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Blogs by Milt Ford
Thinking with Writing, Mine and Other People's 8/18/2010 7:50:30 AM
I am almost always writing something: the novel I’ve been working on for more than twenty years and will soon come out as Philip, the book I’ve published in two editions called Life Journey: Literature and the Search for Meaning in the Stages of Life, and the interview-based book that came out last September called Playing It Straight: Gay Men and Heterosexual Marriage. But these books are only a drop of ink in the bucket of all the writing I do. I write blogs and emails, documents for my courses and committee work, and lots drafts of what I hope will become future books. And there is Rainboa, the play I am currently working on about LGBT history.
The point I want to make here is not about the amount of writing (many people write much more), but that writing is a context, a vehicle, a mode of thinking, which to me is the interesting thing about it.
Since my coming out fourteen years ago, my writing has been mostly on gay topics. I have had to do a lot of catching up on thinking in that part of my life, and Playing It Straight was a big part of that. But in many ways, the novel Philip is very much more to the point. I have been working on that novel for maybe twenty-five years (I sometimes refer to it as the eternal novel), and it is only now ready for publication, nearly ready!
That novel was the context in which I did a lot of thinking about my being gay, and the writing changed many times as my self-understanding changed through those years. I like to say that I wrote myself into my new gay life in large part by the thinking I did and the understandings I came to in the process of writing that novel. At the same time, Philip is very much a fictional character, and most of the details of Philip’s experience are not mine. But that writing gave me the context for thinking about things that were important, but extremely difficult, for me to think about.
I also think with the writing of others, with the books, chapters, articles and papers (certainly including student papers) I read. There are so many more of these written works, and they cover much more territory than I write about. What I read gives me a huge portion of what I think about life with. And much of what I write comes, in one way or another, from what I read. I’m not talking here about imitation or direct borrowing, but about the ways in which the writing of others informs my own thinking, becomes part of what I think, and think with.
