imagination || craft: Tell us what you really think
imagination || craft: Tell us what you really think
Spring, renewal, and moving between the poles of creation
UPCOMING THIS WEEK:
A generative writing workshop with me over Zoom this Saturday 3/24, 1-3 Eastern. More information can be found here.
My class ‘Write into Mystery,’ a 4-week course on writing flash memoir about wonder and the unexplained opens tomorrow through writers.com
Happy Vernal Equinox! Here in North Carolina, things are blooming, and I have that hopeful/unsettled, manic/draggy feeling of early spring. I’m thinking about the idea of an equinox— equal light and dark— and of the poles we move between as creatives and as human beings in this world.
Some of these poles we move between might be:
Structure // freedom
Constraints // variety
Being playful // taking yourself seriously
Exploration // knowing where you’re going
Planning // working intuitively
Being open to input // trusting your inner knowing
There’s so much movement between these poles in creative work, and also in the creative work that is (my) life— relationships, teaching, and parenting.
For example, I often mention this passage from Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry when I teach: “Do you accept your own gestures and symbols? Do you believe what you yourself say? When you act, do you believe what you are doing?” So, there’s that pole of claiming your words, having ethical underpinnings. And on the other side, we might find the idea of not taking ourselves so seriously hugely freeing, creatively. As
wrote recently in her Everything is Personal newsletter:What would happen to your writing if its only intention was to give pleasure to the reader, complex pleasure but ultimately pleasure? Instead of an experience for the author or the narrator to relive and feel again? Instead of teaching something the narrator has learned or pretended to learn? Instead of saving humanity? You want to do a favor for humanity? Tell funnier jokes.
[See Stone’s newsletter for information about an upcoming Zoom conversation about this.]
This point resonates with me, and I believe it to be true. And I also believe Rukeyser. I am ever-oscillating between those poles. Or letting both positions exist at once, a kind of negative capability (Keats’ term for the poet’s capacity to hold in mind “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after facts and reason.”) Recognizing and embracing these polarities is a way to be comfortable with contradiction and ambiguity, which is, after all, so much of what arts and the humanities can teach us.
So I’d like to grapple with one of the poles above, the question (via Rukeyser) of whether you “believe what you yourself say.”
Here’s an excerpt from my essay class “Stringing the Beads” along those lines:
I'd like to refer back to the point about how it's beneficial to look back at a draft at a certain point and ask ourselves if we believe what we've written. Sometimes we can write away from our original impetus and become caught up in a rhetorical mode where we are convincing our reader (and ourselves) of something, causing the piece to lack energy because it lacks truth for us on some level. As Anne Lamott writes in Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life,
If you find that you start a number of stories or pieces that you don’t ever bother finishing, that you lose interest or faith in them along the way, it may be that there is nothing at their center about which you care passionately. You need to put yourself at their center, you and what you believe to be true or right. The core, ethical concepts in which you most passionately believe are the language in which you are writing.
This is not to say, Lamott suggests, that we need all write “message” pieces. As she continues,
Telling these truths is your job. You have nothing else to tell us. But needless to say, you can’t tell them in a sentence or a paragraph; the truth doesn’t come out in bumper stickers. There may be a flickering moment of insight in a one-liner … but everyday meat-and-potatoes truth is beyond our ability to capture in a few words. Your whole piece is the truth, not just one shining epigrammatic moment in it. There will need to be some kind of unfolding in order to contain it, and there will need to be layers. (103-104)
These ideas from Lamott dovetail well with a passage from Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry that often occurs to me: “Do you accept your own gestures and symbols? Do you believe what you yourself say? When you act, do you believe what you are doing?” I find these to be very useful questions to ask myself along the way as I write, as sometimes we can write ourselves into a direction that sounds good but to which we lose an authentic connection. Do I believe what I’m saying? Am I getting to the heart of my core ethical concerns?
This weekend, in a Zoom meeting with students, I mentioned the idea that we can sometimes write away from the direction of what we actually feel to be true. As I discussed with my students, having “core, ethical concepts” at the heart of your writing doesn’t mean that you have to have a strict, reasoned philosophy you’re writing from. Rather, it suggests that it’s useful to pause at various points and ask ourselves, “So what?” and to consider what underlying question or consideration is guiding our work. And this can mean many different things (and different things at different times).
Here’s part of what I wrote when I asked the group to free write on the question, “What is at the center of your work these days? What do you believe to be true?”:
I believe in the value of individual voices and points of view. I believe that people are fascinating— their minds, their experiences, their voices, the unknowability of others, their mystery. I believe that in writing and music and art we get glimpses into what we experience alone, or what we experience in our the interactions between the public and the private that we don’t always have words for. Art lets us tell each other more than the outside we usually see of each other.
I believe there’s value in hearing about the same things from different angles, hearing the same thing over and over in different ways. We’re all a mystery. That’s what I believe in. An ethics of mystery.
I very much connect with this point of Eudora Welty’s in One Writer’s Beginnings: “Greater than scene… is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined in any frame.” Welty's allegiance to the mystery of a human life. That is her “so what?” and also mine.
Some of the other responses I got from the group pointed us in the direction of an ethics of connection, of feeling seen and understood; and an ethics of humor, of making life a little more bearable through shared humor. At other times, I might describe my guiding question or “so what?” in relation to honoring women’s stories and valuing them in a way they aren’t always valued in the larger culture. Or I might be thinking about the value of witnessing ourselves and others. Or of healing the self and other through narratives, through poems.
You don’t have to start from an “ethical concern,” or even to ever make it conscious for yourself. Much of this is implicit, is intuitive, when we write. But if you find yourself at an impasse or a moment of dullness, you might stop and ask yourself what you actually believe.
