Holding up to the Light, Even When We Are Crawling in the Dark
The Way Creative Writing Is Influencing Our Lives
“The world — this shadow of the soul, or other me, lies wide around. Its attractions are the keys, which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with myself. I run eagerly into this resounding tumult…” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
In creative writing today, genres and subgenres and names for them keep popping up in literary and writing circles: flash fiction, drabble, 69-er, sudden nonfiction, and lyric essays, among them. It may have been Ralph Waldo Emerson who first coined the term “creative writing” in an 1837 address he made to The Phi Beta Kappa Society, entitled “The American Scholar” in which he wrote “There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.” And continued:
“The actions and events of our childhood and youth, are now matters of calmest observation. They lie like fair pictures in the air. Not so with our recent actions, — with the business which we now have in hand. On this we are quite unable to speculate. Our affections as yet circulate through it. We no more feel or know it, than we feel the feet, or the hand, or the brain of our body. The new deed is yet a part of life — remains for a time immersed in our unconscious life. In some contemplative hour, it detaches itself from the life like a ripe fruit, to become a thought of the mind. Instantly, it is raised, transfigured; the corruptible has put on incorruption. Henceforth it is an object of beauty, however base its origin and neighborhood. Observe, too, the impossibility of antedating this act. In its grub state, it cannot fly, it cannot shine, it is a dull grub. But suddenly, without observation, the selfsame thing unfurls beautiful wings, and is an angel of wisdom.
“So is there no fact, no event, in our private history, which shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by soaring from our body into the empyrean [the highest heaven or heavenly sphere in ancient and medieval cosmology usually consisting of fire or light] Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and dogs, and ferules, the love of little maids and berries, and many another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already; friend and relative profession and party, town and country, nation and world, must also soar and sing.”
We relish the fact that authors, even those who came centuries before us, had this experience, too, and reading their work illuminates our experience as we hope to illuminate the experience for others. Often authors working in the creative writing genres introduce their work with epigraphs made from the words of other authors or offer thanks to authors whose works and words inspired them. In this way, creative writing is a conversation, a very long, one that has and will go on through the ages.
Whatever genre or subgenre you call a particular piece of creative writing, what is most important is that writers write, and as they write, they discover new strategies and re-discover older ones for researching themselves and moving others
Why We Must Show Not Tell & Why We Forget to Do That
To ace high school and college course papers often meant using summarizing, abstract language, words like “accessible,” “diminutive,” and “universal.” The words summed up an attitude or a point of view. Although it was mandatory to provide examples of what the intangible words summarized, academic examples did not require that the writer build scenes from sensory information.
In creative writing, summing things up is not the object; it is rather the evocation of experience. It is by re-experiencing experience that a creative writer makes discoveries and comes to insight.
How we experienced something is communicated as felt experience when we describe it through our senses, instead of through our thinking. People are most alike in their feelings, I’ve learned, and least alike in their thinking. So when we finish a novel or short story, memoir, or poem, we leave with scenes in mind, with the feeling that we lived the situations as we would in our lives — through touch, smell, sound, sight, and taste. Therefore, we come away with feelings that can affirm or change our thinking.
So why do we often summarize instead of evoking experience? For several reasons:
· Using Latinate summarizing words is how we learned to transmit what we had learned (or what the teacher wanted us to say we had learned). We don’t feel smart if we don’t write that way.
· We are so eager to get our thoughts on the page that we do not slow down to offer sense imagery, as if what caught our eye, lodged in our ears, made us touch or smell or even taste something in the world is of no consequence to our writing or to others’ understanding.
· We think readers will be bored with the images we share, that they are too mundane or just silly, or the same as everyone’s so go without saying.
· And most importantly, we are often afraid to fully re-experience what we are writing about.
Showing means holding up to the light, even when we are crawling in the dark. Writing asks us to trust that no matter the depths and darkness of our emotions, reliving them in sensory words shaped into form on the page helps us create a vessel they can live in instead of remaining inchoate inside of us. Writing that evokes experience is a way through and then out of problems, boundarylessness, and unknowing. Author and authority have the same root. In evocative writing, we are the authors and the authority on how we experienced something. Evoking our experience, we help the reader feel their own.
“My father’s car lurched over the speedbump at 50 miles an hour whenever he was angry with us.” (Rather than father was scary when angry.)
“Decades after the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, I returned to see trees sun-bleached and lying like toothpicks, trees that fell the morning I had camped there (Rather than the powerful eruption had blown down the trees.)”
“Is there anything better than walking along to the evening song of birds as sunset nears?” (Rather than it is beautiful to walk in early evening.)
To recreate our sensory experience for readers, we must re-experience it, not just through our heads. Though summarizing words are not “bad” words, they are just not lucrative words for writers who want to have people feel what they felt rather than feel they are being told how the authors felt. A colleague of mine used to say, “You never hear a reader say, ‘You have to read this book. It changed the author’s life.’ They say, ‘You have to read this book. It changed my life.’”
I add, “When we write with images, we produce feeling in ourselves and then others, all of us becoming connected and more human.”
The Importance of Finding Your Writing’s Occasion
Although you as a writer may have been interested in your topic for a while, the speaker inside your writing must have reason to start talking in the “now” of the essay; something has to be there to prompt him or her to speech.
Once, I assigned students the task of writing a description essay about a place for which they had strong feelings. One student chose Dodger Stadium because he loved baseball. He associated many images with the topic, including the voice of Vin Scully, the game announcer he had listened to for years on TV when he watched games at home with his father.
“But where do I start?” he asked. “I have so many memories and thoughts about baseball.” As we talked, he said he had recently gone to Dodger Stadium for the first time after years of listening to the games at home. At the ballpark, he searched for a glimpse of Vin Scully and could almost make out where he was sitting. He suddenly realized, though, that he wouldn’t be able to hear Scully like his father would be at home because Scully’s voice was being broadcast over radio and TV, not over the playing field. He experienced a moment of shock when he realized that this game, the first live one he had ever attended, would not be narrated for him by Scully’s familiar voice. I realized that one occasion the speaker in his essay could write from would be that of going to Dodger Stadium for the first time and missing the voice of the adored and familiar sportscaster. Not being able to hear Scully made this game emotionally different from others for this young man.
I asked him to describe the moment when he went to Dodger Stadium and looked for Scully and saw him. What did he think at that very moment? He said he wondered about his dad, listening at home, who had turned his son onto baseball, but had never gone to the stadium himself and now refused to go.
And yet, unlike his father, the son wants to see the game live. So the occasion of the essay is going to Dodger Stadium for the first time and realizing he would not hear Scully’s familiar voice. That realization leads him to explore what it felt like going to Dodger Stadium without his father and what that meant to him. Emotionally, this sounds like an essay about having learned from one’s dad, going beyond what he has taught and then not being able to share that new experience with him. The journey to this emotional information ultimately occurred in the written essay through descriptions of the event at Dodger Stadium, comparisons to watching games at home, memories of what the student’s dad taught him about baseball and times he played baseball to impress his father. His father’s refusal to attend a live game made the student aware of his father’s support and the need to grow beyond what his father could offer.
Connecting with the energy attached to subjects we choose for writing leads to having the speakers in our writing movingly explore the emotions and concerns of our lives.
Creativity: On Keeping the Spark Alive
It too often seems inefficient and untimely to be creative when there are so many errands to run, problems to solve, people to connect with, jobs to report to. But it really doesn’t take long to be sure you stay open to creativity. Whenever you can, name one image each of your senses is taking in. Wherever you are, you see something; you hear something (or the lack of something), touch something or feel something on your skin. You probably smell and maybe taste something, too, though you might not at first realize this — the perfume of a flower or the aftershave of a passing man, dryness in your mouth or the lingering flavor of garlic. Make a practice of doing this kind of observation several times a day and you will notice that you are more and more in the presence of what is most alive in you. After you are used to spending a few moments at different times during the day being aware of what your senses are registering, try writing metaphor or simile about what you have sensed.
For instance, what is the smell of a jasmine flower like? For me it is how the crescent moon in a child’s picture book might smell if I could lie in its cradle. What is the taste of burnt toast like? I think it is the taste of one’s argument on one’s own tongue. What is the feel of clean sheets from the dryer? I think they feel like sunlight on the windowsill where the cat sleeps. It is from the combination of now and then that we make our current sensation tangible, no matter how ethereal.
If any of the quick comparisons you write inspire you to continue writing, do so when you can. But at any rate, collect these snippets somewhere — in a box, a computer file, in email to others or posted on Facebook. Read through them at times to capture again the spark of creativity you bring to the way you experience your days.
In Tarn Wilson’s memoir, Slow Farm, she remembers being in her first year of grade school, learning to write letters. She had been careful as she formed each letter but had forgotten to put spaces between words. To fix that, she encircled the letters that made up each individual word so the teacher could see that she understood where the words were.
“What do you think erasers are for?” the teacher said.
“And then the part of me that lived all the way to the edge of my skin, to the hairs on my arms, sucked in, leaving a fleshy layer between itself and the air,” Tarn writes.
Remember when you were open to the world, almost without boundaries between you and the sensations it offered? Tarn’s words make me want to “live at the edge of my skin, to the hairs on my arms” right now, to feel the world that way. By noting what my senses bring in and making sure I describe that, I begin to push aside the world of concerns and create, if only for a moment, the world of experience.
