My Art or My Novel. Which Would You Choose?

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art, Blogging, creatiity, Novel, painting, personal, Pleasure, writing, writing process

Dorothea Lange’s iconic photograph

Someone asked me recently what I loved more, my painting or my writing? Or, she added, is that like trying to choose which child you love most?

It is a little bit like that. Writing has always been the love of my life. Like a first child, I never thought I could love another as much as I loved him. And then number two came along and I learned that I could. Just as much, but differently.

Some children are easier to raise than others. My writing, like my first child, has wild mood swings. It’s like riding a roller coaster, one moment were up, up, up, dizzy with exhilaration, and the next were down, down, down, hating each other and sure we will never write another word again. But painting, like my second child, couldn’t be easier to live with, and there’s never been a cross word between us. She’s always ready to play when I am, and she keeps me delighted for hours.

Painting gives me more pure pleasure than writing. There’s pleasure in looking for a new project and in planning it. Pleasure in the process of painting and in the finished product. Pleasure hanging it, and every time I enter the room to view it anew.

There’s pleasure in writing too, especially in those first few hours, or days, or weeks, when the writing is hot and flowing out of me like I’m taking diction from some inspired muse. There’s even pleasure in the revision process where I’m weeding out what is extraneous and trying to make it as lean and luscious as possible. There’s pleasure in reading what I’ve written when it goes well, when I’m in the right mood, when I’m feeling confident or inspired.

Those are the peak moments. But in between all this pleasure are deep, deep lows. The sense of futility and frustration and despair can seem overwhelming. And then there are the long droughts when nothing inspires me. And the long, cold slogs when nothing is going well. And the times when I cannot force myself to sit down and try again, to keep it going. When I’d rather clean the toilet or go to the dentist or pull out my own teeth with pliers than sit down and write.

With painting, I never have to force myself to start or finish a project. If anything, I have to force myself to leave it be so I can do the laundry or prepare dinner. It’s not that I absolutely love everything I paint. But at the end of the day, it’s deemed good enough. And I feel my time was well spent. Sometimes I’m thrilled with the results and hang them on the wall. Other times I’m mildly pleased and lean them against some bookcase or pin them on bulletin board. Either way they keep me company. They suffice.

But writing, when I’m finished, disappears from sight. I might get pleasure re-reading it from time to time, but mostly I don’t bother. The few pieces that get published seem to go into a dark vault and are forgotten. Worse are the pieces that were much-loved but remain unread, unpublished. Instead of pleasure is a sense of loss and regret, of unrequited love, of stillborn life.

Given all that, you might wonder why I bother to write at all. Why not give it up for painting?

Because I can’t imaging life without writing. In some ways, for me, it’s like breathing. It seems a natural, intrinsic part of me. I can’t live without it, as difficult as it might be. I’m writing in my head all the time. Thinking and writing gets all rolled up together. Writing–putting thoughts on paper–takes me to a deeper place, and sometimes I don’t know what I think until I write it. It’s like the act of writing pulls up astonishing things from my unconscious and twirls them before my eyes so I can see what I’ve never seen before and be amazed. How could I give up something like that?

Writing this blog gives me pleasure and is a great outlet for my need to write. And your “likes” and comments help to sustain that pleasure, make it seem worthwhile. I don’t feel like the writing has dropped into a black hole or disappeared into cyberspace. I don’t feel I’m engaged in a futile exercise.

But my novel. My poor, poor novel. Unless I return to it, it will remain stillborn. And that I can’t bear. Pleasure or no, I must do it justice and publish it myself if nothing else. But all that takes time. Days, weeks, months of dedicated painstaking work. And I’ve become bewitched by painting. I can hardly stand to be away from her for a minute, let alone days, weeks, months.

So if you were me, what would you choose? Pure pleasure, or high anxiety and uncertain results? The answer seems obvious.

And yet, and yet, in the still of night my novel still calls to me.  In soft, wistful whispers.

A Poet & an Artist on Making the Unknown Known

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art, creative process, creativity, Georgia O'Keefe, inspiration, Mary Oliver, poetry, writing

I came across two quotations about the creative process recently and found such striking similarities I had to explore them further. The first is by the poet Mary Oliver, and the second by the artist Georgia O’Keeffe. Both are attempting to articulate how they create, how they make the unknown known. Both make reference–one obliquely, the other explicitly–to the need of stepping over “the edge” into something vague and nearly inarticulate: “formlessness” for one, the “unknown” for the other.

Where does the “extraordinary” that precipitates the creative act take place, Mary Oliver asks:

No one yet has made a list of places where the extraordinary may happen and where it may not. Still, there are indications. Among crowds, in drawing rooms, among easements and comforts and pleasures, it is seldom seen. It likes the out-of-doors. It likes the concentrating mind. It likes solitude. It is more likely to stick to the risk-taker than the ticket-taker. It isn’t that it would disparage comforts, or the set routines of the world, but that its concern is directed to another place. Its concern is the edge, and the making of a form out of the formlessness that is beyond the edge.

From “Of Power and Time,”  Upstream: Selected Essays (public library).

How do we create something out of nothing, O’Keeffe asks:

I feel that a real living form is the result of the individual’s effort to create the living thing out of the adventure of his spirit into the unknown—where it has experienced something—felt something—it has not understood—and from that experience comes the desire to make the unknown—known. By unknown—I mean the thing that means so much to the person that wants to put it down—clarify something he feels but does not clearly understand—sometimes he partially knows why—sometimes he doesn’t—sometimes it is all working in the dark—but a working that must be done—Making the unknown—known—in terms of one’s medium is all-absorbing—if you stop to think of the form—as form you are lost—The artist’s form must be inevitable—You mustn’t even think you won’t succeed—Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant—there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing—and keeping the unknown always beyond you—catching crystallizing your simpler clearer version of life—only to see it turn stale compared to what you vaguely feel ahead—that you must always keep working to grasp—the form must take care of its self if you can keep your vision clear.

From Georgia O’Keeffe: Art and Letters (public library)

Both speak of the need to step over the edge of the known into the unknown to create.

For O’Keeffe, the idea is to keep reaching for the thing just beyond one’s grasp, something felt, but not understood. That’s how you make the unknown known. How you create form out of formlessness.

For Oliver, one’s concern must be always directed toward the edge, toward bringing out the form from the formlessness beyond the edge.

That need to be always living at the edge of things, and being willing to step over the edge, is what really interests me, and has been a motif in my writing, my urge to create, for a long time. This blog, “Living on the Edge of the Wild,” was an attempt to explore this vague and mysterious something lying just out of sight, just beyond our fingertips: The Wild. The Unconscious. The Unknown.

God, perhaps, if God is that vast unknowable spirit from which all things are newly sprung.

It’s the urge to push consciousness over the edge, beyond the ordinary perception or understanding of things as they seem to be, to discover what else lies out there just beyond our grasp.

It comes like a tickle in the back of the mind–an inkling of something exciting, extraordinary, brand new. and undiscovered, just out of reach. The conscious mind cannot make the leap into the great unknown. It’s too slow and cumbersome, too full of itself and its preconceptions. Too fearful of what’s not itself. But we sense that something else can. Some deeper part of ourselves that we rarely tap into can make that leap, if we are willing to risk letting go and allow it. It’s like flying from one trapeze to another. We have to be willing to let go of what we so desperately cling to, to leap out into empty air with nothing to support us, and trust the thing we are reaching for will be there. Without that risk-taking and that trust, nothing extraordinary happens.

The thing that tickles our mind, that intrigues and arouses us, that we want to grasp, seems vague at first, formless. Like a tree hidden in the mist, we catch odd glimpses of a form we cannot recognize at first. But as we pursue our art, our painting or our poem, it becomes clearer, almost as if we are reclaiming it from the mist that has obscured it. As if it already existed perfectly formed, and we are simply the tool used to reveal it, or, at least, reveal some small aspect of what we originally glimpsed.

What we bring forth may not be perfect, may not be the thing-in-itself, but merely hint at it. And that’s enough. To have touched, to whatever degree, that which intrigues us; to have given some slight form to that vague reality which tickled the mind, which once had lain unperceived among the formless, is enough to sate us, to satisfy the creative urge. At least for a while.

For having once tapped into that deeper part of ourselves, having once stepped over the edge and touched the form within the formless, we spark anew, again and again, the urge to create. To risk letting go and trust the empty air before us will bring to our fingertips the very thing we hoped to grasp.

[A review of O’Keeffe’s letters and Oliver’s essays can be found at Brainpickings.org, where I found the original quotations. You might also enjoy “Endless Emerging Forms – Photos of Fog and Mist,” a blog post I wrote with a similar theme]

Painting, a New Passion

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art, creaitvity, hobbies, inspiration, lifestyle, painting, passion, Visual Arts, watercolor, writing

Detail from painting by Van Gogh

Writing has always been the primary passion in my life, the thing I love most to do and identify with. I began blogging as a way to share my writing and the things I’m inspired to write about. Art has been one of those inspirations, particularly the paintings I fall in love with.

In one post I compared writing with painting: “Images and ideas are the paint, words the loaded brush, and sentences our brushstrokes. The mind and imagination of both writer and reader is the blank canvas.”

Writers paint portraits of our characters in the minds of readers and place them in dramatic scenes.  We use lighting and color to evoke mood and atmosphere, and prop “still lifes” about them, revealing tiny details that suggest associations and symbols and themes.

The idea of painting has always intrigued me and I longed to try my hand at it one day. That desire became particularly loud when I was sick to death of words. Yes, even writers weary of words. Then the idea of painting, working with pure pigment and brush strokes on a blank page instead of words, words, words–so fraught with meaning–seemed utterly refreshing.

Writing with no words–that’s what my soul sought.

Watercolor drew my interest. I loved the lightness, the fluidity, the transparency of the medium. But when I was finally ready to paint, the only class I could find was in pastel. So I began playing with pastel about a year ago. While a few paintings were successful and deemed wall-worthy, more often I felt frustrated by my efforts.

Finally a class in watercolor opened up and I feel now I’ve found my medium. Nearly everything I’ve painted so far gives me pleasure. Finally my walls are beginning to feel the presence of my new passion.

I’ve found with painting the kind of satisfaction I’ve rarely found in writing. I always wanted my writing to find a place in the world. I wrote for myself, but also for something beyond me. I wanted my writing wedded to a world apart. Few pieces have found that bliss, and even those that have I still view with misgivings as I wrote about in one post.

But painting doesn’t feel that way. It’s a child that never has to find a place outside my own home. I paint for the pleasure of the process, and also the pleasure I feel from the finished product. It’s something I can enjoy that needs no outward approval.

Much of my writing remains an unwedded bride, an unsung song, a bright promise languishing in a dark corner.

But my painting is a child who needs no one but me to love and enjoy her to feel fulfilled.

It’s a rare blessing.

 

 

Hot Hills in Summer Heat, Revised

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creative process, Deborah J. Brasket, Nature, poetry, writing

“I watch them every summer, the hot hills crouched like a lion beside the road, tawny skin pulled taut across long, lean ribs. I would take my hand and trace round ripples of male muscle, feel the hot rise and cool dip of his body. . . .”

So begins a poem I wrote years ago as a young woman driving along the Central Coast of California on my way to class at Cal Poly University in San Luis Obispo.  I loved the commute along highway 101, especially that stretch between Pismo and Avila with the golden rolling hills studded with oak groves towering up beside me on one side, while on the other side lay the Pacific Ocean, cool and shimmering,  far below.

My commute was a kind of communion with silent companions that lay still and passive while I moved past them, watching them fervently. I traveled with my hands stretched out, tracing the changing contours of the passing landscape with my fingers. I felt the silky coolness of the sea, the soft brush of the hot hills– physically, intimately, intensely. And I felt as if I was leaving part of myself behind as I streamed past them

It was an overwhelming feeling, permeated by a sense of longing and loss, because that sense of connection, of “oneness,” I felt so keenly, was so fleeting.  A waft of perfume, a balmy breeze, that slowly dissipates and disappeared.

Knowing this, sometimes my watching was like a spurned lover or jealous mistress. Sometimes like a distant voyeur, or persistent suitor, watching and waiting, watching and waiting.  Waiting for that moment, as my poem concludes, when the lion so still and silent beside me would “rise, stretch his sensuous body against the sky with one low moan” and “pursue me”.

Pursue and devour, was the unstated implication.  “Swallow me whole” is the metaphor that comes to mind these days—consummation.

All that waiting paid off, it appears.  My relationship with the natural world has matured over the years. How I remember so long ago watching the streaming stars passing overhead on those hot, balmy nights, and being filled with a deep sense of longing and loss.  This too must pass, I thought, and it was almost unbearable.  But no more.

Now when I say goodnight to the stars before going to bed–the nights hot and balmy or crystal clear and cold–there’s no sense of longing. When I turn away toward the house nothing is lost. It’s all a part of me now.  A sustaining presence.

And the passing days and nights, that sense of fleetingness that the poets have mourned over the ages, is “a dark stream streaming through me,” as I write in another poem.  It’s all one, the stream and the streaming.  It always was.

For those curious, here’s the complete poem I quoted earlier, written so long ago and recently revised.

 

Hot Hills in Summer Heat

I watch them every summer, the hot hills

Crouched like a lion beside the road,

Tawny skin pulled taut across

Long, lean ribs.

 

I would take my hand and trace

Round ripples of male muscle,

Feel the hot rise and cool dip

of his body.

 

I see the arrogance—rocky head held

High against a blazing sky, the patient

Power unmindful of the heat

that holds me.

 

One day he will rise, stretch his sensuous

Body against the sky with one, low moan.

On silent paws he will pursue me.

And so I wait.

[I first posted this in September 2012 with the original version of the poem. This post features the revised draft. It’s a work in progress, as all things are, it seems.]

Major Life Changes – Writing with Toddlers (or not)

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children, Choices, life, Life Changes, Toddlers, writing

Funny how life plays these little tricks on you. When my own children were toddlers, I put my writing aspirations on hold because it was too difficult to care for them and write at the same time. I know many authors are able to do both, but I discovered I couldn’t. Not happily so, at least.

Putting my writing on hold was a sacrifice, but I felt good about my choice. I knew my little ones would not be little for long and I wanted my care for them to be free of the distractions and frustrations that trying to write would bring.

Later when they were in school, other obligations and adventures kept me away from full-time  writing. That too was a conscious choice I felt good about. My plan was to retire early and devote myself to writing then. And that was what I was doing, with great pleasures, until very recently.

That’s when life played its little trick. The saying goes: “Man makes plans, and God laughs.” Well, he seems to be laughing now. But maybe not for long.  For the time-being though, I must learn to write with toddlers playing at my side, or put my writing aside, again, for a little while at least.

My beautiful little granddaughter is living with us for a while. For how long, I’m not sure. I love having her here. She’s a joy and a delight. I feel so blessed holding her in my arms, watching her play, teaching her to swim, reading and singing songs together. But finding time to write is almost impossible while she’s awake, and when she’s asleep, I’m so exhausted that writing is the last thing I want to do. Sleep is what I crave. Mindless rest. No thought.

So my posts here may be fewer and far between for a while. I’m still working on the final copy-edits for my novel, and sending off queries to agents and publishers. That’s as much as I can manage for the moment.

If you are a writer with small children and have suggestions on how to care for both at the same time, I’d love to hear them.

Good Prose and Good Science — Quibbling with the Masters

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book review, books, critique, Richard Dawkins, science writing, Steven Pinker, style manual, The Sense of Style, Unweaving the Rainbow, writing, Writing advice

At first Steven Pinker was my new hero. Within the first few pages of reading his widely acclaimed “The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century,” he debunks the long-standing myths about the evils of passive voice and killing one’s darlings.

We now know that telling writers to avoid the passive is bad advice. Linguistic research has shown that the passive construction has a number of indispensable functions because of the way it engages a reader’s attention and memory. A skilled writer should . . . push back against copy editors who, under the influence of grammatically naive style guides, blue-pencil every passive construction they spot into an active one.

Finally! Someone is speaking my language.

And he doesn’t stop there.

The classic manuals . . . try to take all the fun out of writing, grimly adjuring the writer to avoid offbeat words, figures of speech, and playful alliteration. A famous piece of advice from this school crosses the line from the grim to the infanticide: “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetuate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—wholeheartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.” (Though commonly attributed to William Faulkner, the quotation comes from the English professor Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in his 1916 lectures On the Art of Writing.)

I was thrilled. My top two pet peeves on bad writing advice soundly tromped by the latest style guru.

Pinker goes on to say what most writers would readily agree with, that to be a good writer you need to be a good reader. What’s more, you should acquire “the habit of lingering over good writing wherever you find it and reflecting on what makes it good.”

That’s what he proposes to do in his book, to teach the principles of good style by “reverse-engineering examples of good prose.”

By now, I’m bubbling with enthusiasm, and eagerly turn to his first example, the opening lines of “Unweaving the Rainbow” by Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and popular science writer.

That’s when my giddy glide toward Pinker fandom comes to a screeching halt, because this paragraph is a ghastly example of good prose.

Shouldn’t, above all, good prose make sense? Failing that, what good is “style”?

But this example is so full of logical inconsistencies and pure nonsense, I’m amazed that a scientist (the supposed epitome of logical and rational thought!) would write it, let alone that a stylist would recommend it. Surely Pinker could have found a better example of good prose.

Don’t take my word for it. Read it for yourself. It’s not so much the style I object to as its substance:

We are going to dies, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds, it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

Okay, he has an intriguing premise in his opening line. It makes you sit up and take notice. It makes you want to find out more. I’ll give him that.

But the next sentence is clearly nonsense, and rather than intrigue me, it makes me question the author’s intelligence: not a good sign of good prose. He says, “Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.” But if “most people” are not born, “they” are not people. His sentence makes no sense. He’s referring to something that doesn’t exist and calling it a person. His terminology is all screwed up. He goes on to call these non-people “potential people,” “unborn ghosts,” and “possible people,” when, in fact, “they” are nothing, non-entities.

What he’s really trying to say, in what he thinks is a clever way, is: “We’re lucky we’re alive.” Because in the bijillion possible ways our DNA could have been strung, it was strung in the way peculiar to us, thus making me “me,” and you “you,” and not someone else.

Fine. I get that. I’m lucky I’m going to die because I’m lucky I was ever born. I’m also lucky I was born a person and not an ant, or algae, or a cancer cell. I’m lucky my daddy’s sperm beat out all the other sperm to penetrate my mother’s egg, and that it was that particular egg, and not another, or I could have a sister I never knew existed because I never would have been born. I’m lucky in a bijillion ways that doesn’t include a specious argument comparing me with “potential people.” Which makes me wonder what caused him to choose that clumsy and rather irrational example?

But let’s move on. Next he claims those potential people (or potential ways of stranding DNA) “will never see the light of day.” Never? Really?

Who is to say that one of those potential people, as he calls them, or possible DNA strandings is not being born as we speak, or will not be born next week, next year, and next century? In fact, aren’t all people pulled from that pool of DNA possibility, including future generations, which will go on peopling our planet onward to eternity, or at least the end of the human race?

If you really think about it, based on his logic, it’s not so much that we “actual people” are luckier than those “potential people,” but that while we are lucky now, at this point in time, they will be lucky later on when our luck has run out.

So, that sentence about “the light of day” makes no sense either. But the next one is even sillier.

He says “certainly” the set of as yet unborn potential people includes poets and scientists greater than the set of already produced people. Certainly?

There’s two things wrong with this sentence.

First he’s presupposing that DNA alone is responsible for poetic and scientific greatness, when certainly our parentage, education, place of birth, economic status, and any number of other criteria is equally important. We could almost certainly say that people who had the potential to be greater than Keats and Newton have already been born, are alive this moment, but sadly for them and us, they were born to a Pygmy tribe in Africa, a female in Afghanistan, or a crack baby in the ghetto. None of which would have had the education or opportunity to reach her or his full potential as poets and scientists.

The second problem with this sentence is that it does not belong in this paragraph. It does not support his topic or strengthen his argument about how lucky we are to be alive. A good editor should have deleted it.

But his most stupefying statement is his last, remarking on the “stupefying odds” that “you and I, in our ordinariness” were ever born. How strange he would come to the conclusion of how “ordinary” we are, for it defies the very point he was making all along. In the terms of his own argument, the very point he is advancing, our very lucky and exceptional birth would qualify us as extraordinary; indeed, far surpassing all those innumerable unlucky, unexceptional, unborn ghosts.

Pinker claims that Dawkins’ purpose, as an “uncompromising atheist and tireless advocate of science,” is to explain how “his world view does not, as the romantic and religious fear, extinguish a sense of wonder or an appreciation of life.”

If that was his purpose, then he failed miserably. For all he did in that opening was to irritate this reader with all his non-logical arguments. The only “wonder” of it for me was how a scientist could write it, and how a stylist could praise him for it.

If I could rewrite his paragraph to remove the logical inconsistencies and yet retain what Pinker claims was Dawkins’ purpose–to move the reader to marvel at the wonder of existence–here is how I would do so:

We are lucky to be alive. That joyous fact should far outweigh any grief in the knowledge of our eventual death. We are lucky because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people containing you and me. Our birth is an exceptional and extraordinary accident. Out of all the innumerable sand grains among the sand dunes of time, the winds of chance happened to pick up the ones producing you and me and spun us into being. In the teeth of these stupefying odds, you and I, in all our uncommon glory, won the mother of all lotteries.

Lucky indeed.

Blogging A Trail of Bread Crumbs – 2014 Recap

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2014 review, Blog, Blogging, favorite blog posts, freshly pressed, poetry, Recap, writing

Blog posts are like a trail of bread crumbs leading you back through a misty past. They tell you where you were, not where you’re going. I can’t say I’m unhappy to leave 2014 behind. And if a few of those bread crumbs get gobbled up by birds, so much the better.

Still, it’s instructive, looking back before you plow forward. Here are a few trends, challenges, and highlights from my last year of blogging.

Is Less More, or Just Less?

I wrote fewer posts on this blog in 2014 than in previous years. But I’ve always been a slow blogger. Even at the beginning in 2012 I was posting only twice a week. Eventually it turned into once a week, then every ten days of so. I’ve gone as long as two weeks between posts now. I seem to be racing toward some decline. But it worries me. I don’t want to stop blogging. I don’t want to lose you, the readers who have come to mean so much to me. I love blogging. I want less to be more. Is that possible?

Into the Pit and Out Again

One reason I’ve blogged less is because I’ve been challenged more–both personally and professionally. Early last year, I thought I lost my son to addiction for good. I’d given up hope. In desperation, I created a new, anonymous blog, just to vent all the rage and grief and craziness I was feeling. And it helped. It brought me back from the brink, and him as well. Now he has 8 months of recovery behind him and still going stronger than ever. Still, we take it one day at a time. There’s no other way.

Professionally, I was thrown down into the pit as well. I finished the last draft of my novel in December 2013.  2014 was supposed to be the year I sent this darling out to agents and publishers. I put it aside for a few weeks so I could re-read it fresh. That’s when it all came crashing down. I hated my novel!

I was devastated. After so many years of tender loving care, this baby too was lost to me. In a frantic, I reached out to a few writer friends and researched the web, searching for a life-line, hoping this was a normal reaction. Did all writers end up hating their novels? It turns out, most don’t, but some do. It’s not uncommon. I found a new beta reader and, working with her strong encouragement and deep insight, went through the draft one more time. (Thank you, Kerri!). Now I’m back on track again. I’ve finished what I hope will be my final draft, and set it aside for another read. I’m keeping my fingers crossed I won’t hate it this time.

I had one more personal crisis in 2014, but I’m saving that for another blog post. All this did slow me down and drain away some of the energy and inspiration for keeping this blog going. In retrospect, I’m surprised I wrote as much as I did. Maybe I’m more resilient than I thought.

Now for the 2014 highlights:

Most Viewed Posts: A Blast From the Past

According to my WordPress Annual Report, my most viewed posts in 2014 were written in 2013. Hmmm. What does that mean? Well, I could take it sunny-side up: My writing has staying power, or so WordPress euphemistically suggests.  Or it could mean my best blogging is behind me. Well, time will tell. Here’s my two most viewed posts:

• Blogging and “The Accident of Touching” (Freshly Pressed in 2013)
• Growing Up in a Haunted House (part of a series of blog posts I wrote in 2013 and re-blogged last Halloween)

Binge Blogging

Series are all the rage now, both in television viewing and reading. We love characters who linger, whose stories become our stories, who return to us day after day, week after week. Even season after season and book after book. We boast of our binges: mine was Downton Abbey last week. I re-watched all of Season 4 during the afternoon, then watched the premier of Season 5 that evening. I went to bed fully sated.

Binge blogging, sadly, is not quite the same. It’s done less for the pleasure of readers and more to accommodate long-winded writers. Like me. I take more pleasure in my series than my readers do. It’s a guilty indulgence.

The first one was a 4-part literary deconstruction, tying together the themes found in the writings of Milton, Wordsworth, and Lacan. (I know, ouch!) The first and last posts in the series are listed below.

• “Some Tragic Falling Off” into Difference and Desire
• “Thou Art That” – Part IV, “Some Tragic Falling Off”

The next 2-part series on Annie Dillard’s writing and my own was much more popular:

• Dialogue with Annie Dillard on “The Writing Life”
• More on “The Writing Life” with Annie Dillard

Hu-More, Not Less

Three personal favorite, which readers also seemed to enjoy, were attempts to lighten an otherwise overly heavy and oh-so-serious blog load. Not to mention, help me lift my head out of those pits I mentioned earlier, if for just a moment. It was quite refreshing. Maybe I need to hu-more in the future.

• Humor, It’s Serious Stuff
• Selling My Babies. Where’s the Joy?
• Dreaming of Death—Oops, Bears

Freshly Pressed (Again!)

I’ve been freshly pressed three times now. Each time is a surprise and delight. Gifts that come from out of the blue. The last time was in June 2014. This one’s about marriage: drifting apart, pulling together, and finding that magic balance.

• On Herds, Husbands & Riffing on Writing

My First Guest Post!

I was also honored, and delighted, to be invited to write a guest post on poetry for the lovely Luanne’s blog, Writer Site. I posted it on my site as well.

• A Cranky Reader: What I Crave When I Read Poetry

Your Favorites and Mine

Surprisingly, and happily, some of my readers’ favorite posts were mine as well, and several featured my poetry. I can’t tell you how gratifying that is. I haven’t written much poetry in my life, but all of it is deeply personal. I think sometimes that to truly know me, who I am at heart, you would have to read my poetry. And you have. Without blogging–without my poetry being read–large, intimate parts of me would remain relatively unknown.

Three of your favorite posts featuring my poetry:

• “Taste and see – I am spare”
• The Slant of Afternoon, Playing with Light
• Song from a Dream – “My Queen’s Soul Lies Naked”

Two of my favorite posts featuring poetry from my favorite poet, Wallace Stevens:

• Cultivating “a mind of winter”
• Downward into Darkness on Extended Wings

Two of your non-poetry favorites this year was a photo-essay on fallen oak trees, and a list and lament about all the books I’ve abandoned this past year.

• My Roman Oaks
• Books I’ve Abandoned

Hugs and Kisses

Thank you for bearing with me through this long post, and through this last challenging year of infrequent posts–those bread crumbs scattered along a dark trail with its few gleams of light, and rare laughter.

Your comments and encouragements have meant the world to me, and made all the difference. May you all have a truly marvelous 2015.

The Light-Craving Stories of George Saunders

Tags

George Saunders, literary fiction, short stories, Tenth of December, writing

What is it that I love about the wildly weird, dark and dorky stories of George Saunders?

Ever since reading his collection “The Tenth of December,” I’ve been trying to figure this out.

His stories are not easy reading. People are tortured, puppies drowned, nefarious things are happening behind a guise of bureaucratic goodness. Often the stories start in confusing, abrupt ways, and are written so lean it’s hard to see what’s holding them together.

His characters are usually bizarre or just plain sad: pathetic morons, smug hypocrites, nerdy adolescents, clueless housewives, loser dads, lame do-gooders.

At first you think Saunders is making fun of them, judging them, exposing their hypocrisy, their meanness, their arrogance, their stupidity. You think: this satire. It’s ironic. It’s absurdist.

Much of what he writes has a hard comic edge. Some of it is laugh-out-loud hilarious.

But then you realize he’s not laughing at these characters. He’s not laughing with them either. Most are too naïve, too serious, too un-self-aware to have the capacity to laugh at themselves. They have no idea how comical they are, although they may be painfully aware of how they are made the butt of others’ jokes.

The stories aren’t about the characters at all. They are about us—the readers. How he moves us from A to Z.

“I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters,” Saunders wrote in an essay on Vonnegut (and quoted in a NY Times interview).

“He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what’s inside the box bears some linear resemblance to ‘real life’ — he can put whatever he wants in there. What’s important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit. . . . The black box is meant to change us. If the change will be greater via the use of invented, absurd material, so be it.”

Saunders is taking us on a hilarious, diabolical, fun-house tour, and at the end, we realize how all these crazy, ridiculous, pathetic losers we meet along the way are us in disguise. Me, in a different life—my son, my daughter, my mother, my poor dear deranged grandpa. Beneath the pathetic veneer is someone we love, or someone worth loving.

In the same interview, Saunders talks about how his family has influenced his writing:

“My life with them has been everything to me. And loving them the way I do—I think that was a very major development in my artistic life. Suddenly everything mattered. What helped them was good, what hurt them was bad. And then that feeling got writ large. I became aware . . . of the fact that cruelty or even just mere thoughtlessness had an object: someone was getting bruised. And someone must have (or should have) loved that bruised party as much as I love my family. So the world became morally charged. . . . People were precious and not just my people.”

But these kinds of revelations in his stories do not come easily, without struggle. Or without a cost. They come like The Misfit in Flannery O’Conner’s short story. He stands over the silly and self-absorbed Grandmother with a gun held to her head. And then, just before he kills her, he holds up her heart, the heart she never knew she had until that very moment.

They come with regret, with a deep, gut-wrenching sadness. And sometimes, at the very end, with a heart-searing and heart-soaring softness.

The first story in Saunders collection, “Victory Lap”, opens with a young teenage girl floating down a marble staircase imaging all her secret admirers below. It’s written in a 3rd person stream-of-consciousness point of view, in the vernacular of the blissfully naïve and hopelessly romantic. She gushes about how lovely everyone is, all the girls at school, all the boys:

“Actually, she loved her whole town. That adorable grocer, spraying his lettuce! Pastor Carol with her large comfortable butt! The chubby postman, gesticulating with his padded envelope! It had once been a mill town. Wasn’t that crazy? What does that even mean?

There is so much she doesn’t know. Like how to change the oil. Or even check the oil. How to open the hood. How to bake brownies. That was embarrassing, actually, being a girl and all. And what about a mortgage? Did it come with the house? When you breast-feed, did you have to like push the milk out?”

When she’s happy like this, she tells us, as she pirouettes around the house practicing ballet, she imagines a conversation with a baby deer trembling in the woods. She admonishes the hunter who slays the deer’s mother.

“Her guts were completely splayed. Jeez, that was nice! Don’t you have anything better to do, dank hunter, than kill this baby’s mom? You seem like a nice enough guy.”

She believes in niceness. “In a straw poll at school, she had voted for people being good and life being fun.”

While she’s practicing ballet, alone in the house, a meter-man who’s not a meter-man knocks at her back door. “Something told her to step back in, slam the door. But that seemed rude.” So she smiled and asked, “How may I help you?”

Next we meet Allison’s nerdy teenage neighbor, Kyle, who she calls a “poor goof.”

He’s just come home from school to see a note his father leaves him about placing their new expensive geode out on the back deck.

“Gar, Dad, do you honestly feel it fair that I should have to slave in the yard until dark after a rigorous cross-country practice . . . ?

Shoes off, mister.

Yoinks, too late. He was already at the TV. And had left an incriminating trail of microclods. Way verboten. Could the microclods be hand-plucked? Although: problem. If he went back to hand-pluck the microclods, he’d leave an incriminating new trail of microclods”

He has imaginary conversations with his Dad, who calls him Scout, and his mother who calls him Beloved Only. He imagines them watching his every move with disapproval, and him explaining away his failures at meeting their strict standards, even though they both send “weekly braggy emails to both sets of grandparents” about him.

While he’s out on the back deck ready to set the geode he sees Allison with the meter-man who is dragging her toward his van. When she resists, he punches her in the stomach. The man sees Kyle and warns him to stay away: “Move a muscle and I’ll knife her in the heart. Swear to God. Got it?”

“Kyle’s mouth was so spotless all he could do was make his mouth do the shape it normally did when saying Yes.

He was just a kid. There was nothing he could do.”

He imagines going inside, pretending he never saw anything. Imagines how he’ll look and what he’ll say when eventually he learns that Allison was raped and murdered while he was innocently sitting inside playing with his railroad cars. He imagines how pleased his parents will be that he hadn’t put himself in harm’s way. “Super job, Scout.” “We are well please, Beloved Only.”

Then he was running.

“Oh God! What was he doing, what was he doing? Jesus, shit, the directives he was violating! Running in the yard (bad for the sod); transporting a geode without its protective wrapping: hopping the fence, which stressed the fence, which had cost a pretty penny; leaving the yard; leaving the yard barefoot.”

He throws the geode at the head of the man who falls, his head a bloody mess. Allison crab-crawls into the house and calls 911.

The story could have ended here. It would have been a good story. But Saunders takes it further. He pushes the narrative into something beyond a would-be rape gone bad, a skinny scared kid saving the beautiful princess next door. He pushes the story past mere good into sublime. He takes the reader to that state of grace, where we feel that heart-searing, heart-soaring softness.

Allison watches from the window while Kyle does a wild, crazy “Who’s the man!” dance on the hood of the car.

“You still moving, freak? Got a plan, stroke-dick? Want a skull gash on top of your existing skull gash, big man? You think I won’t?”

He lifts the geode again. Ready to bring it down on the injured man’s head once more.

“Kyle, don’t,” she whispers.

She has nightmares about that day, about Kyle murdering the man. About his bloody head dissolving. And Kyle looking at her with that look: My life is ruined. I’m a murderer. Until her parents remind her, over and over again. It didn’t happen like that. You stopped him. You saved Kyle.

“You did so good, Mom said.

Did beautiful, Dad said.”

The final story in the collection does the same thing. Pushes the story to a satisfying conclusion, and then takes it further, into the sublime.

In Saunders’ title story, “The Tenth of December,”(which you can read online) a boy with “unfortunate Prince Valiant bangs and cublike mannerism” walks with his pellet gun out into the snowy woods. Here he will confront the wily “Netherworlders” who live under rocks, and today seem intent on capturing the new girl from Montreal in his homeroom class.

“He just loved the way she talked. So apparently did the Nethers, who planned to use her to repopulate their depleted numbers and bake various things they did not know how to bake.”

In the middle of this fantasy, he sees a coat left lying on the snow, and off in the distance a half-naked man leaning against a tree.

“What kind of person leaves his coat behind on a day like this? The mental kind, that was who. This guy looked sort of mental. Like an Auschwitz dude or sad confused grandpa.”

Despite fears and misgivings, he sets racing off across the frozen duck pond with the coat to rescue the old man, for “had not Jesus said, Blessed are those who help those who cannot help themselves but are too mental, doddering, or have a disability?”

The old man, who is dying, and who wants to spare himself and his family the indignity of a slow, painful, humiliating death, has come out here to end his life. He has just sat down to wait peacefully for what he hopes will be a quick and relatively painless death, when:

“Oh, for shitsake.

On for crying out loud.

Some kid was on the pond.

Chubby kid in white. With a gun. Carrying Eber’s coat.

You little fart, put that coat down, get your ass home, mind your own—

Damn. Damn it.”

The boy falls through the ice and the dying man must try to gather enough strength to get up, get down the hill and save him. Painstakingly, cursing the whole way, he does. He manages to pull him out, get him dried off the best he can, and then forces the boy to get up and moving, so he can run home before he freezes to death. Then Eber sits back to finish what he had started.

The story could have finished here, but it doesn’t. He sits there, thinking about what he’s doing. Two weeks before Christmas. Before Molly’s favorite holiday. He’s “offing” himself. Too late, he has second thoughts.

“He tried to send some last thoughts to Molly. Sweetie, forgive me. Biggest fuckup ever. Forget this part. Forget I ended thisly. You know me. You know I didn’t mean this.”

I won’t tell you how the story ends—you really need to read this. My little summary here doesn’t do it justice. But I will share what Eber comes to realize, which is at the heart of nearly every Saunders story I’ve read so far. That moment of grace.

“He saw it now, was starting to see it—if some guy at the end, fell apart, and said or did bad things, or had to be helped, helped to quite a considerable extent? So what? What of it? Why should he not do or say weird things or look strange or disgusting? Why should the shit not run down his legs? Why should those he loved not lift and bend and feed and wipe him, when he would gladly do the same for them? He’d been afraid to be lessened by the lifting and bending and feeding and wiping, and was still afraid of that, and yet, at the same time, he now saw that there could still be many—many drops of goodness, is how it came to him—many drops of happy—of good fellowship—ahead, and those drops of fellowship were not—-had never been—-his to withheld. Withhold”

This last shows his dying brain misfiring.

At the end of another story called “ComCom,” not found in this collection, the narrator and a man called Giff are murdered. Afterward, they rise together above the world:

“Snow passes through us, gulls pass through us. Tens of towns, hundreds of towns stream by below and we hear their prayer, grievances, their million signals of loss . . . . All this time we grow in size, in love, the distinction between Giff and me diminishing, and my last thought before we join something I can only describe as Nothing-Is-Excluded is, Giff, Giff, please explain, what made you come back for me?”

He learns:

“This is why I came back. I was wrong in life, limited, shrank everything down to my size, and yet, in the end, there was something light-craving within me, which sent me back, and saved me.”

That’s what I love about his stories. He shows us that in the end, when all the superficialities and fears and meanness are flayed from us, beneath that, we are light-craving creatures: people who are starving for the want of goodness, the want of grace in our lives. And like Eber, we realize those “drops of goodness” that we experience at each other’s hands, though few and far between, are worth all the other absurd humilities and indignities that life may heap upon us.

One drop of grace is all it takes to save us from each other and ourselves.

Getting Serious about Our Life’s Work

Tags

art, artist, creativity, devotion, higher calling, life, purpose, Steven Pressfield, The War of Art, Turning Pro, writing

I read Steven Pressfield’s book “The War of Art” not long ago and followed up with its sequel “Turning Pro: Tap Your Inner Power and Create Your Life’s Work.”

Both are motivational books that help artists of all stripes get serious about their work. It helps them turn the corner from being mere dabblers, dilettantes, or “amateurs” as he calls them, to becoming true “professionals,” devoted entirely to their craft.

I think I’ve been turning that corner for a while now, but the “fire in the belly” comes and goes, and I realize I’m not as seriously devoted to writing as I could be, or want to be

One of the interesting things he does in “Turning Pro” is compare the artist and the addict. The mindless and mind-numbing pleasurable distractions, along with the self-doubts and fears and life-long bad habits, are what he calls “addictions.” This could include what we normally think of as addictions–to drugs, sex,  gambling, money, fame. But they also include web-surfing, working out, house-cleaning, pleasing others, a leisurely life-style, etc.

It’s all the same.They are all ways we resist devoting ourselves to the work we know we were meant to do.

Let me quote a few things he says about these addictions:

“Addictions” are not bad. They are simply the shadow forms of a more noble and exalted calling.

Addiction becomes a surrogate for our calling. We enact addiction instead of embracing the calling.

All addictions share, among other things, two prime qualities: (1) They embody repetition without progress; (2) They produce incapacity as a pay-off.

Both addicts and artists are dealing with the same material, which is the pain of being human and the struggle against self-sabotage.

Both artist and addict wrestle with the experience of exile. They share an acute, even excruciating sensitivity to the state of separation and isolation, and both actively seek a way to overcome it, to transcend it, or at least to make the pain go away.

The addict seeks to escape the pain of being human in one of two ways–by transcending it or by anesethetizing it. Borne aloft by powerful enough chemicals, we can almost, if we are lucky, glimpse the face of the Infinite. If that doesn’t work, we can always pass out. Both ways work. The pain goes away.

The artist takes a different tack. She tries to reach the upper realm not by chemicals but by labor and love.

The book is calling all the “amateurs” of the world–-those of us stuck in our distracting, mind-numbing “addictions”–-to turn “pro.” Turning pro is a mind-set. It’s embracing our higher-calling, the work we feel defines us.

 It’s not an ego thing. It’s devotional. And it’s humbling. He writes:

“When [the poet William] Blake said Eternity is in love with the creations of time, he was referring to those planes of pure potential, which are timeless, placeless, spaceless, but which long to bring their visions into being here, in this time-bound, space-defined world.

The artist is the servant of that intention, those angels, that Muse. The enemy of the artist is the small-time Ego, which begets Resistance, which is the dragon that guards the gold. That’s why an artist must be a warrior and, like all warriors, artists over time acquire modesty and humility . . . . They know they are not the source of the creations they bring into being. They only facilitate. They carry. They are the willing and skilled instruments of the gods and goddesses they serve.”

I feel I’m getting there. I feel I’m turning that corner. But I’m not quite there yet. I’m holding something back. That’s sense of urgency perhaps. That devotional state of mind. That single-purposedness.

I dreamed not long ago about a ferocious bear descending upon me, coming to grab me away from my ordinary life. I felt like I was being “chosen” for something, being taken on a journey to a higher realm. I was terrified—until I noticed the hand grabbing me was “soft,” not hard.

Am I being “softly” led away to my calling?

Or am I once again choosing the soft, easy path? S-l-o-w-l-y turning the corner, rather than plunging directly into the heat of that creative fire?

Annie Dillard, whom I wrote about recently, also spoke of the artist in terms of the devotee and the warrior:

Writing a first draft requires for the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. If you were a Zulu warrior banging on your shield with your spear for a couple of hours . . . you might be able to prepare yourself to write. If you were an Aztec maiden who knew months in advance . . . the priests were going to throw you into a hot volcano, and if you spent those months undergoing a series of purification rituals . . . you might be ready to write. By how, if you are neither Zulu warrior nor Aztec maiden, do you prepare yourself, all alone, to enter an extraordinary state on an ordinary morning?

How set yourself spinning? Where is an edge—a dangerous edge—and where is the trail to the edge and the strength to climb it?

While she was referring to the state of mind needed for writing a first draft, could that not also apply to our lives as artists, activists, entrepreneurs, whatever we feel in our bones we were called to do?

Mary Oliver asks at the end of one of her marvelous poems:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Indeed, what?

And, most urgently, when?

More on “The Writing Life” with Annie Dillard

Tags

Annie Dillard, books, creativity, Deborah Brasket, inspiration, The Writing Life, writers, writing

Annie Dillard, July 1987, Getty Images

One of the things I love about Annie Dillard’s book “The Writing Life” is how it addresses both the drudgery and the ecstasy of writing, the torment and bliss, the good days and the bad.

It is both a comfort and an encouragement that other writers–esteemed writers, prolific writers–have felt at one time or another all the highs and lows of my own experience in pursuing the writer’s life.

Preparing to Write

Writing is both craft and art, but to move it from craft to art requires a certain kind of mental preparation that many writers refer to, sometimes as ritual, sometimes as muse. For Dillard, that preparation is particularly intense:

Writing a first draft requires for the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. If you were a Zulu warrior banging on your shield with your spear for a couple of hours . . . you might be able to prepare yourself to write. If you were an Aztec maiden who knew months in advance . . . the priests were going to throw you into a hot volcano, and if you spent those months undergoing a series of purification rituals . . . you might be ready to write. By how, if you are neither Zulu warrior nor Aztec maiden, do you prepare yourself, all alone, to enter an extraordinary state on an ordinary morning?

How set yourself spinning? Where is an edge—a dangerous edge—and where is the trail to the edge and the strength to climb it?

How to set yourself spinning? That’s the question, isn’t it? What lights the spark within that catches fire and sends us breathless to the page to capture that flame before it dies. What brings us back there, again and again, each day, to complete the work? How to ignite it again? Sometimes it does seem that we have to enter that extraordinary state of mind that the Zulu warrior or Aztec maiden prepares for with such zeal and passion.

For me it often comes when reading poetry, or philosophy, or other writers I admire, and something catches–a phrase, a thought, an image, a rhythm in the way the words flow. I’m snagged, and I feel I am being carried to a new place, and I see things in a new light. This new seeing, this discovery, is so exciting, it looses something in me and I run to grab a pen so I can capture it before it disappears.

It’s returning to that, that “felt sense” of things, that spark of discovery, that brings me back into the state of mind where I can re-enter the work, and keep writing, keep unspooling what’s there, discovering as I go where I’m going.

“A dangerous edge” – yes. It is an edge, a precipice, beyond which “not-knowing” lies. We have to be willing to throw ourselves over that edge, enter the “not-knowing,” submit to it, let it take us where it will, and trusting it will take us where we need to go.

E. L. Doctorow once famously said, “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

Writing Through the Flow

In that almost hypnotic, expectant, trustful state of mind, the writing is joyous, thrilling. We’re “in the zone.” As Dillard writes:

The line of words is heading out past Jupiter this morning . . . The line of words speeds past Jupiter and its cumbrous, dizzying orbit; it looks neither to the right nor to the left. It will be leaving the solar system soon, single –minded, rapt, rushing heaven like a soul . . . . Right now, you are flying. Right now, your job is to hold your breath.

Elsewhere she elaborates:

The sensations of writing a book are the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.

The sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then—and only then—it is handed to you.

Writing Through the Resistance

But sometimes it’s not handed to us. Sometimes we search and break our heart and break our back only to find—nothing. Sometimes the work does not speak to us.

Sometimes the “not knowing” feels like a brick wall, huge, monstrous, holding us back, walling us out, keeping us stumped. We feel dumb, tongue-tied, speechless, like a brute trying to talk. We choke on our own words, the words that will not come, the words that weigh us down, the words that feel dry and brittle and useless in our mouths.

We’re stuck. Blocked. We hit that wall and would rather do anything but write.

At one point in her book, frustrated by her writing, Dillard exclaims: “I hate to write. I would rather do anything else.” She tells us:

I avoided writing, and mostly what I did by way of work was fool around.

One day, full of such thoughts, I tried to work and failed. After eight hours of watching helplessly while my own inane, manneristic doodles over stepped their margins and covered the pages I was supposed to be writing, I gave up. I decided to hate myself, to make popcorn and read.

Pacing the Writing

So how do we negotiate that space that lies between inspiration and resistance, between “not-knowing” as a precipice from which we gladly leap, flying, and “not-knowing” as a wall around which we cannot reach?

Pacing. Pacing is the answer. Slow and methodical, or brisk and determined, or steady and sure. Whatever. Just keep one foot moving forward at all times.

On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away. These truths comfort the anguished. They do not mean, by any means, that faster-written books are worse books. They just mean that most writers might well stop berating themselves for writing at a normal, slow pace.

I was working hard, although of course it did not seem hard enough at the time—a finished chapter every few weeks. I castigated myself daily for writing too slowly. Even when passages seemed to come easily, as though I were copying from a folio held open by smiling angels, the manuscript revealed the usual signs of struggle—bloodstains, teethmarks, gashes, and burns.

This revelation was particularly encouraging to me—how slow Annie writes. Doing so can be discouraging, but doing so still gets the work done.

You are writing a book. . . . you do not hurry and do not rest. You climb steadily, doing your job in the dark. When you reach the end, there is nothing more to climb. The sun hits you; the bright wideness surprises you; you had forgotten there was an end.

You do not hurry, you do not rest. My mantra now.

Pacing is key: Fast, slow, in-between. Doesn’t matter. Moving forward, steadily, one word after another, is all that does matter.

Pacing – II, Tending and Taming

Sometimes another kind of pacing is needed, knowing when to patiently nurse the writing, and knowing when to beat it into submission. Both are sometimes required, as Dillard will tell you.

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

This tender relationship can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you.

A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight . . . . As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room.

Pacing – III, Emotional Distance

A third kind of pacing, or maybe “spacing,” emotional distance, is also needed: The ability to regard our work from a “Goldilocks” zone: Not too close, not too distant.

[A writer] must be sufficiently excited to rouse himself to the task at hand, and not so excited he cannot sit down to it. He must have faith sufficient to impel and renew the work, yet not so much faith he fancies he is writing well when he is not.

Finding the right balance in our relationship to the writing is important when it comes to evaluating and revising our work. The failure to do so can either distort or block the writing. Another hindrance, another kind of wall that can block the writing, or distort it, is our own evaluation of the work.

There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress and its action quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.

I’ve been snagged by this before, so much so that I could write a whole blog post about this, and probably will. So I’ll reserve that for later. The thing is, when we get too close to the writing, when it thrills us, we may think it’s magnificent, and forget, as Dillard writes below, that the reader, who is not sitting at the top of that roller coaster ride with you, may find our writing not quite so thrilling as we do. Dillard warns:

The writing that you do, that so thrills you, that rocks and exhilarates you, as if you were dancing next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else. The reader’s ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can’t yet hear a thing: it will take half an hour to pick up the writing’s modulations, its ups and downs and sounds and softs.

On the other hand, in trying to distance ourselves from our own words so we can read them “objectively,” sometimes moves us so far away from our writing that we view it not as a living thing with breath and a beating heart, but as a cold-blooded stalker bent on murder might: as a thing, an object: cold and dead. Do not trust these kinds of reading, neither the cold-blooded kind, nor the thrilling roller-coaster kind. Step back, but not too far. Regard your writing kindly, and kindly look for ways to improve it, not destroy or abandon it.

Too many of us thin-skinned writers, I believe, are too eager to either kiss our darlings passionately to death, or to dispassionately murder them instead. I’ve never bought into the “murder your darlings” advice. Regard them kindly, wisely. Cut the fat, trim the ribbons, make sure she’s buttoned up nicely, and let her work her magic, if she can, upon the readers who, like me, eagerly look for and highlight “the darlings” we encounter.

Whatever you do, for the reader’s sake, don’t cut the heart out of your writing:

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?

Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer . . . will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking.

The Heart of Writing

For many of us, writers as well as readers, what we’re searching for when we write, when we read, is the heart of the beast—that bloody, bleeding, throbbing heart. The place where you know you are holding something live and tender and immensely precious is in your hands and you hold it with reverence. Because you recognize it. It’s your heart. Yours. You are holding it in your hands. You are seeing it for the first time. And it’s beautiful.

Finding it, cutting it out, laying it on paper, as the writer does, is not easy. As Dillard knows.

The line of words fingers your own heart. It invades arteries, and enters the heart on a flood of breath; it presses the moving rims of thick valves; it palpates the dark muscle strong as horses, feeling for something, it knows not what . . . . [S]ome film of feeling, some song forgotten.

[T]hese fragments are heavy with meaning. The line of words peels them back, dissects them out. Will the bared tissue burn? Do you want to expose these scenes to the light? You may locate them and leave them, or poke the spot hard till the sore bleeds on your finger, and write with that blood. If the sore spot is not fatal . . . you can use its power for many years, until the heart resorbs it.

Writing as Dying

It is not easy, digging into the heart of things. But it’s what we live for, many of us, to reach the beating heart of existence. To hold it in our hands.

Perhaps this is why Dillard urges us to:

Write as if you were dying . . . write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. What would you begin writing if you knew you should die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

Push it. Examine all things intensely and relentlessly. Probe and search each object in a piece of art. Do not leave it, do not course over it, as if it were understood, but instead follow it down until you see it in the mystery of its own specificity and strength.

Who but an artist fierce to know—not fierce to seem to know—would suppose that a live image possessed a secret? The artist is willing to give all his or her strength and life to probing with blunt instruments those same secrets no one can describe in any way but with those instruments’ faint tracks.

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.

Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.

The Aim of Writing

There’s another succinct piece of writing advice that Dillard gives, that if she said nothing else about the art of writing would suffice. She compares writing with chopping wood and tells us:

Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood, aim for the chopping block.

So what is the chopping block in this metaphor?

Call it the heart of the matter. Call it the “deepest mystery,” as Dillard does, that which lies beneath all things and upon which all things lay. But whatever we call it, when we write, we must aim past the words, past the writing itself, toward that “deeper penetration into the universe.”

What Are We Here For?

Toward the end of her book, Annie asks: “What are we here for?” I’m not sure if she is asking us that as writers, or as human beings. But her answer could be applied to either.

She replies: “Propter chorum, the monks say: for the sake of the choir.”

Our one small voice is essential to the whole.

“The Writing Life” ends with the following quote, and so too shall I end on this high, clear note:

“Purity does not lie in separation from but in deeper penetration into the universe,” Teilhard de Chardin wrote. “The world is filled, and filled with the Absolute. To see this is to be made free.”

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If you missed part one of my dialogue with Dillard, you can read it HERE.

More on Dillard’s book can be found at Brain Pickings, which includes a link to a free public library e-book.