A review by savaging
Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing by Margaret Atwood

4.0

I was reminded of something a medical student said to me about the interior of the human body, forty years ago: “It’s dark in there.”

Possibly, then, writing has to do with darkness, and a desire or perhaps a compulsion to enter it, and, with luck, to illuminate it, and to bring something back out to the light. This book is about that kind of darkness, and that kind of desire.
-Atwood

The writers I love are the ones who say writing is an act of sinking, emptiness, the shock of the void and the pleasure of the shock. Kafka, Cixous, Lispector, Duras. And Atwood sounds like them when she explains that the person whose name is on the book might be pleasant and mild, it's just that they have a double, a parasite in the brain -- she writes that the internal writer is something like a necrophiliac "tape-worm made of ink."

But Atwood isn't as far gone into the Dark Arts of Writing as the others -- after all she can keep her head above water enough to craft a functioning plot, while the other names mentioned are wide-eyed with the fishes. That makes this book somewhere between the fruitfully insane and the uninspiringly helpful (between Cixous' [b:Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing|153347|Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing|Hélène Cixous|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1172249906s/153347.jpg|148027] and Bradbury's [b:Zen in the Art of Writing|103761|Zen in the Art of Writing|Ray Bradbury|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1385688086s/103761.jpg|2183601]), and is probably The Answer for those who conclude that moderation is the key to most mysteries.

For instance, Atwood considers the reason for writing. Is it simply to write, Art-for-Art's Sake? If so, "won’t you end up making the equivalent of verbal doilies for the gilded armchairs in the Palace of Art?" But if instead you choose Social Relevance, "Will you end up on a panel discussion, and if so, is it the panel discussion in Hell?" Her books testify to the importance of never quite solving this question.

Read this, if you're a writer, especially if you love that dizzying inward movement of reading writers writing about writing for readers.