by e-mail for some months on literature, sex and contemporary Western culture. Gaitskill is an incisive and fierce critic of what's deplorable at present, and also a passionate protector of what she thinks might still work for writers and thinkers these days. Perhaps the two of us exemplify the problems at hand, in that this conversation never took place as a conversation; rather, it occurred only in the confines of an e-mail exchange. Yet we're attempting to indicate the possibility that literature and other marginalized discourses might still flourish inside the machine of Western consumer culture. What follows, then, are excerpts from the most recent weeks of our epistolary tête-à-tête.

-- Rick Moody

RM: I want to start with the hypothesis that there is a sociological basis for thinking that one should not be sad. This surely comes from the notion that capitalism can quench our thirst with the application of product. It is un-American to be sad, therefore, or at best, sadness is simply something to be treated with antidepressant meds and otherwise need not be spoken of. However, all the emotions are grand, and if sadness is among them, then I embrace sadness. This also reminds me of a great sentence from Foucault, from his introduction to "Anti-Oedipus": "Do not think that because you are a revolutionary you must be sad." Does sadness, for you, relate to sexuality in any way?

MG: A friend, in an e-mail, quoted from an essay by Robert Warshaw ("The Gangster as Tragic Hero") on this subject of sadness, and he broadened it to include systems other than capitalism: "Modern egalitarian societies ... whether democratic or authoritarian in their political forms, always base themselves on the claim that they are making life happier." And so public displays of unhappiness and failure are seen as disloyal. I'd say, that is, that public displays of unhappiness and failure that are not reducible to supposedly soluble social problems -- to some category like "poverty" or "mental illness" -- are considered disloyal, or at least incomprehensible.

My suspicion is that this is an unavoidable human dilemma, that people will always want to avoid pain, to avoid those who are in pain, and so will be vulnerable to anyone or anything that seems to promise permanent avoidance. At the same time, I think people know that pain is part of our nature, that it cannot be avoided and that it should not be avoided. But capitalism in this country is focused on the idea 1) that life can and should be absolutely beautiful; 2) that beauty can be defined according to an ironclad objective standard; 3) that beauty can be held onto forever if only you do the right things perfectly enough; and 4) that it can be purchased. I don't only mean physical, personal beauty, but that is a good enough example and metaphor. You look at a fashion magazine, or really any glossy magazine, and you see flawlessly beautiful women in fantasy lives of utter beauty and excitement, sometimes mixed in with a little cruelty. It appeals to what I think of as the upper layer, the part of us that wants that perfection so much because it is static; it pretends that life can be captured, controlled by us forever without the endless slippage of organic life, in which we are a mere piece of vegetable matter in a system that is as much about disintegration and decay as anything else -- a system in which our personalities and egos do not matter, let alone whether or not we are pretty.

The fantasy pictures are never-never land, and yet you can feel a certain desperation in the way they deny everything that isn't utterly beautiful, utterly light; paradoxically, the insistence on occupying that realm evokes all the more ungainly, "ugly" things that are being denied. People know there is something wrong with this denial, even if they want to buy into it, so "darkness" asserts itself in increasingly distorted forms, like anorexia, cutting, all kinds of emotional violence. Light and dark become so polarized that it is terrifying, and something like sadness can come to seem grotesque -- and in fact become grotesque, like you see in somebody like [writer] Elizabeth Wurtzel, who I believe is desperately unhappy in part because she has absolutely bought into the idea that she should not be unhappy.

About your question of sexuality and sadness: I think they have a natural connection for everybody, which is why (and I know I'm talking out my ass here) I think people on antidepressants often lose sexual feelings. I don't mean that I think sex is only about sadness; it is obviously about joy and vitality and birth as well. But I think it is our root link to the deepest part of ourselves, the part that goes beyond personality or even human identity. It goes down into a pit we can't see into, and people tend to be scared of what they can't see.

I don't think "sadness" alone is in that pit; I think everything is in it, too much for us, in our human incarnation, to bear -- so that a fully expressed sexuality does have that dark, earthen element that is profoundly sad, at least in human terms. I think it is in part about death, and is what menopausal women sometimes feel, an extraordinary despair that is about the breaking down of procreation and identity -- which is now controllable by hormones so nobody has to feel anything icky. This is a part of sexuality that never shows up in advertisements, that rarely shows up in pop music, but everybody knows it's there. And in our trying, maybe unconsciously, to find it, it gets expressed in some distorted forms...

Wannabes beware, writing isn't a matter of staying the course

* MY JOURNAL
Jenny Sinclair
* January 27, 2007

EVERYWHERE I turn, it seems, I see advertisements for writing courses, writing workshops, writing weekends, writing holidays. All of them promise to help participants polish their prose and carve out their characters.
It should be stopped. The only people writing should be those who must write, I scrawl in a notebook as I sit on the side of the running bath while my young son makes duck noises at me.

There is no shortage of people who can, with a little encouragement, write. There are lots of skilled craftspeople. Even more say they want to write, and many of those find their way into university courses, adult education or privately run seminars on the novel, genre, short story and importance of plot. Some can write like angels from the outset, others can't write at all, as I've heard for myself in classes I've attended.

This multiplicity of courses promises a way forward, a way into print, possibly even that chimera, a writing career. But desire and training don't equal genius or that je ne sais quoi that allows a writer to connect, to slip refractive glasses over a reader's eyes, to say, "see this". They don't give the writer something to say that can be said in no other way.

What they do is provide toolboxes, and with those toolboxes the vaguely talented often turn out the equivalent of high school carpentry projects: a procession of by-the-numbers breakfast trays and carved wooden animals.

So do I expect geniuses to spring forth untrained, with no access to guidance? Not at all: researchers such as the University of Chicago's Benjamin Bloom found that many years of hard work and, most crucially, an influential mentor were the keys to unlock talents in most fields. Up to a point, writing can be taught. But that point isn't the point where the wider reading public would want to read that writing, where it would enhance and enrich their lives.

Writing is not a good in itself that everyone should be encouraged to attempt, such as cycling to work or eating more broccoli. It's a specialised art that if practised, only adds to billions of existing published words. Training and encouragement will not bring out the real writers. The threat of not writing will.

By the time I was 35, I had attended a half-dozen university-level writing classes, receiving respectable marks and enough encouragement to justify a shot at a writing career. I was already a journalist so I could spell and take editorial advice without bursting into tears (once past my cadet reporter years, at least). I wasn't fazed by producing 2000 words a day; that was what I did for a living. I thought I wanted to write, in the literary sense. I had plenty of free time, being childless and independent, and I'd even bashed out a 30,000-word document I called a novel. But I wasn't a writer.

Then I had a child and I despaired, amid piles of nappies and from under a crushing weight of exhaustion, of ever writing anything longer than an email or incoherent blog entry (usually on the topic of sleep). I spent four months mostly alone with my baby in an apartment in Hong Kong while my husband worked long hours.

And then I got cancer. Death threatened, if merely statistically. Suddenly I left the dishes undone, let the washing pile up, declined social invitations, turned my back on my husband in the evenings, ran to the computer to write the second my child was asleep. I completed scenes as I waited for chemotherapy, scribbled plot outlines in the radiotherapist's waiting room, wrote dialogue on the tram, jotted down two-word ideas in a notebook while my car idled at the traffic lights. I wasn't sure where it was taking me, but in the fourth month, on a holiday to give me relief from the relentless treatments, I had an epiphany: it didn't matter to me if I was any good as long as I wrote. The realisation was like a starburst in the dark of a hot, sleepless night in Thailand, and it hasn't left me since.

Two years later, I'm a writer. I've had a few stories published, won a minor literary prize, had many more pieces rejected. Hundreds of thousands of words lurk on my hard drive, or are in the post travelling to and from editors' slush piles, fulfilling my mantra of "write and send, write and send". I don't know if I'm any good but I am a writer, and the reason I'm a writer is that I was suddenly faced with not being one.

I still fight obsessively for every free minute at my computer. I baulk at time-consuming paid work, invent other activities to excuse me from invitations that might interfere with my writing; I even enrolled in a university writing course to give a socially acceptable face to my compulsion. I try not to neglect my son but I scheme and plan and look forward to my writing times, free of him. Tired, not in the mood, it doesn't matter: I sit and write and soon enough the muse pops by to see what I'm doing.

From the ridiculous to the sublime: at a seminar at the University of Melbourne last year, Gerald Murnane spoke of writing his stories standing up at the kitchen bench while family life went on around him, and of what he calls "secret writing", writing that is done without reference to the glare of publicity, the culture of big names, writing that is done because it must be done.

A recent article in The New Yorker described how Noah Webster, author of Webster's Dictionary, padded the walls of his study to shut out the noise of his many children while he worked his way through American English from A to Z.

Manuscripts worked on in secret, smuggled out of Soviet gulags or completed in the attics of Amsterdam row houses, written in exile, written in prison, written behind the backs of tyrants: these are books that have something to say.

If all writing were forbidden, the stories written in secret would be the ones we needed to read. It's not writing that should be encouraged but reading, widely and voraciously, reading the classics, reading the modern masters. That, if my university lecturers are right, is what will bring out the real writers among us. Magazine editors, publishers and writing competitions are groaning under the output of all those writing courses and I want to say stop. Stop if you can. And if you can't stop, write.