(Note: This past weekend, my old friend insomnia showed up for a visit. This is what wandered out of my head at two o’clock in the morning on Saturday…)
I meet once a week with a group of writers to talk about what we’re working on and struggling with, read things aloud that are in progress. It’s half social club, half professional organization, and half support group. Often with a potluck thrown in for good measure. That’s right. Three halves.
Last week one of the members of the group and I had a conversation over e-mail about whether or not they should limit their writing to a single genre, based on the recommendations and opinions of some others who have heard their work.
Here’s what I had to say, more or less, in response…
Don’t listen to anybody else (not even me). Write the stories that you’re given — plays, poems, prose, whatever. I’ve seen and heard enough of what’s there to say that you’re drawing from a broader source.
So drink deep.
Your only responsibility is to yourself, to your stories. You are your only audience and what matters, ultimately, is that you love what you do.
Tell the story you’re given as well as you can. Write as though you were in love with it, the actual physical action of pulling words out of deep water. Love your characters as much as you love your family, love your story as much as you love your life.
Writing is a romance with something bigger and greater than ourselves. I’d like to believe that the nine sisters are out there somewhere, bathing in a stream and waiting to be wooed.
But the reality is that it is we who are wooed and seduced, and in deeper waters than the shallow stream running from Helicon.
Apart from alternatively channeling William Blake and Annie Dillard, I believe in the basic premise of what I wrote above. I’ve written before about the obligation of the writer to themselves as the Audience-as-One (Glenn Gould is probably lurking somewhere at the back of this opinion, perhaps).
But the discussion of the source that we draw from fascinates me. This goes well beyond the cliched “Where do you get your ideas from?”
Why is it that some years feature ten or more new books, plays and movies which all deal with certain ideas and concepts and topics? Diverse writers who, for whatever reason, were given the same (or similar) stories to tell.
Why is it that, within a month of having selected source material for a new play, I hear that a famous playwright/director is currently developing a text and performance piece based on the same source material?
If there are only nine of them, the muses are sluts.
As I said, I think there’s a deeper source. Sometimes I feel as though I can put my ear to the ground and listen to it rumble and rush below the thin surface.
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On an entirely different note, having been involved with this group for a number of months now, it’s interesting to see how easily someone’s comments/ideas/suggestions/reactions can color and direct my feelings about a work-in-progress.
Another one of the writers told me that the act of reading the first few pages of a new piece made them feel that things had gone a bit blurry around the edges. And this wasn’t because of comments from the group — we all loved it and said so. But somehow, the writer had lost their own confidence and connection to the material by sharing it with us.
I’ve got fifty or sixty handwritten pages of a novel (or a very, very overwritten short story) and I’ve been vacillating between reading it along to my group or not. I’m very much in the process of discovery, wandering along behind my characters and, like them, relatively unsure of what happens next.
I know how the story starts (I’ve written that bit) and I know how it ends. Apart from little episodes and moments in between, writing is like walking into a pale mist and trying to navigate by the shadows around you: Even the way I came becomes hazy and lost, I can’t even find “behind” anymore but I have to just keep moving until I make it out of the mist. If I make it out at all.
Which is, of course, precisely the same journey that my characters are on.
We all are, I suppose — real and imaginary alike. Which makes the meta-me wonder about creation and identity, and if there’s a fundamental difference between the artificial and the real.
And then I decide I need another cup of tea.