Reading About Writing

The following is a guest post by Michael Amoruso, assistant professor of religious studies at Occidental College and author of Moved by the Dead: Haunting and Devotion in São Paulo, Brazil which is now available wherever books are sold.

I had a hard time writing Moved by the Dead. This probably comes as no surprise. There’s a quote, often misattributed to Ernest Hemingway or Douglas Adams, that goes something like, “Writing is easy. You just stare at a blank page until your forehead bleeds.” While I emerged with my forehead intact (if larger than before), there were times when my frustration and self-doubt bordered on physical pain. I remember especially the summer of 2020, when I spent two months drafting what would become just two paragraphs about Brazil’s 2018 presidential elections. And the summer of 2022, as I sprinted to submit before the September birth of my son. Not only did I not finish the book, but I didn’t even finish a chapter that had long plagued me. 

This is slow, solitary work. There are times when your only companions are your imagined readers, who may forever remain imagined. “Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating,” writes Annie Dillard. “It is sufficiently difficult and complex that it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free.” She continues, “The obverse of this freedom is that your work is so meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except you cares whether you do it well, or ever.” If Dillard, a best-selling novelist, could write these words and believe them, where does that leave us? 

If nowhere else, writing leaves us in the company of other writers. This is easy to forget. The community of writers is an imagined one, bound together by print. That is why I read about writing. Sometimes I want practical advice—guidance on syntax and style and some motivation to maintain a writing routine. More often, though, reading about writing is a way of feeling that I am part of the guild. During those many dark nights of the soul, reading other writers reflect on their joys and frustrations convinces me that I too am a writer, and that my book too would one day be printed and bound and put on someone’s shelf.

I keep coming back to Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life. The book is mysterious to me. It brings me to a quiet place, a world between late winter and early spring, when the sun glints off the melting snow.

For all the softness of her prose, Dillard’s vision is raw and brutal. I still remember reading its first pages. It was the winter of 2018, and I was in an apartment I hated, a place that was too expensive and built all wrong. And there it was: 

When you are stuck in a book; when you are well into writing it, and know what comes next, and yet cannot go on; when every morning for a week or month you enter its room and turn your back on it; then the trouble is either of two things. Either the structure has forked, so the narrative, or the logic, has developed a hairline fracture that will shortly split up the middle—or you are approaching a fatal mistake. If you pursue your present course, the book will explode or collapse, and you do not know about it yet, quite.

When I read this, I knew: there was a hairline fracture in my work, and I needed to find it. 

If nowhere else, writing leaves us in the company of other writers.

My dissertation seemed robust. One of my advisors was confident that I could turn around revisions and submit it to a press within a year. It took six, but I’m glad I didn’t rush it. The dissertation focused on a ritual practice—the devotion to souls (devoção às almas or culto das almas)—as a way of reframing syncretism. The argument worked, but it wasn’t enough to sustain a monograph. It was the crack.

It took me another year to realize I’d missed the main story. Moved by the Dead centers on two Catholic churches in central São Paulo: The Church of the Holy Cross of the Souls of the Hanged and the nearby Chapel of Our Lady of the Afflicted. These macabre names speak to the neighborhood’s grim history as the Hanging Field (Largo da Forca), a place where convicts and enslaved Africans met their death. In my early work, I described the sites as “oblique memorials” to slavery in a city that had erased most material reminders of it. But in my stubborn focus on the devotion to souls, I almost missed how the practice told the story of a place. 

That changed in 2018, when an activist movement emerged to save the Chapel of the Afflicted. Commercial development in the lot adjacent to the chapel threatened the building’s structure and would later reveal human remains from the Cemetery of the Afflicted. Subdivided and sold in 1886, the cemetery had been the resting grounds of the gallows’ victims and those unable to afford a church burial before. Within a few months, the movement to save the chapel grew into the broader work of recovering Black—and later, Indigenous—memory in São Paulo. This was the story: not just one of devotees’ movement between religions, but how their affection for the dead pulls them across São Paulo and yields political movement in the face of urban erasure.

I have often heard (and given) the advice that when writing, it is time to put the books down. It is true that reading can be a way of procrastinating, especially for scholars: just this one more book, then I’ll get it. But when you’ve lost your way, try reading about writing. Those other writers may just move you, and help you find your way out.