Literary Hub " Robert M. Pirsig on the Book He Wrote (And the One He Didn’t)

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Robert M. Pirsig on the Book He Wrote (And the One He Didn’t)

“Gradually, I began to discover that I was on to more than I had thought.”

Via Mariner Books

Robert M. Pirsig and Wendy K. Pirsig

April 29, 2022

On May 20, 1974, soon after the initial publication of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig addressed students at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. The following transcription of those remarks—published for the first time—has been lightly edited for clarity.<br>Article continues after advertisement

I want to talk about the creative process. My medium is books or, to put it precisely, a book. Other people work in different media. But I think my creative process is not so different from the one you may go through. And if so, then perhaps some things I say may have value to you. A lot won’t. No two people are in the same situation or have the same problems. But in another sense—and this is a contradiction everybody’s in the same situation and has identical problems.

Regarding the creative process, I want to talk about two books. The first is the book I never wrote, and the second is the book I wrote. I’d like to contrast how both of those, the book and the non-book, were arrived at and, by comparing the two, try to get an idea of what was going on. And draw some morals and maybe find something useful in that process.

I spent maybe an hour or two hours, and really was beginning to get sort of frustrated, and not willing to admit that maybe what I had come all the way down here for wasn’t going to happen.

The first book never did get a title, and, of course, it never got written. But it was going to be a great book. My wife and I were just married. We lived in Reno, Nevada; we were dealers in a gambling casino at that time. I dealt the keno—this was at the Nevada Club—and she dealt the roulette, and we were going to save money. We lived in a cheap trailer and we saved all the cash we could. We figured the only way to beat these casinos is to work for them and take as much out of it as you can, and get out of there, and never spend a cent if you can possibly avoid it. And then go someplace where costs were very cheap, in this case Mexico, and then sit down there and write the perfect book.<br>Article continues after advertisement

So we worked for eight months. This was in 1953 or ’54, and at the end we had $3,400 saved, which in the fifties was a huge sum of money, and we hitchhiked, “Bobby McGee” fashion, all the way through Nevada and into Southern California, across Arizona and down into Mexico, and then at the Mexican border got a third-class bus and went down through Mexico City, through Veracruz, way down into the jungles of Mexico and into a tiny little village town called Acayucan.

In Acayucan we got paper, and I bought a Parker 51 pen, and I prepared to write the great book. At first I found a good room, with proper temperature and proper exposure. It was nice temperatures down there, as it was fall getting into winter. Got a comfortable chair and sat down. After about fifteen minutes, after all this preparation, I said, “Well, maybe I should walk a little.” I walked a little around town and met various people and talked for a while, and said, “That’s very interesting, and now I’ll go back and write.” And I went back, and I spent maybe an hour or two hours, and really was beginning to get sort of frustrated, and not willing to admit that maybe what I had come all the way down here for wasn’t going to happen.

These options for Quality that we feel sometimes are exclusive to the arts, I feel also exist in technology.

So I procrastinated on this and other things for about a week. And at the end of a week I still hadn’t written anything. I began to become gradually aware that something was very deeply wrong, that everything I’d set up, everything I’d done to come down here, wasn’t right, it was a wrong situation. I was doing it badly. And then at that time an idea came along: “Well, I’ll build a boat.” And this struck me as one of the most brilliant ideas I’d...