Reflective Writing
The best literature revolves around a central core of an idea or emotion—what I like to call the heartbeat. The heartbeat pumps life into every artery and vein of a story. It unifies. It doesn’t prevent the inclusion of other themes and motifs, but it does rise to prominence. This heartbeat almost never reveals itself during a first draft. Our work during revision involves looking for hints of this heartbeat and drawing them forward. One helpful technique for doing this is to write with the voice of a distanced narrator. Rather than immersing yourself in the character who is your younger self (the former you, who experienced the events of your story), step back and reflect. What do you make of these events today? Why are you sharing them? What’s at stake for you? What might be at stake for your reader? Whether or not these reflections get included in…
Holy Memory
Five hours into our week-long family vacation, Gwyn said, “I want to go home!” This wasn’t a new refrain. When she’s excessively tired or hungry, she sometimes says it when we’re at home, bustling around the kitchen or getting ready for bed. Emily and I have speculated that “home” is a pre-birth memory for Gwyn, and today received confirmation. “Let’s play I’m home in Nanny’s womb,” Gwyn said to Emily this morning as she crawled under the covers. In short order she was born once more. Nanny is Gwyn’s biological mother. That Gwyn remembers her womb so viscerally, so fondly, feels miraculous. At firs Annie didn’t want a baby inside her although she came to care for it responsibly and with love beyond her years. Perhaps, though, it wasn’t Annie so much as God who made a home for Gwyn before this one, wrapping her in warm water and sending…
What’s At Stake?
Perhaps the most important question for every creative writer to ask—and definitely the hardest question to answer—is “What’s at stake for me?” For writing to work well, the writer must care deeply. On the surface this question seems simplistic; our care is instinctive, compelling, and unspoken. In practice, the journey through revision is an excavation of the author’s stake, digging below external reasons (“I want to help others; I want to be published”), below the outer story (“I want to explore this memory, character, or idea”), to some subconscious, undercurrent of longing. Our stake is always found in our emotional relationship to the subject matter. Without some connection to our content, we might convey the content to a reader but we’ve no reason to explore it. And passionate exploration is what makes writing great. What’s in question? What are you risking? What of your heart have you invested? A writer’s…
Housefly, Go Home
Arnold Lobol writes a cautionary tale about a housefly who one day wakes up to see all the dirt in his house. He diligently begins sweeping. When he pushes the pile over the threshold, he notices the dirt on his front path, and then on the road. He’s a good way down the road when Grasshopper comes along and inquires what he’s doing. Poor Housefly; he’s taken on cleaning up the world. I am that housefly. Not that I’m a compulsive cleaner—far from it. But I can’t look around me without seeing what needs to be done. A moment spent admiring the (glorious) flower garden with Gwyn turns into a to-do list: weeding, transplanting, pruning, seeding. Cleaning the kitchen after dinner, I’m acutely aware of all I’m not cleaning: the grease on the kettle, the spills in the refrigerator. Clearing out my email, I berate myself for not writing to…
From Rilke, With Love
Whenever I get swept up in the competitive, audience-seeking dimension of the writing life, I turn to Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet as an antidote. Rilke returns me to my essential, life-giving reasons for writing. What goes on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love; you must somehow keep working at it and not lose too much time and too much courage in clarifying your attitude toward people. Art-making both awakens and fulfills basic spiritual needs, Rilke says, and that this role is ultimately sufficient. A work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity. Out of the cacophony of writing advice out there, Rilke stands alone in emphasizing love as the central creative force in our work. We must love our doubt, love our solitude, love the questions, love our subject, and make love our subject. Even suffering in the creative process is worthy of love: Why…
Bath-Time Resurrection
If you’ve happened to walk past our house on a Saturday around seven p.m., chances are good you considered calling child protection. Judging from Gwyn’s screams, that’s our weekly time for torture. In fact we’re just washing her hair—once a week is frequent enough, thank you. There have been times when Gwyn’s anxiety about hair-washing was so extreme, she began worrying about the next shampoo while her hair was still wet. We tried washing around swimming goggles. We asked Gwyn’s birth mom to share how much she hated hair-washing as a child. Once we called an older neighbor kid to come hold her hand, hoping peer support might help. We talked with a therapist about toddler anxiety. Shortly before Easter, when Gwyn was playing with a watering can in the bathtub and began pouring water over her head, I raised my eyebrows but kept my mouth wisely shut. “Mama, I’m…
Are you writing?
During a moment of discouragement this morning—others writers have better focus than me, more time to read great literature, no three-year-old pulling love and attention away from the page—I flashed back to college, to what I now realize is a seminal moment in my development as a writer. The world looked bleak (Was it my miserable relationship with my boyfriend? The overwhelming stress of senior year? The overcooked green beans in the cafeteria?); I complained about everying in great detail to my friend Heather, a brilliant mathematician. She finally interrupted me. “Elizabeth, are you writing?” No, I wasn’t. I knew immediately Heather saw an equation I hadn’t: Elizabeth minus writing equals misery. Solitude, a pen and paper were key to my mental health. From that moment forth writing has been an essential activity, saving me thousands in therapy bills. (Thank you, Heather.) Not that writing solves all my problems, but…
Sufficiency
When you nurture and nourish what you do have and begin to make a difference with it, it expands before your very eyes. In other words, what you appreciate appreciates. This is true prosperity. –Lynne Twist In an attempt to bring my financial life in line with my beliefs and values, I’ve been reading The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist. Twist posits that the mentality of scarcity is a modern scourge affecting rich and poor around the world; when we believe we don’t have enough and act from that place, we damage our souls, but when we recognize the wealth of our resources, be they internal, relational, or financial, and act from a place of sufficiency, our generosity and health ripples out into the broader world. Early in her book Twist tossed out a side comment: Our scarcity-mentality around time is just as damaging as that around money. Her…
Triage
I’m a great proponent of the triage method of revising: Take care of the big problems first and gradually work your way down to the details of language. This is a great policy—in the abstract. If there’s such a thing as a time-saver, prioritizing is it. And generally writers DO pay more attention to word choice, sentence structure, rhythm and sound the closer they get to publication. But in reality writers, to varying degrees, can’t help but pay attention to language from the start. On one extreme are writers who must perfect each sentence before continuing to the next. While this method works for some, I wouldn’t recommend it as it poses far too many opportunities for a new writer to get stuck. Most of us grow attached to sentences we’ve polished and this attachment interferes with our ability to remain flexible and open-minded. It’s hard to fundamentally restructure an…
Resurrection Socks
A month ago on a long drive to Madison Emily taught me to darn socks. Basically you sew along the circumference of the hole, warp it like a loom and then weave. Darning thread is comprised of four strands so you don’t have to be precise about moving in and out. It’s surprisingly, ridiculously, easy. Ever since, I’ve been (dare I admit it?) ecstatic. Emily and I are reluctant to throw away quality goods (anyone want ten Styrofoam medical coolers?), so my darning abilities now mean that the pile of Smart Wool socks with holes accumulating in our mending basket will finally vanish. I’m suddenly rich in socks. I’ve achieved a new and satisfying level of self-sufficiency. By recovering a small skill that’s been forgotten for a few generations, every time I get dressed I can thumb my nose at disposable consumerism. What could be better? As I revel in…