Writing Is Listening

Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. When people really listen to each other in a quiet, fascinated attention, the creative fountain inside each of us begins to spring and cast up new thoughts and unexpected wisdom.
— Brenda Ueland quoted in Finding What You Didn't Lose by John Fox

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I think sometimes we forget that writing and reading are a form of listening. 

When we write, we listen to our inner truths and we listen to the big questions about life.  This doesn't mean think about creating "great literature."  That is the human ego and you can never live up to that standard anyway. 

Instead of listening to the human ego, I think you have to to listen to life.  I have written a great deal about how important writing is to me.  But Ueland said the great Russian writers were great because life was more important to them than literature.  This is true and something I often need to be reminded of. 

And Ueland also said, "If good ideas do not come at once, do not be troubled at all.  Wait for them.  Put down the little ideas however insignificant they are.  But do not feel, any more, guilty about idleness and solitude."  When you are in your quiet time, go to the bottom of your "self" and listen.  Out of the idleness will come the truth, which will not be  a fancy plot.  As John Gardner says, plot is just a device used to help your characters reveal themselves.

I believe Sandy, who keeps the journal "Mental Jewelry," is onto something when she says of that "somewhere" our writing must go:   "And if in journaling, could that be self?  An internal 'somewhere?'"

In writing, we most certainly must listen and speak to that internal "somewhere."

Then, after listening, we write the thing we would most like to read ourselves; in this way--and only this way--we are truly listening to the needs of our readers.

Moreover, when we read, we are listening to the soul (personality) of the writer.  We experiencing that writer's imagination clearly.  We experience the source of the words as being "an actual and living person," according to Ueland.  She also said:

"The personality behind the writing is so important.  This is what I call the Third Dimension.  On the paper there are all the neatly written words and sentences.  It may be completely objective, with 'I' not written there once.  But behind the words and sentences, there is a deep, important, moving thing--the personality of the writer.  And whatever that personality is, it will shine through the writing and make it noble or great, or touching or cold or niggardly or supercilious or whatever the writer is."

To experience that Third Dimension as we read, we listen. 

To know what to write, we listen.

We cannot speak with authority until we listen.

All artists are great listeners!

No Other Way

 

...if I bring my awareness that people will read my writing to the forefront of my consciousness, I paralyze myself.  My perfectionism and my inner critical voice have a field day.  I want to be read, but sometimes I can't imagine who would read me or why what I have to say is worthy of reading.

I thought I would take some the comments from the previous entry and comment on them.  The comment above is from Cynthia, who keeps a beautiful journal called Sorting the Pieces.  I'm sure many of us share Cynthia's dilemma.  I certainly have felt this way.

Everyone's journey is different; everyone finds the right path in a different place, a different way.  Yet Cynthia has described her dilemma so well that I think I may be able to say something that will be of help.

After I finished my MFA (Master in Fine Arts degree), I didn't write for five years because I had lost all my confidence.  Every time I started to write, I would only hear my inner dragon telling me that I was no good, that I couldn't write, that no one would be interested in anything I had to say. 

One of the things that kept writing at the forefront of my goals was that I had invested so much time and effort into it.  I had moved from NC to Ohio just to study writing, and my family had made many sacrifices so I could do so.  So I was trapped between my feelings of inadequacy and my need to show my family that their faith in me had not been in vain. 

One day--how well I remember it--I found I was so sickened by my inability to write that I did a serious reassessment of my goals and myself.  I took out a notebook and told myself that I was going to start a novel, right there, right then. 

What I discovered  was this:  The only way to slay the dragon of doubt is to write.  In the days, weeks, months, and years to come, I found that I still struggled daily with feelings of inadequacy, but the more I wrote, the more often I found nuggets of truth in what I was saying.  I began focusing on the little bubbles of truth that rose to the surface of the sea of words.

Brenda Ueland says that "to have things [your art] alive and interesting it must be personal, it must come from the 'I':  what I know and feel.  From that is the only great and interesting thing.  That is the only truth you  know, that nobody else does."

So I began to focus on that.  As I wrote, I would ask myself, What, as a result of my struggles, my studies, my life,  do I know that others don't know?  What can I show them that might help them out of their own labyrinth of doubt?

I can see how questions like this might put pressure on a writer.  But what must happen, I think, is the writer has to separate what Ueland calls the human ego from the divine ego.  The human ego needs to be "the best" or "famous" or to write "the great American novel."  It needs to be thought of as "important," or "scholarly," or "talented."  The human ego needs praise.  It needs to be constantly fed, and enough is never enough; hence, all those stories and paintings of dragons sitting on huge piles of treasure and guarding virgins, neither of which he can ever use!

The human ego is beset by the dragon, because the dragon tells us we can never be or do these things.

So the dragon is slayed if you set aside the human ego and work from the divine ego--that part of you that sees and knows what your "truth" is.

The human ego leads you to write in what Ueland called a "bogus" way, in a way that is a "put on, " a "bore."  The human ego is a static state, says Ueland; whereas when you work from the divine ego you never rest, you are always "working and striving."  She says the divine ego is "modest and open to what is new and better."  She says it is "humble all the time before what is greater than itself."

Now, being humble doesn't mean being meek.  As Ueland says, when you write, you can't hold back--you must write like a lion.  You write your truth without censoring it.  When you do that, people will be interested in what you read.  Will everyone like what you write?  No.  You won't please everybody. 

John Gardner tells us in On Moral Fiction that one writes for people like oneself.  So if you tell your truth, others who are like you will love what you write!

But you can't just up and decide one day this is how it's going to be, and start writing, and everything will be fine.  It takes hours and days and sometimes years for some people to break through and find their "truth."  Their "truth" is hidden under so many layers of repressed thoughts, fears, denials, and all the rest that it can be hard to find. 

The only way to break through is to write.  There is no other way.

 

It Must Go Somewhere

I want to try to bring together the thoughts of two writers I admire and draw from constantly for my strength, John Gardner and Brenda Ueland.  On the surface of things, they seem quite different.  Gardner was somewhat of a renegade scholar who lived hard and died before he was 50.  Ueland was knighted by the king of Norway, cared little for the hard facts of scholars (and she detested critics, whereas Gardner thought some of them to be useful, creative agents) and lived to be over 90 years old.  What holds them together, in my mind, is their dedication to art and the importance both placed upon it.  On closer inspection, one finds that Ueland was rather a renegade for her times:  she was part of the Greenwich Village crowd of bohemians.  It would have been something to see the two of them sitting at the same table talking about art. 

Ueland's book, If You Want To Write, established her reputation in the world of writers.  Gardner's On Moral Fiction, gave Gardner some fame also, although perhaps not in the way he would have wanted.  Critics (the selfsame that Ueland probably wouldn't have liked) had a field day with Gardner's fiction, holding it up to the high standards he set for writers in Moral Fiction and often finding it wanting.  At the time just prior to his death, he found himself hounded by scholars, critics, and old ghosts of memory.  Ueland, on the other hand, lived her life by a simple maxim:  she determined she would never do anything she didn't want to do.

In the belief that art came from some "divine" place and that true art is moral art, they both agreed.

There are so many quotes in both books I would like to call attention to in this entry, but I'm going to restrict myself to just a very few.

Ueland wrote:  "This recognition that art, music, literature is a sharing, that a live, alternating current is passing swiftly between teller and listener, that a listener (even though imaginary or transcendent) is absolutely essential in the process, cleared up many things that puzzled me."

And Gardner wrote that "art's validity can only be tested by an imaginative act on the reader's part."  He also wrote that "True art is a conduit between body and soul, between feeling unabstracted and abstraction unfelt."  In other words, Gardner felt that art came out of the same place as dreams--and this is why it is original and true.  He said that "out of the artist's imagination, as out of nature's inexhaustible well, pours one thing after another.  The artist composes, writes, or paints just as he dreams, seizing whatever swims close to his net.  This, not the world seen directly, is his raw material." 

Gardner felt that when ideas were dreamed and then expressed in art, the audience entered into the artist's dream--the unconscious is that current that Ueland was talking about, the one that connects the artist to the audience.

Ueland wrote of one of the best stories I have ever seen explaining the relationship between the artist and the audience.  She wrote:

Once I was playing the piano and a musician, overhearing it, said to me:  "It isn't going anywhere.  You must always play to someone--it may be to the river, or God, or to someone who is dead, or to someone in the room, but it must go somewhere."

Joy of Going Home

  Okay, I can be a sport.  Marigolds asked folks if they would list books they have in piles here and there and everywhere.  At first, it seemed like too big of a job to list the books in even one of my piles, but then I looked next to my computer and realized, with horror and fascination, that Charles Bukowski and Eve Ensler were nestled together, and so I figured that was something the world needs to know.  In this pile are books I have recently skimmed through in order to give advice to writers, would-be and is-be, to give myself strength to write something I needed to write, and books that wake up my imagination....  

Franz Kafka, Max Brod

Magical Realist Fiction (Anthology)

Baptism of Desire, Louise Erdrich

Rites and Symbols of Initiation, Mircea Eliade

Albert Schweitzer:  An Anthology

Robert Kennedy and His Times, Arthur M. Schlesinger, jr.

 There is No Road, Antonio MacHado

Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl

Whale Rider, Witi Ihimaera

Novel & Short Story Writers Market, 2005

Remembrance of Things Past, Volume I,  Marcel Proust

Men On The Moon:  Collected Short Stories, Simon Ortiz

Summer On the Lakes in 1843, Margaret Fuller

Munching On Existence (literary anthology)

Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire

The Last Night of the Earth Poems, Charles Bukowski

The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler

The following excerpt from Proust is marvelous.  What Proust says at the end of the paragraph:  that is the way I feel about my books, that they give me the imminent joy "of going home."

I would ask myself what time it could be; I could hear the whistling of trains, which, now nearer and now farther off, punctuating the distance like the note of a bird in a forest, showed me in perspective the deserted countryside through which a traveller is hurrying towards the nearby station; and the path he is taking will be engraved in his memory by the excitement induced by strange surroundings, by unaccustomed activities, by the conversation he has had and the farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp, still echoing in his ears amid the silence of the night, by the imminent joy of going home.

In A Strange, Exotic Way

 

Painting by Chagall

Vicky (My Incentive) recently wrote in one of her entries:

"We are losing our ability to be who we are and relax into ourselves"

I really believe this statement represents the biggest threat to our creative lives.

Anyone who has known me for any time at all knows how much I love Brenda Ueland's book If You Want To Write.  In her book she talks about the need for moodling, her word for "dreamy idleness."

She wrote  that we need the dreamy idleness "that children have, an idleness when you walk alone for a long, long time, or take a long, dreamy time at dressing, or lie in bed at night and thoughts come and go, or dig in a garden, or drive a car for many hours alone, or play the piano, or sew, or paint alone; or an idleness...where you sit with pencil and paper or before a typewriter quietly putting down what you happen to be thinking, that is creative idleness."

She also said, "With all my heart I tell you and reassure you:  at such times you are being slowly filled and re-charged with warm imagination, with wonderful, living thoughts."

I definitely relate to what Vicky wrote about how hectic our lives are.  We get all used up and have no time to recharge ourselves And since inspiration, as Ueland points out, often comes not as a flash of lightening but slowly, over a great span of time,  too often we feel completely spent.  What a shame. 

Ueland also wrote that in order to create art, we have to be "in" the experience of creating it.  Only, then are we moved.  And then our audience will be moved, because we are.  She wrote that the "passionate and wonderful questions" of the world become our questions and we then are able to speak with "all the nobility and violence and wonderful sweetness of Beethoven."

Isn't it an amazing word choice that she used:  "Violence"?

Isn't there something liberating about that?  In a strange, exotic way?

So Indelibly There.

Painting by Munch:  one of my favorite artists.  I was obsessed by his work in art school.

Vicky (My Incentive) recently did an entry on Donne's "Death Be Not Proud," a poem I have always loved.  Death is a subject many of us do not like to contemplate; it's a subject that's omnipresent in my own work because I keep trying to understand the human experience in light of our mortality.  One aspect that intrigues me is the idea of the womb/tomb--the fact that life can't exists without death.  My last entry was dedicated to the mothers; how awesome it is to think that when we give birth, we are giving birth to a person who will one day die.  We are giving birth to death.  Our own own wombs have written of for centuries as symbolic of the earth-womb, which will one day take us in.  The Writers Almanac poem below is a wonderful one of awakening--the speaker awakening to the awesome knowledge of death.

Poem: "Calf Born in Snow" by Patricia Gray, from Rupture. © Red Hen Press, L.A. Reprinted with permission.

Calf Born in Snow

I can still hear the loud moan
in my grandfather's kitchen,
where the woodstove was open
for the failing fire's warmth, and
on the oven door, wrapped
in an old quilt, lay the new Charolais calf-
a twin that survived its snowy birth
that morning, though its brother died-
both of them the color of muddy snow,
this one too weak to stand.

We tried to feed him his mother's milk,
but he seemed to forget he was eating
and slept, so that by ten that night, when
he raised his head suddenly, making
a loud maa-a-a-a sound, I could scarcely
believe it. "He's getting better!"
Dad put his hand on my shoulder.
"Quiet. He's dying," was all he said-
old knowledge, deep as the Blue Mountains.
Still, I'd witnessed that final, wonderful
rallying, as if every ounce of life pulled
together to raise the calf's head,
to leave his sound so indelibly there.

I love how the father says, "Quiet..."  I remember how my own grandmather told me to be quiet after she had learned of John Kennedy's assassination.  I was only 7 and didn't really understand what was happening, but her reaction made me pull into myself,  into deep thought--I knew something awesome had happened within her and to the country.  She was a quiet woman and didn't often express herself.  So when she did, I really paid attention.

I will never forget that day; and my memory hinges on that moment--her shushing me.  "Be quiet," she said, "The President's been shot.  The President is dead."

To the Mothers: Vicky, Robin, Cynthia, Beth

A poem from Writers Almanac, for the mothers I've come to know in this weird, wild community!  And the mother I've known a long time, Beth, who introduced me to Writers Almanac.  This poem makes me want to write a poem like it for each of my children.

Poem: "My Son" by Susan Cataldo, from drenched: selected poems of Susan Cataldo 1979-1999. © Telephone Books. Reprinted with permission.

My Son

I love this messy room you live in
The plants you care for
The nickels & dimes & pennies you pile
Up on your desk like no-good money
The Amazing Spiderman poster on the wall

Tapes paint comic books biographies
Of all you favorite presidents
A picture of the Lincoln Memorial
On the wall facing your bed
An eleven year old dusty red TV

Daphne turning into a tree
Two autographed photographs of
Leonard Nimoy. Dracula.
A cross made of branches
Held together by a rubber band

You love daisies
& keep them alive until
Every bud has blossomed
You are interested in
What everyone is doing

You think of new things for them
To do you make them heroes
In your fantastic head
You look strong & handsome
But you don't see that

You want to defend helpless people
You want to know why there aren't
Really super heroes
You ask the same questions
I ask myself & can't answer

You don't understand jokes
You think they hurt
You are constantly dodging
Bullets & dreaming up new
Ways to defend yourself

You are stubborn to a fault
A fortress of mind & chest
Eyes never more mirrored
The soul than your
You deny love

You want to be "different"
You don't want to feel
How much you love this life

Back to Ordinary Things

Some thoughts gleaned from Writers Almanac:

1.  Robert Coover:  "The narrative impulse is always with us; we couldn't imagine ourselves through a day without it."

2.  Though he'd previously been a pacifist, Dietrich Bonhoeffer decided to join a plot to assassinate Hitler. He said, "Will the church merely gather up those whom the wheel has crushed or will it prevent the wheel from crushing them?" The assassination plot was a failure, and Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943.

 Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the woman to whom he was engaged, Maria von Wedemeyer discussed ordinary things in their letters. She asked him if he liked dogs. He asked her if she liked skiing. They made plans for their wedding, and picked which flowers they might use at the ceremony. She told him that she had drawn a chalk line on the floor around her bed the size of his prison cell, so she could imagine she was with him.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, "Love is not something in its own right, it is what people are and have become."

He was executed a few months later. The correspondence between him and Maria were collected in the book Love Letters From Cell 92 (1994).

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I've been thinking a lot lately about the importance of ordinary things.  Recently, while commenting on the Elizabeth Bishop poem, "The Fish," a student mentioned that the poet's fish was no ordinary fish--otherwise there would be no need to write a poem about it.  However, it is only though the imagination of the author that the fish becomes something out of the ordinary.

I find it touching and also exciting to read that Bonhoeffer and his fiance discussed such ordinary things when they were separated from each other, when he was facing execution.

Truly, we cannot afford to think of anything as "ordinary" in this life; otherwise we are missing out on life.  It seems almost cliche to say that.  But I believe the poems and stories that have most excited me are the ones that transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.  Those authors make me feel awake.