In Conversation with Writer Ryan Ruby
When I mention I’m working on an interview with an author living in Berlin, I describe him as an über hyphenate: a writer ~ philosopher ~ Wittgenstein scholar, although I suspect Ryan might be a little uncomfortable with my appraisal; he is one of those rare geniuses who is anchored by a deep humility.
We connected via Twitter in December, 2020, when he graciously answered my questions about his writing process in the most detailed and profound way. When I read his treatise, I was so impressed that I suggested he make an essay out of the piece. What was clear from his reflections is how he operates in the world, with a brilliant mind that seeks to formulate and synthesize ideas and a mastery of language that makes his prose sing with poetic precision. He is an articulate rationalist with a well-developed counterpoint ~ a lyrical artistic sensibility.
We exchanged emails for several months and also had a lovely video chat in June of this year, Skyping across the Atlantic from different time zones. As with most compelling conversations, time evaporated as we spoke about literature and the writing life, and also about music (he admits to playing the guitar “like a teenager” and spoke with reverence about a concert, helmed by Pierre Boulez, that moved him deeply), surviving the pandemic and working from home while parenting a toddler, and the exquisite gift of having a partner whose father was a writer, which means she understands when he gets that distant, dreamy, I’m-writing-in-my-head look.
ML: What time of day do you write best? Is there a particular season that seems to be most conducive to writing? What circumstances are most ideal? Do you have a routine?
RR: My ideal writing hours are between eleven in the evening and four in the morning, especially during late autumn, early winter. There is the unbroken stillness and silence, of course, but also the quality of artificial light against the darkness outside and the crisp, cool temperature, which for me is the least inhibitive of the sustained attention necessary to get sentences on the page.
But in my case at least I think this is somewhat misleading, and the reason touches on the question of routines. Often when we talk about writing, the analogy is to work, specifically office work: writing is a task for which we carve out a distinct block of time (writing time), that takes place in a well-defined location (office, co-working space, café, library, etc.), that requires certain supplies or tools (laptop, pen, paper, desk, etc.), that involves a particular kind of visible physical activity (scribbling, typing), and wherein progress is measured in quantifiable units (word count). This is not a false analogy per se, but in my experience this conventional image of a creative writer’s work really only represents a small portion of the activities that go into what I would call writing. For the truth of the matter is that whenever I am awake, I am writing more often than not. I’m writing whenever my attention is not wholly absorbed by something else, and sometimes even when it seems like it is.
To give a few general examples. As I move through physical space, wherever I happen to be, I am describing the space to myself as if I were writing the setting of a scene, and the same is true for the appearances of the people I encounter. Whether I am having a conversation or eavesdropping on one, when I listen to people talk, I am paying every bit as much attention to their vocal ticks and speech patterns as I am to what they are saying. When I read, I try to notice what effect it is having on me and how that effect is being achieved. I hoard details, ideas, other people’s stories, gossip, the rhythms of texts. Everyone likes to interpret people’s behaviors, motives, and meanings, but I treat it as a matter of professional concern. Whether or not I write any of this raw data down after the fact, and I don’t write it down as often as I should, I am always storing as much of it as I can remember away for later use. This is what I think writers — or at least narrative fiction writers — mean when they say: everything’s material. (When I was writing my book-length poem, which is in a loose blank verse, I talked to myself in pentameter, and scanned everything I read, whether it was graffiti or advertisements or newspaper articles, a kind of equivalent process.)
For me, a better analogy for the vast majority of what goes into being a writer would be to a kind of physical training, like musical or athletic training. On the production side, at least, I think of this form of being as a kind of translation machine, whereby I’m taking a series of neurological events and translating them, first of all, into the slightly vague experience we call thinking-in-language, and second of all, transcribing that into alphabetic code, as regulated by English orthographic, syntactic, or orthographic conventions. Only later on is that code deliberately refined into or around or in violation of the series of even-more complex conventions we more typically call mode or genre, which distinguishes creative writing from other kinds of writing, though knowledge of both of these kinds of conventions will shape and color the production and interpretation of the so-called original neurological events. (This refinement will take place many times, most notably in what we call drafts or revisions, but this requires an entirely different vocabulary — for me editing is at bottom a game of conscious problem-solving — to describe.)
This suggests that what I’m usually doing is not so much writing as preparing the conditions for writing to happen, a process I believe is fundamentally physiological in nature, and which involves everything from my diet, to my sleeping patterns, to mood regulation, stimulant-intake, locomotion, temperature adjustment, interpersonal interaction, introspection, and media consumption, above all reading, as well as the more cerebral forms of writing-exercise I’ve described above. So if I say I like to write between 11PM and 4AM it is because, in my experience, this period of time provides the best opportunity for the work of writing I’ve been doing throughout the day to be performed as the activity we typically imagine when we think of writing, but just as often what it actually involves is waiting in a state of readiness and receptivity for writing to happen, whenever and wherever it does happen. This description strikes me as both more ubiquitous and more erratic than what is usually implied by the notion of routine — and if it is a routine it is one I am adjusting almost constantly in response to external circumstances, an editor’s deadline, say, or having a child, or getting caught in a once-in-a-century-pandemic.
Now it may be the case that for some, even most writers, routine in the more traditional sense is precisely the form of training one undergoes, and needless to say I have nothing against that. The problem with describing one’s writing process is that because every writer is her own unique physiological system it is difficult to generalize one’s own process into something that takes the form of good advice. The only generalizable writing life advice is this: know yourself. That is: learn, through a several-years-long process of experimentation on yourself and observation of yourself what does and does not work for the unique physiological writing entity that you are, or rather, that you become through this process of experimentation and observation. If I mention this at all it is because so much discussion of process is about how to create a novel, or a short story, or a poem, or an essay, which sort of puts the cart before the horse — or rather puts four different carts in front of four different horses, as each of these kinds of writing by definition requires a different kind of training. But in every case, a writer’s foremost task is rather to create the instrument — that is, the you — that writes the writing it writes. All the other, more frequently-discussed questions — about craft, technique, style, genre, form and so on — belong to process of conception or refinement, which fold into but are not necessarily the same as what I’ve been talking about here.
ML: Do you work most often in longhand or on a computer?
RR: Pens and paper and computers are such familiar objects that it’s easy to forget that they’re just tools. Each has its advantages depending on what you want to do with it, and I’m not attached to either, on principle, as some writers seem to be. Writing longhand has the advantage of speed, portability, and provisionality so I tend to (but don’t always) use pen and paper when I’m taking notes or just working out an idea, and only transfer it to the screen when I sense that it’s going somewhere, after a few pages at most. Whereas word processing programs, probably the most sophisticated devices in the several thousand year history of writing, have the advantage of mimicking the look of the final page, giving the eye quicker access to larger chunks of information, enabling you to easily change the order of paragraphs and sentences, adding clauses within those sentences, and swapping in and out particular words as needed.
For me, the trick is variation. Just as sometimes I transfer longhand to the screen, sometimes I get stuck with what I’m writing on the screen, and need to go work out a particular idea on the page. The simple shift in interface between the virtual and physical page is sometimes all it takes for me to express what I’d been having trouble expressing. If I’m working on a project of sufficient length I’ll end up toggling between them dozens of times. Like most writers, I assume, whenever I’ve completed a draft, I always print it out and edit longhand, but here again what is crucial is the how these two different kinds of writing look. The difficulty of editing, especially at first, is to be objective about your own work — and by that I mean to view it as though someone else had written it — and it is helpful in this regard to actually have a physical object in front of you that you can then physically modify with a visually distinct script.
ML: Your novel, The Zero and the One, is deeply philosophical and has been described as “A gothic twist on the classic tale of innocents abroad, The Zero and the One is a meditation on the seductions of friendship and the power of dangerous ideas that registers the dark, psychological suspense of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley and the intellectual and philosophical intrigue of John Banville’s The Book of Evidence.”
I’ve been swooning over your long-form poems and your recent essay, Child’s Play ~ What Can Wittgenstein Teach Us About Raising Kids? published last month in The Believer Magazine (https://believermag.com/ryan-ruby-childs-play/).
Your writing is replete with erudition and wit, but it also has a rich, orchestral quality. I’d love to know more about your academic background.
RR: My academic background is in philosophy, specifically the philosophy of language and political philosophy. As an undergraduate, I did the Core Curriculum at Columbia, with a year as a so-called visiting scholar in PPE at Pembroke College, Oxford, and wrote my bachelor’s thesis on poetry and method in the philosophy of the late Wittgenstein. I followed that up with a degree at the Masters of Arts Program in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago, and wrote my master’s thesis on the linguistic assumptions underpinning Richard Rorty’s “postmodern bourgeois liberalism.” Later I taught ancient philosophy and ethics in the History and Philosophy department of York College, CUNY.
What I also don’t have — and I suspect this is what lies at the bottom of this question — is a writing degree or any formal training in creative writing, and so in this respect I’m something of an autodidact. I find the whole MFA vs. NYC debate, as it’s phrased in the States, to be largely question-begging, and more about defending one’s own small plot of the literary field than getting clarity on the substantive questions about what it means to be a writer today. I believe that a person who looks at this question honestly will conclude that while one does not need to have a professional degree to write and publish a book of any kind, creative writing instruction (like all instruction) hands down valuable technical knowledge, experience, and information about writing, reading, editing, and being edited, along with, it goes without saying, an entry into the kinds of social networks in the various branches of the publishing industry. All of these things you can learn by yourself and for yourself, like I did for both poetry and prose, but it’s undoubtedly more efficient to learn from other peoples’ expertise than to teach yourself everything. It took me a long time of trial-and-error to figure out what people learn in their couple weeks of a single writing workshop. A writing program can’t teach you open-mindedness, curiosity, independence of thought, or good taste, but if you have any of these things going in, it won’t take them away from you either, and if writing programs sometimes have reputations as being narrow in their stylistic, national, and temporal focus, no degree of any sort represents the end of learning.
The only significant issue when deciding whether or not to do an MFA is cost. And if I say that an MFA is not worth what you pay for it — the odds are that you will never make enough money as a writer to pay off your student loan debt — this does not distinguish it from any other degree program in the US higher education system, all of which are horrifically overpriced. But even if professional degree programs function as cash cows for universities, even ones with large endowments, extensive stock portfolios, and well-compensated administrators, this is not an education problem per se, let alone a writing education problem, but a social problem about the cost of education. If you can get into a subsidized writing program (or better still, one where they pay you) and can spend two years doing nothing but making books and talking about books with other people who are making books and talking about books, well, that seems pretty ideal to me.
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ML: After our conversation, I was struck by how much I was still thinking about what Ryan had said, even weeks later. It was such a pleasure to connect with him in the midst of the pandemic and to revel in his insightful musings on the writing life.
Ryan Ruby is a writer and translator from Los Angeles, California. A graduate of Columbia University and the University of Chicago, he lives in Berlin, where he is on the faculty of the Berlin Writers’ Workshop and is an Affiliate Fellow of the Institute for Cultural Inquiry.
His fiction and criticism have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review Daily, Conjunctions, n+1, The Baffler, and elsewhere. His novel The Zero and the One was published by Twelve Books. It has subsequently appeared in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and France. Ryan is the author of a book-length poem, Context Collapse, which was a Finalist for the 2020 National Poetry Series . He has translated Roger Caillois and Grégoire Bouillier from the French for Readux Books.
In 2019, he was the recipient of the Albert Einstein Fellowship from the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. His Einstein Fellowship Lecture can be watched here and a reading of Context Collapse 4 can be watched here.
You can find him at ~ http://www.ryanruby.info
