Tag: inspiration

Reading for Writers: “The Laugh of the Medusa”

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Birth Write:

The birth of the author, the reader, and the text in Hélène Cixous’s “The Laugh of the Medusa”

Part manifesto, part poetry, part call to action, part theoretical treatise, part psychoanalysis, Hélène Cixous’s “The Laugh of the Medusa” is a philosophical essay that defies genre and convention – and rightly so, because this is exactly what Cixous is writing about.  Around the same time that Roland Barthes is theorizing about the death of the author, Cixous is trumpeting the birth of the author.  Is this backwards and old-fashioned of her?  Were these two theories so at odds as to be opposites?  No. While Barthes is approaching the subject as an either/or binary distinction in which the interpretation and agency of the reader necessitates the fall and death of the author, Cixous sees the same rise of the reader, though it is not at the expense of the author because for her their differances are not in opposition.  For Cixous, it is possible for the reader and the writer to be born within a text.

Cixous’s work is difficult to summarize.  It is a call to arms, or if you will, a call to pens for women, who she defines as in an “inevitable struggle against conventional man” (1943).  This definition of woman includes not only those with female bodies, but all those who are engaged in this struggle against the traditional hegemony. Throughout the work, she uses images of the female body and motherhood to explicate a new kind of writing, one which is not bound by the hierarchical structures that are imposed on language.  Instead, she advocates for writing with and through the body.  In writing in this way, those whose voices and bodies have been repressed by the dominant establishment may come into their own and begin to realize their selfhood.  “Write your self. Your body must be heard” (1946), Cixous urges her readers.  She uses the biological functions of the female body to pinpoint that which is dictated by the laws of nature and that which is governed by culture.  Biologically, woman can think, write and speak.  It is the phallocentric culture which will not allow her to do these things.

But “The Laugh of the Medusa” is more than a feminist manifesto.  It also goes into great depth about the theory of language and writing.  She calls for the birth of the author through the text: “Write! and your self-seeking text will know itself better than flesh and blood” (1956).  Cixous seeks to encourage those whose voices have been repressed to take back their words and their bodies through writing, allowing them to come fully into being. Unlike the rigid, structured language of Saussure and Lacan, the language of woman is not beholden to the rules of the signifier and the signified.  The language of woman is more fluid and immediate.  The distinctions of the symbolic order, the imaginary order, and the Real do not hold in this ecriture: “We are ourselves sea, sand, coral, seaweed, beaches, tides, swimmers, children waves… More or less wavily sea, earth, sky… We know how to speak them all” (1956) Cixous’s vision of ecriture feminine is a writing that surpasses the traditional binary opposition of I and Not-I, but instead leaves room for connection with the multitudes of Other.  Feminine writing is “a process of different subjects knowing one another and beginning one another anew… a multiple and inexhaustible course with millions of encounters and transformations of the same into the other and the in-between” (1948).  It is not a language based on the separation of parts and the creation of boundaries but instead tries to encompass the whole. Woman “has never ceased to hear the fore-language. She lets the other language speak… Her language does not contain, it carries; it does not hold back, it makes possible.” (1955)

Cixous seems to divert from many of her contemporaries by upholding the role of the author in a text. However, this is because ecriture feminine is not founded on the same assumptions as traditional writing.  Roland Barthes writes “Death of the Author” in critique of the writer as one who seeks to control and own his text.  Unlike Barthes, Cixous does not assume that the author is one who has had access to the modes of writing, speaking, and dissemination.  Cixous’s writer has a newfound voice and is creating her self through her writing. She does not fit the mold of the privileged “conventional man” and therefore must give wings to her own ways of meaning-making.  She has been silenced by the traditional conventions of writing and language as a form of self-expression.  Indeed, she has not had the opportunity for self at all. This is why Cixous sees writing as an empowering act for the writer.  The writers Cixous is writing to and of have agency precisely because they haven’t had it before.  These woman writers are engaging in revolutionary acts through writing.  Cixous writes, “We are at the beginning of a new history, or rather of a process of becoming in which several histories intersect with one another” (1955).  This writer must give birth to her writing because it is the only way that this multiplicity of voices and histories can come into being.  Cixous maintains that writing is an act of empowerment for the author.  She calls on woman to “Write! and your self-seeking text will know itself better than flesh and blood” (1955).  Here the author and the text come into being together.  This is not as far from Barthes’ argument as it would at first seem.  He writes, “the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text” (1324).  Cixous’s writer takes the same relationship with her text, coming into being as she is writing it.

For Barthes, the writer is in opposition to the reader and therefore must die so that the reader and text may be free.  He maintains that the author tries to dominate and restrict readings of his work and therefore must be separated from it.  However, the distinction between Barthes’ author and Cixous’s woman as writer is that woman is giving. The woman as writer is not trying to restrain or constrict the writing the way that Barthes imagines the traditional writing to do. Instead of being the traditional “father” of the work, who knows and restricts all its interpretations and intentions, Cixous’s writers are different: “They observe, they approach, they try to see the other woman, the child, the lover – not to strengthen their own narcissism or verify the solidity or weakness of the master, but to make love better, to invent” (1958).  Cixous envisions a writer who is not stingy with the text or its meaning in relation to the reader, but instead is moved to give.  Of course, the writer is present in the text, but because Cixous and woman writers are not working within a system of binary oppositions in which they see writer and not-writer, they are free to allow the writer to exist alongside the reader and the text.  When the world is not divided into I and Other, all these things can come to fruition together.  The act of writing not only gives voice to the writer, but also to the readers whose voices have also been stifled.  In this way, the author gives birth not only to herself but also to the text and the reader.

There are possible problems with Cixous’s text.  For one, its portrayal of woman in some ways is very one-dimensional, nearly mythological.  She speaks of the experience of women as if all feminine experiences are the same.  However, upon closer examination, Cixous mitigates these concerns at the outset of the essay.  She writes that there is “no general woman, no one typical woman” (1943).  She writes of the individual and multiple variations of woman’s experience.

When she speaks of woman in terms of body, she seems to be upholding traditional gender stereotypes of a binary, biological gender system.  However, in looking more closely, we can see that Cixous is aware of this when she defines woman as in conflict with “conventional man” and states that there is an “infinite richness of individual constitutions” which make up woman’s experience.  She asserts that “each body distributes in its own special way, without model or norm, the nonfinite and changing totality of its desires” (1957).  These passages are inclusive, calling all of the individuals who do not conform to society’s idea of “conventional man” to speak out.

One may see this style of writing and this essay as nonlogical, proof that women cannot write and theorize.  However, Cixous must write in this way in order to break free of the constraints of traditional writing.  There are inconsistencies and places where the essay are unclear, but these only serve to give Cixous’s writer an example, a possible way to break out of the conventions of language so that she might give herself voice.

The implications of this essay for literary theory are manifold.  For one, it is an encouragement for female writers.  It opens the door for a variety of voices, ways of making meaning, and interpretations.  It calls on us, as readers, writers, and citizens, to abandon the old system of binary oppositions, to understand that there are more useful interpretations of the world than A and not-A.  It allows for more room to play with language, embracing nontraditional grammatical forms.  It also calls on us as readers and writers to give.  Instead of holding on to our interpretations and view points as the only right way, we can become Cixous’s woman writer and act with “a love that rejoices in the exchange and that multiplies” (1959).

This essay is also calling on the literary establishment to understand the cultural and societal implications of writing.  Cixous writes that we “confuse the biological with the cultural” (1942), that we are upholding as natural a hierarchy which is completely constructed by society.  Cixous’s use of the body here represents, in part, a call to understand what is “natural” and what is imposed by tradition.  Her use of the body in this essay is on one hand to be taken literally, but functions even better as a metaphor.  Throughout the essay, Cixous uses metaphor and figurative language to make her points and add weight to her arguments.  She is direct about doing this: “The mother, too, is a metaphor” (1948). The body represents the self and the text of the person: “Text: my body” (1948).  She is not only talking about the biological flesh of the writer, but the writer’s very self.  It is only in this context, separate from the control of the imaginary and symbolic orders, that those whose voices have been marginalized can begin to write themselves.  Writing is a historical act.  It creates history and we, as writers and readers, must be cognizant of the history we are creating.  Cixous is asking us if we want to live in a world controlled by the master-slave dialectic, where the author must die so that the reader and the text may live.  Perhaps instead we can live in a world where the author, the reader, and the text may all be born through the act of writing.

Works Cited[1]

Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” The Norton Anthology of Literary Theory and

Criticism, Second Edition. Ed. Leitch, Vincent B. New York: W.W. Norton and

 Company, 2010. 1938-1959. Print.

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” The Norton Anthology of Literary Theory and

Criticism, Second Edition. Ed. Leitch, Vincent B. New York: W.W. Norton and

 Company, 2010. 1322-1326. Print.

[1] I understand that it is traditional MLA Format to alphabetize the works cited page by author’s last name, however, I feel that “Laugh of the Medusa” is so much more important to this critique that I have chosen to put it first.  Also, it’s my tiny nod to breaking out of the constraints of the literary establishment.

Inspiration: Writing that Escapes the Page

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The Materiality of Meaning: the Format of Words on the Page

            It has long been the realm of poets to think about line breaks and format on the page.  There is a myth that for prose, the words should speak for themselves.  We have the idea that prose writers who manipulate how they put their words on the page somehow undermine the meaning of the words, as if calling attention to the fact that they are on a page takes away their power.  When poets think about the way they format their work on the page, they are being artful, purposeful, but when prose writers do it, it is a gimmick, a trick.  It’s as if readers of prose are meant to mind meld directly with the words.  We imagine that the way the prose is experienced does not matter.  This is not the case.  Whether we are reading words in straight lines on a page, in text boxes, with line breaks, wrapped around images, on an ebook reader or online, our physical experience of the words matter.  It is not true that we feel the words as completely separate from the physical medium through which they are presented to us.  Because of this, we, as writers, must be more cognizant of the ways in which we are offering our narratives.

            We are living in a time when the possible modes for storytelling are more numerous than ever before.  It used to be that recitation, handwritten manuscripts, and books off a printing press were the only media available to writers to disseminate their works.  The forms that these works took followed the physical limitations of these media.  Works meant to be recited were written with meter and rhyme, so as to be as easy as possible to remember.  Books from a printing press used uniform fonts and lines to conform to the constraints of the machine.  Straying from this form was expensive and difficult.  Even adding images or color consumed near impossible time and money.

            With the advent of the digital age, however, the possibilities for publishing and storytelling have exploded.  This explosion means there is also a myriad of ways that a reader can experience a text.  Audio books, Prezis, digital storytelling, hypertexts, and ebooks all offer new possibilities for narratives to be presented.  Because of these new technologies, we can see the fallacy of the direct experience of the word.  A book put in each of these formats takes on new meaning and affords the reader altered ways to encounter the text, even as the words stay the same.   It becomes apparent, then, that reading is an experience that is dictated, at least in part, by the physical choices that authors make concerning format and medium.  In this way, we can see the importance of the material medium that a writer chooses.  The writer can now be a painter, a sculptor, and a poet all in the same work.

            Even if our work remains in traditional ink and paper form, the options in terms of choices a writer can enact are plentiful.  We are no longer beholden to the constraints of traditional printing presses, but can now digitally format our words to be printed in a diverse array of forms.  Writers can choose varying fonts and font sizes.  We can include images or sculpt the ways our words look on the page.   We can choose the way that different ideas get juxtaposed or separated.  We can change color, font or style midsentence, or even midword.  Rather than being automatically a gimmick, these devices can be used to add a more dimension and new layers of meaning to texts.

            Take, for example, Kamau Brathwaite’s essay “Trench Town Rock.”  In his introduction, to the essay, John D’Agata writes:

 I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a ‘performative essay,’ but I know that there are texts that are more profound because of the arguments they try to demonstrate rather than merely state … that simultaneously enact the concepts they represent… Brathwaite therefore emphasizes the experience of reading his texts, encouraging us to find alternative paths into their meanings: visually, aurally, authentically participatory (D’Agata, 599).

 Brathwaite uses an array of devices in his essay to make the reading more experiential.  He uses images, changes the sizes and fonts of his texts, uses varying margins, italics, and bold type.  It is clear that he was purposeful in his choices.  The some sections of the essay are scattered and disjointed, while others read like traditional poems, news reports, or transcripts. The format of each of these sections visibly shows the differences. The effects of these choices on the reader are palpable.   Instead of reading an account of the deaths, the reader can feel the chaotic, disjointed feeling that being in Jamaica at the time must have been.  The reader’s sense of the order of things is disrupted, leaving her with the feeling of lawlessness and turmoil that mirrored Brathwaite’s Jamaica. In this way, the reader experiences the feelings more directly than words following a traditional format would have allowed.

            The ways that a reader encounters words on a page will change the experience of those words.  Different fonts can be used to show different voices.  The words telling the story of a journey can show the journey in addition to telling it, following the route along the page.  Two versions of similar stories can be juxtaposed to show the differences in perspectives.  Different colors or fonts could be used to give the reader different feelings.  Text that is askew on the page can be used to literally show a skewed point of view.   Rather than being interesting effects and ways to play with words or experiment, current technologies make it possible for these new layers of meaning to be the norm.

            It is indeed true that form follows function.  Thus far, writing has taken a very specific form, following the function of the technologies available to us.  But is it true that linear, left-to-right, uniform font on sequential pages should be the default form in which narratives are experienced?  In a postmodern world, where texts are becoming ever more disjointed, we must ask the question if it serves the purposes of the individual text to be written in a linear manner.  It may be true that this form is useful and logical for narratives that follow a traditional linear structure.  However, for works that do not follow this narrative structure, the form of linear font on sequential pages does not follow the function.  As the technology to shape the experience of the reader becomes more and more accessible, writers have more of an obligation to take these possibilities into account when making decisions about their work.  It should not be assumed that all, or even most works are best suited for traditional formats.  Not all narratives or experiences or essays follow traditional, linear structures, and their formats should adapt to the experience.  Now that we are released from the technological constraints of traditional printing, writers need to let go of the constraints in format that came along with that.

              It is not the case, of course, that all writing from here on out should be in non-traditional formats.  Rather, writers should make conscious decisions about how their work looks on the page and take into consideration the effects of those decisions on the reader. We should let go of the myth of the spiritual, non physical power of our words and understand that they are experienced through the choices we make about format and medium.  More and more, the decisions about such things fall into the hands of writers.  Rather than buying into the idea that the power and meaning of our words lies only in putting one letter after another, we should allow ourselves to utilize the full potential available to us by making thoughtful, conscious decisions not only about the words we chose, but also how we chose to send those words out into the world.

Work Cited

Brathwaite, Kamau. “Trench Town Rock.” The Lost Origins of the Essay. Ed. John D’Agata. St.Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2009. Print.

Using Poetry in Creative Nonfiction: Eva Saulitis’ into great silence

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“Alaska. As a college student, a dream for me of blue-white tundra, wolves, caribou, moose, indigenous hunters: wilderness. A dream of emptiness, silence” (3).  With this first line in her first chapter of Into Great Silence: A Memoir of Discovery and Loss among Vanishing Orcas, Eva Saulitis presents her reader with an idealized, poetic view of the place she is about to bring us.  With these images and sentence fragments, she paints us a lyrical picture of the place we will come to know and study through her.  Though she writes about scientific research and the imminent extinction of a group of transient killer whales, Saulitis uses poetry and poetic language throughout her account to allow her reader to feel her connection to Prince William Sound and to experience that same level of connection and loss.

Throughout into great silence, Saulitis weaves poetry and lyrical language throughout the text.  She begins her book with an epigraph of poetry by Dylan Thomas.  She also begins her prologue with lines of poetry by W.S. Merwin.  With these two epigraphs, Saulitis sets the stage for a book about science which the reader knows will not be a typical research book.  Though into great silence recounts her days as a field biologist studying whales and includes much of her research, she chooses to begin her book and her prologue with poetry.  This shows her reader that she will be narrating this story not only through the lens of a scientist, but also through the lens of a poet.

Saulitis continues to use epigraphs to insert poetry into her narrative throughout the book.  In particular, she uses the epigraphs to frame points of especially poignant emotion. For example, she begins Chapter 18, “Beast and Beauty,” with two lines of poetry by Cyrus Cassells.  This is a small cue to the reader that this chapter will be one of the most evocative in the book.  In this chapter, Eva slowly realizes the true effects of the Valdez oil spill.  As she says, “Every zooming skiff, every blackened beach, every harassment of whales triggered ire, until it seemed the oil was inside me” (92).  She goes on to compare the scene to a “war zone” (92).  This realization that some of the worst fears of the researchers are becoming reality is one of the most emotional moments in the book and Saulitis uses Cassells’ poetry to highlight that.

Saulitis uses a poetic epigraph again to begin the last section of the book, titled, like the book itself, “Into Great Silence.”  On page 179, Saulitis begins Part 4 of her book with a poetic quote from Li-Young Lee.  This section of the book is by far the most emotional.  Saulitis begins to leave her day-to-day accounts of research behind and allows herself to ruminate on the emotions and repercussions connected to the loss that she is witnessing and the grief that she is feeling.  She becomes more introspective and more speculative, trading in scientific research for meditations on death, loss, and ultimately hope.

Saulitis also chooses to begin her second to last chapter with poetry by Peggy Shumaker.  In this chapter, Chapter 47, Saulitis begins to write in present tense.  This is a chapter in which she uses some of the most introspective, reflective language.  It is in this chapter that she revisits her battle with cancer and relates it back to the story of the whales.  She reflects on the process of writing the book.  At the very end of the chapter we see Saulitis as the author who began the book  meeting herself as present author directly and telling us how her views have changed.  Not only does she begin the chapter with poetry, she rewrites the poetry as the title of the chapter.  The poem that she uses ends with the line, “In a language lost to us/god is singing” (239).  She chooses to name this chapter “In a Language Lost to Us, Eyak Is Singing.”  These poetic devices set her reader up for a very poignant ending.

Saulitis does not only use the poetry of others in her account of her whale research and the loss of the pod.  She also brings her own poetry into the retelling.  This happens most often in Saulitis’ use of letters to her parents and her own journal entries from the time.  These things give the reader a penetrating look into the narrator’s relationship with the world around her.  Her letters are often strikingly evocative.  Saulitis makes a real effort to pull those around her into her world.  For example, in her letter to her parents, she writes, “The hemlocks, gray-barked and bearded with lichen, remind me of ancient men in Tai Chi poses.  Gnarled, wind-scoured, half alive, they seem to hold each cry, each gasp of the Sound under oil, under boats, under trash, under storms, like memory given form.  When I lean my body against one, I’m dizzy from their knowledge” (80).  This kind of lyrical language does not just describe the place to the reader, but makes the reader also feel the connection and emotion attached to this place as if we are there with Saulitis and feeling the same sense of connection and attachment.

The emotion and passion with which she writes to her parents also comes through in her journal entries.  Amid a myriad of observations about wildlife, one journal entry muses, “If I sat here all day, what would fill these pages?  Out of nowhere, a helicopter.  Clouds sink and rise, wind rises and stills, the air becomes moister and cooler.  It’s impossible to predict what will happen next” (135).  This kind of imagery and introspection is incredibly effective.  It is clear in both her journal and in many of her correspondences that she is of that place.  There’s an immediacy about those passages that brings the reader into the experience.  In these instances, the reader can feel the place and Saulitis’ connection to it in a very powerful way.  Additionally, the speculation that she engages in here allows the reader to feel the possibility that the place holds.

This kind of lyrical language is juxtaposed with more straightforward accounts of her scientific studies.  She gives not only detached scientific explanations, but also an emotional sense of loss.  This juxtaposition comes to bear on both the factual portions and the poetic portions of Saulitis’ writing.  The lyrical portions are given a sense of authority when they are seen next to the research of a scientist who has been studying the place and the whales for years.  The scientific portions are made much more poignant and the reader connects with them much more when they are placed alongside poetic accounts.  Saulitis gives us not only facts on a page, but these facts are given meaning and weight through her use of poetry and poetic language.  Rather than undermining the validity of the scientific research that Saulitis did, it intensifies it.  The poetry and the science both become more authentic and more true.

Saulitis becomes most lyrical and introspective at the very end of her book.  She begins her last chapter writing:

Fine mist falling, fog down to the decks of boats in the harbor. On the breakwater, shags and herons cluster, hunch-shouldered against gusts.  I see them through the spaces in his ribs.  I stare down into the cradle of his rib cage, basket of bones, hoop of barrel staves, empty frame… I want to crawl inside, huddle at his skull’s base, a dark, secret place, to listen (241).

The strength of this writing is in the way it plays with images and lyricism.  We can feel the sense of longing and loss inherent in the way Saulitis talks about the space between ribs and wanting to crawl inside.  But we can also feel the sense of hope and connection in the resiliency of the hunch-shouldered herons and listening.  This echoes the feelings and imagery that she uses at the very end of the book in which she writes, “That what’s broken can be mended. That what’s shattered can be made whole.  That what’s damaged can be repaired. That the end of the story is ‘and then –‘  And then there was Eyak. Always and forever. Amen” (245).  In this, she closes into great silence much in the same way she began it, through the lens of a poet, someone who felt on a very special level a connection to a group of whales and a place and wants to bring that connection to the reader.

As writers of nonfiction, we can use these devices in our own writing as well.  Like Saulitis, we can include poetic epigraphs to heighten the poignancy of our nonfiction stories.  We can also use poetic language, such as metaphors, to share not only the factual details of our experiences but also the emotional facets.  We can juxtapose the lyrical, emotional language of our areas of expertise or personal experience to give our readers a fuller, more true picture of the events.  The use of poetic language in nonfiction can serve to enhance the experiences we are sharing with our readers.  Evocative, lyrical language can help take stories off the page and make them more visceral and relatable for our readers.

 

*This post is part of a series on the craft of writing called Reading for Writers.  This series examines a variety of authors to ascertain the choices they’ve made in their writing and the effects of those choices so that we as writers can make better decisions in our own writing. May contain affiliate links.

Prompt: Writing Roulette: Plot Generators to Spice up Your Literary Life

Jaclyn17 Comments

 

 

 

Need a little spice and adventure in your writing life?  Did you make a New Year’s Resolution to write more and now your motivation is waning?  Did you join the My 500 Words Challenge, but can’t figure out what to write about?  Maybe you and the muse have just gotten into a rut and need a little more passion in your relationship.

Perhaps it’s time to leave things up to chance, play a little writing roulette and see where it takes you.  There is a huge array of plot generators out there, which will give you anything from a random sentence to hypothetical scenarios, to symbolism, to stories complete with weather and villains.  Here are some fun tools that might help get you through a little bit of writer’s block:

The Big Huge Thesaurus Story Plot Generator: 5.1 million possible story plots.  Just click the link for six possibilities.  Not inspired by those?  Just hit refresh until you find one that gets your fire going.  This one actually started me on a novel.

Plot Generator UK: This one takes a little bit more of your own input into consideration.  Choose a genre.  The options are Romance, Crime, Teen Vampire, Mystery, and Song Lyrics.  Or (my personal favorite) you can recreate a lost Bronte Sisters novel, complete with a well-to-do hero and a poor, lower class hero and a weather description. For this one, you can choose the names, jobs, descriptions, weapons, and hometowns of your characters, or the generator will suggest them for you.

Writing Exercises UK: This generator gives you characters, a setting, a situation, and a theme and you can put them together to create your plot.  If you don’t like one of the elements you’ve been given, just hit the button again to get a new one.  One of the exciting things about this site is that it also has other writing exercises, like a random first line, random title, subject or random words to use.  Very, very useful if you just need a little kickstart.

Seventh Sanctum Story Generator:  Another one where you can choose the genre, this generator gives more in-depth scenarios in Fantasy, Science Fiction, Modern, or Free-for-All categories.  These plots are interesting because of the details that they contain.  This website also has a What-If-inator and a Symbolitron, which might be my favorite find in all of the plot creators!

Hopefully this will be enough to get your writing juices flowing.  If any of these work out for you, please share the results with us!

 

Creative Commons love to Adam Lerner for the awesome photo!

Bursting out of You or Showing Up?: How to Romance the Muse

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There’s so much to Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life that I feel like I should be reading it more slowly. Today I read 30% of it in one sitting and I could barely contain all the thoughts that it brought up in me.  I sat in the airport and both laughed and cried in the short time that I read.  Other passengers stared.   The ideal way to read it would be to read just one page or one section a day, and ruminate on and write about that one bit.  It’s so dense with wisdom, with feeling.  It’s the kind of book needs to be chewed, tossed on the tongue and savored.  It needs to be digested and felt.

The part I found most encouraging in the sections that I read was Annie’s descriptions of her own writing processes.  I see quotes like Bukowski’s “If it doesn’t come bursting out of you, don’t do it,” and sometimes feel that I am on the wrong track.  There are days when I sit in front of the computer screen and need to walk around the room, have a coffee, make myself a sandwich, have another coffee, and still it’s like pulling teeth to get anything out.  Some days I know that all that I wrote that day will be useless in the final draft.  In terms of word count for the work I’m wrestling with, I’ve done nothing all day.  I think about Bukowski’s quote and think about how it’s not bursting out of me, it’s not even coming out when I’m trying.  Maybe the muse isn’t smiling on me. Maybe I’m not chosen.  Maybe I’m just a fraud thinking I can write when really I can’t.

But Dillard experiences the same frustration.  The same feeling that it’s coming too slowly – or not at all.  She also makes her two cups of coffee and “fools around all day” when she’s trying to write.  The honesty and authenticity with which Dillard writes about her writing process and her struggle brings tears to my eyes, inspires me, and soothes my soul.

She writes, “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.”

Writing isn’t easy.  It’s a process, a life.  For most of my writing life, I followed Bukowski’s advice.  I only wrote when I felt like I was going to explode if I didn’t.  I waited, passively, for Calliope to smile upon me, to fill my chest and my mind until my hands couldn’t write fast enough.  In the last ten years, all this waiting got me maybe fifty pages of writing that I was proud of.  Sure, when I was bursting, my writing was good.  But I made a promise to myself that I would no longer wait for my genius to show up, but I would work at it.  And I’ve written the same amount of work that I’m happy with in the past six months as I had in the ten years prior.

Yeah, sometimes it’s wrestling.  And sometimes nothing comes out.  Sometimes what comes out is terrible.  But showing up means that Calliope visits more often.  It means that I have time set aside in my day to work, to think about writing. It’s not as easy as passively waiting for the muse, but the more often I show up, the more often it comes bursting out of me.

 

*This post is part of a series on the craft of writing called Reading for Writers.  This series examines a variety of authors to ascertain the choices they’ve made in their writing and the effects of those choices so that we as writers can make better decisions in our own writing. May contain affiliate links.

Is Writing Selfish?: What I learned from two years of blogging

Jaclyn47 Comments

Two years ago, I started a blog.  I was scared.  I had spent the better part of my adult life running away from writing.  In an attempt to cover up this fear, I had told myself that writing was just selfish.  Why did I think that what I had to say needed to be heard by other people?  What did I have to share that the world needed to hear?  I’m no expert in anything.  And really, isn’t writing really just narcissistic and self-centered?

But there was always this little voice inside me, this little part of me that felt unfulfilled when I wasn’t writing.  I travelled the world, teaching and volunteering in developing countries, devoted myself to helping people learn and grow.  I had the most amazing adventures and there was still something that was missing.

“If money were no object and you didn’t care about what people thought, what would you do?” my friend Ram asked me.  I didn’t stop to think about it.  “Write.”

But it was still too scary, too intimidating.  Everyone knows that being a writer is a tough job.  There’s no job security.  What if the muse doesn’t come anymore and you can’t buy groceries? What are you going to do about a retirement plan?  Worse than the practical issues were the emotional repercussions.  What if I bared my soul and no one wanted to read it?  What if I sent my writing to thousands of publishers and got thousands of rejections?  Am I strong enough to keep even through all of that?

So I did what seemed least risky at the time.  I started a blog.

I posted my first blog post steeling myself for negative comments or zero views.  Maybe only my mom would read it.  Perhaps that was all I could hope for, but hey, at least I would be writing.

That’s not what happened.

What did happen is that I learned the most important lesson that I’ve ever learned about writing.  I got positive comments, empathy from other WordPress writers and readers. People from all over the world read and followed my blog. I grew a writing community.

Can writing be selfish?  Sure, but it doesn’t have to be.

This is the thing about writing: writing has an enormous possibility for connecting with others.  Sharing your writing means sharing bits of yourself, putting yourself out into the world and trusting that other people will connect with you.  Every “like,” every comment is a connection.  Every description of scenery is a connection to that place.  Every word about an emotion is a connection with that feeling.

To me, connection, however fleeting, is what life is all about.  Each smile, each moment in the present, each shared experience with another person: these are the things that last once we’re gone.  These are the things that people will remember about us, and the things that we will remember on our deathbeds.  Writing is an extension of that.  Writing allows us to have these moments of connection with more people than we would be able to otherwise: people who are far away, people we haven’t met yet, people who were right there with us for the experiences we write about, and the people who couldn’t be.

So, thank you, writing community, for teaching me something that I really needed to learn.  I have no excuses anymore and nothing to be scared of.  Each time I write, I am fulfilling my highest potential – I am connecting, with myself and with  you.

A big thank you to Matti Vinni from flickr for the creative commons photo of  Essi Korva’s sculpture, Connection.

My 500 Words Challenge

Jaclyn12 Comments

It’s amazing sometimes how the universe seems to be sending very distinct messages, as if it’s conspiring for goodness.  Pronoia.  After writing a post about forming writing habits and a post about writing word by word, my reading of Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life presents me with this food for thought, which she refers to as “comfort for friends discouraged by their writing pace:”

“It takes years to write a book, between two and ten years. Less is so rare as to be statistically insignificant… Thomas Mann was a prodigy of production. Working full time, he wrote a page a day. That is 365 pages a year… At a page a day, he was one of the most prolific writers who ever lived.  Flaubert wrote steadily…For twenty-five years he finished a big book every five to seven years.  If a full-time writer averages a book every five years, that makes seventy-three usable pages a year, or a usable fifth of a page a day… 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.” (13-14)

Then an email from Jeff Goins over at Goinswrites.com shows up in my inbox with an invitation to participate in a 31 day 500 word challenge.  Jeff’s advice echoes Annie’s:

“Here’s what I know about writing: It happens in small bites. Step by step. One little chunk at a time. You don’t write a whole book. You write sentences that turn into paragraphs. And paragraphs turn into sections that, then, turn into chapters.  In other words, it all begins with words. You don’t control the outcome, just the process.”

So, clearly, the cosmos are trying to tell me something and I figure that I don’t really have much choice other than to join the challenge.  I won’t be holding myself too strongly to the word count, but I’ll be working really hard to make sure my butt is in my writing seat for at least an hour a day, as per my New Year’s System.  And I’ll be using the My 500 Word Challenge as extra motivation.  Nearly 700 other writers have signed up so far, so it should be some excellent community-building.  I’ll be tracking progress here.   Feel free to join us!

My 500 Words Widget

January 1: 1087

January 2: 675

January 3: 940

January 4: 545

January 5: 629

January 6: 1201

January 7: 524

January 8: 0

January 9: 1152

January 10: 1398

January 11: 540

January 12: 513

January 13: 583

January 14: 503

January 15: 1159

January 16: 278

January 17: 0

January 18: 1097

January 19: 506

January 20: 537

January 21: 1302

January 22: 2173

January 23: 0

January 24: 0

January 25: 634

Reading for Writers: The Writing Life by Annie Dillard

Jaclyn23 Comments

Chapter 1.1

In her first chapter of The Writing Life, Annie Dillard begins to explain the complexities of writing.  She hones in on the process.  She starts with the importance of the word as a tool, a hammer, a pick, that gets to the root of the gold you are searching, plumbing depths and getting you closer to truth.  But she also asserts the need to know that many of your words will need to be scrapped, thrown away for the good of a piece.

This first chapter is a perfect example of sparseness that works.  Dillard moves back and forth between musing about writing and metaphors for writing.  For example, she tells of the inch worm that is constantly searching climbing a blade, “in constant panic” (7).  When putting forth her metaphors, she does not fumble with explication or transitions. Instead she boldly throws the metaphor out juxtaposed with her thoughts about writing and allows her reader to draw their own conclusions about the meaning and purpose of the metaphor.  This book would be a quick and easy read; this first chapter is a mere 21 pages.  But Dillard trusts that her reader will stop and parse the nuance behind her words.  This makes for an enjoyable, engaging experience for the reader and an excellent example of how to write in a way that engrosses the reader.

I loved her discussion of why to write word by word:  “The reason to perfect a piece of prose as it progresses – to secure each sentence before building on it – is that original writing fashions a form.  It unrolls out into nothingness. It grows cell to cell, bole to bough to twig to leaf; any careful word may suggest a route, may begin a strand of metaphor or event out of which much, or all, will develop.” (15)

Though she also discusses the merits of writing like a steam train, without thinking and just going, going, going, this quote really resonated with me and with the way that I write.  I love a little thesaurus.com and Wikipedia.org while I am writing.  Sometimes I feel the need to find just the perfect word and when I do, it leads me on a new idea or metaphor that runs away into the sky in beautiful swirls of words.  This happens also with Wikipedia. Often I have a question or want to know more about some small detail I am including and once I get into Wikipedia, I’m off on new paths that I never imagined but are wonderfully complex and inspire the piece I am working on to go further than I ever thought.

My creative nonfiction professor balked when I told him how long it took me to do our weekly three-page exercises.  I was often spending hours on an assignment that was intended to take only one or two. “You’ve got to learn to write faster. There’s going to be demand for your work and you’re going to have to fill it.”  I tried to explain that I wasn’t being overly meticulous or editing as I wrote, necessarily, but that my process for creativity and association took a lot of time and consideration to come about.

I love the non-linear, associative, over-the-top writing of someone like Tom Robbins (some of you might know that he’s one of my favie faves), who said in an interview with the New York Times, “The reason I write so slowly is because I try never to leave a sentence until it’s as perfect as I can make it,  so there isn’t a word in any of my books that hasn’t been gone over 40 times.” I think this kind of consideration and thorough thought about each word is exactly the reason that Robbins’ sentences are so jam-packed with meaning and imagery and purpose and humor.  They leave me both feeling full and always wanting more.  In the same interview Robbins says that he often starts with just a title, and you can easily imagine how you can go from just a title to a whole whirlwind of a novel if you building it word by word in this way.

The quote above from Dillard helped me to remember why I write this way.  After a failed (well, 17,165 words, which was excellent for me, but not the 50,000 word target) attempt at NaNoWriMo and a push from my nonfiction prof, I was doubting my process and this little aside in The Writing Life reminded me that my process is my own. It does get results and I do love what comes out of it.  So, I can let go a bit on this insistence on word count and instead remember that what I need to put in is time.  Sit so the muse will show up.  And when she does, I’ll be there, listening slowly and conscientiously, even if she gives me only 100 words a day.

 

*This post is part of a series on the craft of writing called Reading for Writers.  This series examines a variety of authors to ascertain the choices they’ve made in their writing and the effects of those choices so that we as writers can make better decisions in our own writing. May contain affiliate links.

 

 

Books for Writers: The Writing Life by Annie Dillard Writing Tips from Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life How to Be a Writer: Lessons from The Writing Life by Annie Dillard Check out the Lightning Droplets Blog for writing inspiration from Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life. A book every writer should read! Learn how to develop a writing practice and get useful advice for writers about how to cultivate a writing life. This writing inspiration can be used in all kinds of creative writing: poetry, novel writing, fiction writing, and memoir writing. #mustread #writing #nonfiction #books #memoir #tbr #amwriting #tipsforwriters #inspiration #writinglife #creativity
Books for Writers: The Writing Life by Annie Dillard Writing Tips from Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life How to Be a Writer: Lessons from The Writing Life by Annie Dillard Check out the Lightning Droplets Blog for writing inspiration from Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life. A book every writer should read! Learn how to develop a writing practice and get useful advice for writers about how to cultivate a writing life. This writing inspiration can be used in all kinds of creative writing: poetry, novel writing, fiction writing, and memoir writing. #mustread #writing #nonfiction #books #memoir #tbr #amwriting #tipsforwriters #inspiration #writinglife #creativity
Books for Writers: The Writing Life by Annie Dillard Writing Tips from Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life How to Be a Writer: Lessons from The Writing Life by Annie Dillard Check out the Lightning Droplets Blog for writing inspiration from Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life. A book every writer should read! Learn how to develop a writing practice and get useful advice for writers about how to cultivate a writing life. This writing inspiration can be used in all kinds of creative writing: poetry, novel writing, fiction writing, and memoir writing. #mustread #writing #nonfiction #books #memoir #tbr #amwriting #tipsforwriters #inspiration #writinglife #creativity

2014 New Year’s Resolutions: Process over Goals

Jaclyn15 Comments

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” – Annie Dillard

As I begin this new year, I can see that I’ve reached many of the goals I set for 2013.  I made some big goals.  I started an MFA Program in Writing, so now writing has become the focus of my life.  I’m studying writing, teaching writing, and most importantly writing writing.  I’ve gotten some good publishing under my belt and even won some awards and nominations.  This is, of course, extremely exciting.

As I look into 2014, I realize that what I really need this year has less to do with goals and more to do with systems.  My writing goal long-term is actually not to write a book or make money, but to build a writing life.  For me, this has more to do with habits than with milestones.

This morning I read an article on m.entrepenuer.com that suggested we trade goals in for systems.  It’s a pretty compelling argument.  The author asserts that goals suggest that we are not good enough in the moment, whereas systems give us something we can work at any moment and we will be successful just by virtue of working on them.  He goes on to propose that systems are more motivating in the long term because they release you from the emphasis on results and instead concentrate on the process.  Lastly, goals can often include aspects of things that we can’t actually control, whereas systems are always within our control.  For example, it might not be within our control to set the number of pounds we might lose this year, but it is within our control to set a number of hours each week to exercise.  Whether we lose 5 pounds or 15, we can feel accomplished by having gone through with the routines we’ve set.  Not only that, but this works much better in the long term, because we won’t stop once we’ve reached our goal, but instead we will have developed daily habits that support us in going even further.

The most helpful part of this article, for me, comes at the end.  He writes, “None of this is to say that goals are useless.  However, I’ve found that goals are good for planning your progress and systems are good for actually making progress.”  In some ways, this is what I’ve been doing all along.  When I do a Submission Bonanza!, my goal is obviously to be published.  But also, the decisions that editors make are out of my control.  What is within my control is that I am sending my work out there, on a regular basis.  Also, in doing the Submission Bonanza, I accomplished things that I hadn’t even considered in my goals.  Not only was I published, but I was published 4 times, highlighted as a featured author,  and nominated for Best of the Net.  I wouldn’t have set these things as goals, but the process that I followed lead to these things.

I, for one, have always been skeptical of routines.  How can you grow if you’re doing the same thing every day?  Are you living a thoughtful, authentic life if you’re just following a script?  But Annie Dillard’s above quote is making me change my mind.  How do I want to spend my life?  I’d better make sure that that’s how I’m spending my days.  That’s how I’m going to be living conscientiously.  Not by sitting mindlessly in front of the computer or the TV when I feel like it, but by being thoughtful about how I’m spending my days.  It seems to me that setting routines is an excellent way to be conscious of this.  Instead of being distrustful of habits, I’m coming to see them as cultivation, the planting and nurturing of seeds that need time and attention to grow.

So for me, 2014 will be about creating habits.  My resolutions will be processes, systems instead of goals.  So here they are:

My 2014 Resolutions

  1. Writing Treadmill: 1 hour per day on writing, also keep track, so that at the end of the week, month, or year I can look back and see how much I’ve accomplished.
  2. Submitting Treadmill: 1 submission per day (eep!).  This is basically a year-long Submission Bonanza!, but think of the results!  In terms of process, I’ll spend one hour a day working toward this.  This can include editing pieces, researching magazines or actually submitting.
  3. Mental, Emotional, and Physical Health: 1 hour per day on this, as well.  Yoga, meditation, running, hiking, whatever!  This semester (can I blame the busyness and my first winter?) I’ve lost sight of the importance of these things and I need to make sure that I’m devoting time to keeping myself sane.  In the long run, it’s more important than finishing that last chapter of reading for a class and I need to remember that.

Finally, I’ll leave you with a little more from Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life:

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.”

Creative Commons love to Nikos on flickr for the inspiring picture.

Flecks of Inspiration to Ring in the New Year

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These are a few things that I’ve found inspiring over the years, some ideas that have helped me cook up some creativity, punched procrastination in the face, and take a battering ram to writer’s block.  I hope you find them as helpful as I do.

Creativity as Play: John Cleese on what it takes to be creative

Look Up More: The shared experience of absurdity and how it comes to play on storytelling

Cat Exploded? Make Good Art: Neil Gaiman on the creative process

A Vessel for Genius: Elizabeth Gilbert on how to talk to your muse

 

Creative Commons love to Jon Delorey for the photo!