Chapter 51: Julie Otsuka on Discovering Her True Art Form
There are writers who, from an early age, know that is what they want to be. It does not matter what they write – journals that no one is ever supposed to see, “family newspapers” distributed to loved ones. They write and the more they do the more their growing skills allow them to impose some order on the universe, or at least try.
But that is not all writers. Many of us discover it late, having assumed we lacked the talent (hand raised, right here) or who simply wanted to do and be something else, if only to feel secure in the knowledge that they can make a living.
Julie Otsuka, however, is the rare writer I know who believed she had found her voice, her means of expression, in one art form, only to discover that she was destined to write all along. This came to her late, after college, and after she had embarked on a life as a painter.
Otsuka, the author of the best-selling “When the Emperor Was Divine,” has just published her third novel, “The Swimmers” which the New York Times praised as “an exquisite companion.” She is, by her own admission, a very private person who nonetheless likes to write and read at her local cafe where, she told the Times, you do, on occasion, get to meet the most interesting people.
We are neighbors and run into one another from time to time. Though we often talk about work, I’d never asked her about her evolution from painter to writer, until now.
How, I wrote, did she come to see for herself that the miracle of expression was not on canvas but through words on a page?
She replied: “In a word, through failure. There was always a frustrating gap between the kinds of paintings I wanted to make (I could see them very clearly in my head) and what I was actually technically capable of making. And so, one day, after many years of trying, I put down my brushes for good. For the next two years, as a form of solace, I read—contemporary fiction, mostly, which I was not familiar with, but found I rather liked. And then, sometime during year three, I began to write. Not with an eye towards becoming a writer, but simply because it was something I enjoyed doing, something that engaged my mind in the same way that painting had. Instead of making pictures, I was now making paragraphs, sketching out scenes. And even though the process of writing was not always easy, there was not that gap between what I wanted to write and what I actually could write. Even the roughest of drafts could be shaped, with a lot of hard work, into something coherent, which gave me a certain kind of pleasure.
“But I will always love looking at paintings. The medium of paint, its viscous physicality, the gorgeousness of its colors—will never cease to amaze me. I think I feel about painting the way you feel about the written word—a sense of awe and wonder. Painting, for me, is a very high form of art, maybe because it’s so abstract. It’s right up there with music, which may be the highest form of art of all, I don’t know. Both tap into something deeply spiritual and mysterious.”
There was something more. I had once read an interview in which Julie said she was happiest when she was writing. I asked, “How, in heaven’s name, does that happen for you?”
She wrote: “I don’t think I mean what you think I mean when I use the word ‘happy.’ By happy I don’t mean some transcendent experience of joy. I mean that experience of being intensely focused and engaged with the work. All the neurons are firing and you are (ideally) ‘in the zone,’ which is maybe what people mean when they describe that state of ‘flow.’ And this usually happens for me when I’m trying to figure something out, whether it be the contours of a human figure or what does this color do when you put it up against that color or how do I solve this calculus problem (I loved math in high school) or what are the best words I can use to get this scene down on the page. There’s a sense of emotional well-being that I feel when I’m writing, like, oh, this is what my brain is supposed to be doing. Maybe it’s akin to what a sheepdog feels when it’s herding sheep. That dog can do many other things, like fetching a stick or returning a ball to its master, but really it’s most itself—it’s happiest, if you will--when it’s out there in the fields with the sheep. This is what that dog has been bred to do.
“Of course I experience frustration, anxiety, and doubt along the way, all writers do, this is totally normal. If the process were too easy, my brain would get bored. The task at hand has to be difficult enough to keep me engaged (writing), but not so hard that it’s impossible (painting).”