My wife and I went to South Carolina for the holidays, a 10-day trip where we visited each set of parents. We’d turned the heat down in our townhouse, locked the doors, and set the lights on timers, but we didn’t turn the water off. Why? Because we’re inexperienced homeowners.
You know where this is going. When we returned, our house was a cool 56 F and water was leaking through our living room ceiling. Two unrelated problems: the furnace was out because a safety switch was dirty, and a pipe had come loose in the upstairs bathroom.
Water puddled on our bathroom floor, onto our bedroom carpet, through the floor and into our living room. Our living room ceiling is drywall, so the water found the seams and the nails and stained the paint yellow. In one place, where two sheets of drywall met, the paint bubbled down and water dripped onto our couch.
In hindsight, it could have been so much worse, and the experience was good for me as a homeowner. I found our main water switch, for one thing. And I got to do repairs — always fun when you’re young and eager to learn something handy.
I had to call someone to fix our furnace, but I was able to replace the bathroom pipe myself. I had to pull up the carpet in our bedroom and closet to replace some of the wet carpet padding, and I repainted the ceiling. The only thing I didn’t do that first week in January was repair the hole in the ceiling, where one piece of drywall was hanging down.
This week, I made time to fix it. It turns out our house is not that well crafted, and there wasn’t a handy stud to nail the drywall back into. I had to cut away some of the drywall, insert a boar to rig a stud, then put in a drywall patch. It seemed to work fine, and I then was able to put up new tape, joint compound, and paint. Three or four trips to Lowe’s (joint compound and tape, drywall nails, dust mask and eyeglasses, patch kit), fifty bucks, and our house is spic and span.
This story is much longer than it needs to be, and I haven’t touched on my triggering idea — the writer’s craft. Many already have compared a writer’s craft to some other craft. I’m drawn to Seamus Heaney’s poem, “Digging,” in which the speaker reflects on his farming family and concludes: “Between my finger and my thumb / the squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.”
A wonderful, related book is Shop Class as Soulcraft, by Richmond’s Matthew Crawford, whose central argument is that manual labor — in particular, the craft behind labor — is spiritually healthy. Crawford uses motorcycle repair and electrical work as his examples, though I imagine the same could be said of woodworking or gardening — or home repair.
Crawford and Heaney are talking about a spiritual art, rather than the humdrum task of commercial writing. But even in commercial writing, it’s a worthwhile comparison. You start by learning your craft, and you gain skill by experience. You’re making something. You’re dedicating yourself to something outside the self. In the case of copywriting, the “beyond self” has to do with the client’s project, whereas in poetry the poem is the “beyond self.” Either way, it’s a suppression of ego, which is kind of a Taoist effort. So maybe the way to understand the craft of writing is really to understand the Taoist concept of “wu wei,” of emptying the self.
That’s in contrast to the stereotype of writers as prima donnas, as the moody, selfish creators who live for their art. I’m not sure whether the selfish writer-genius is a myth, or just an outmoded model for writing in the 21st century.
