I am putting novel notes into my novel document this week. That means that I’m going through the 500-page Word document and adding my copious handwritten notes in through this strange code I made up. (I make up codes a lot. Every organizational system I have is coded, and the codes make no sense to anyone but me, largely because they are inconsistent and change on a whim.)

Anyway, it’s boring work, so I am listening to radio shows in the background while I do it. Thus the previous post about Isabel Allende, and thus this post about Naeem Murr, who I hadn’t heard of before the Bookworm interview. I liked one thing he had to say about writers. Want to hear it? Here is it:

The writer is a dreadful position to be in, in some ways. As I say, for me, human beings are everything. My central passion ever since I could remember was just, people. What was going on inside of them, what they were, the mystery, the central mystery.

And the thing is, my mother was a wonderful woman who was very secretive about a terrible past. I think as a young child, you see into that, but how you get to it is through her gestures, every single minor movement and flicker of the eyes, everything that is – it comes to you in a kind of intimacy. You understand that there’s something there, there’s something behind that. And so you are fantastically intimate with something that you do not know and that you cannot penetrate.

That is the position of almost all writers that I know. They are obsessed with connection and human beings, but because of that obsession, there’s so distantly separated from humanity. You’re constantly in this paradox of connection, of trying to read and understand what a human being is, while being absolutely disconnected from them.

And that’s a really difficult place … to be in for any length of time. And that’s why so many writers are drunks, and so on. You can’t be there for very long without it beginning to corrode.

This quotation matches my experience exactly, except I don’t seem to find this observer state as lonely or upsetting as he does. But anyway, well put, Naeem.