5. Stuttering and Writing
@
Koshikawa: If you don't want to talk about this, it's OK, but could you tell me about the relationship between your stuttering experience and your motivation to be a novelist? Somewhere in the novel you say that if you didn't stutter you would not have been a writer.
Erickson: I assume that's true, because I stuttered when I was a very small child. And when you stutter, you are immediately severed from the rest of society in a certain way, in terms of communication and in terms of verbal exchange. And when it happens to you at a very young age like four years old, it's a traumatic thing. And so that experience cut me off from the world around me, and as a result I lived a lot inside my own head. And because I had a verbal facility, it was going to find some expression in some other way. It couldn't express itself in speech, because the speech was impeded. So I became a writer. It's a very common thing for writers to be stutterers. A lot of stutterers have become writers. Lately I have begun to wonder if I had it reversed. I have always assumed that a stutterer becomes a writer. Lately I have begun to wonder if the writer becomes a stutterer, if a writer is born a writer--if there is something about the writer from the very beginning that makes him a writer and if that's what gets in the way of his speech. Do you understand? I don't know which comes first, which is the horse and which is the cart. But there is definitely a relationship.
@
6. Joe Christmas,the Ultimate American Character
Edited by Syuichi OTOMORI