May have blown my readership with last month’s post in terms of length and, uh, girth. So, this post promises to be synoptic. But I do appreciate the feedback readers provide, face to face, on the phone, through emails and texts, etc., thank you. The elegance and precision of a two-word response most impressive…well played.
As I write this, a woolly mist smudges the St Lawrence to the sky, shifting Wolf Island’s shore and every other geographic anchor to the imagination. The chipping sound of chickadees loop the staghorn sumac, garland the cedar hedges; beloved swallow song put to winter’s bed.
Grateful too, for having vaulted the winter solstice and tumbling this season of epiphanies.
Reflecting this past year’s writings, I’m struck (and so deeply touched) seeing my words spark and stir creative pursuits for others. I’ve delighted reading my own words reflected in others’ poetry and prose, my own words transformed into paintings and artworks, my own words recited back to me in conversations. It has been (is) the most beautiful tribute to my continuing creative work. Also, a sober reminder of the responsibility to package the raw, wonder-filled gifts of the world in the best way I can, because love travels, as it should, pirouetting and somersaulting across the universe. It has been a slow learning but I’m gaining confidence in my writing and beginning to trust the whisperings of my heart, that it reaches you.
Here’s to a holiday season, the coming new year, brimming with joy, delight, forgiveness…and the timeless unspooling of love – Cin cin!
Shall we start with a blowjob story? Sex always gets everyone’s attention. Pleasure: a cardinal motivation. But let’s delay that gratification, and, fair warning, this post won’t end with the orgasmic gasp you’re longing for (don’t we all?). Let’s leverage the promise though; foreplay is fun, and entertainment is, after all, the goal here. Well, that and writing my way to understanding my writing process—the steps I’m taking—to improve my writing…at least that’s why I’m here. Why are you here?
[And, if your immediate reaction to that question is insolence (!) (moral indignity?), that’s not my intention—please see an earlier post regarding my tendency toward blunt written communications lacking the (necessary?) subtle tonalities of delivery—here’s the signpost (pink neon!): I ask this question with a spirit of curiosity, a shy and genuine curiosity, and heaps of gratitude that you’re here reading my words (heaps! really, your continued attention is pulling me through a bunch of turmoil, so, thank you). And yes, you can put shy and blowjob together in a sentence or a paragraph, it’s an alluring combination, but I digress.]
Another pleasure of mine, and, I realize, essential to my writing process, is to read across multiple and diverse texts in one sitting, toying to find a connection or thread of meaning between them. For fun. It helps me relax. Weirdly. I do it at work and at home and can credit (some) creative breakthroughs to this fetish – this blog post, for instance. I had a vague desire to write about metaphor this month but needed more to, you know, fluff it up.
Recently, a friend texted “Don’t cull [your] state of mind; express it in all its confusion. Put the tornado in the typewriter…” So, my favourite peeps, this post is a flavour taster, leading you through my convoluted thinking that landed on sharing a very private short story publicly.
a web site on “warm data”, broader contextual information as opposed to the simple numbers of (disconnected) statistical information
Jung’s 1925 lecture #1 about developing his theory of the unconscious in which he inadvertently exposes himself as a real dick with his disparaging comments about the poor teen (his patient!) who fell in love with him. Calm down Jungian fans, I’m among you, I even practice his active imagination approach. But still, I feel for that poor girl, unrequited love, the scent of bitter almonds and all that…that lecture may have been the inspiration for David Cronenberg’s film A Dangerous Method
the introduction in The Situation and the Story, a book by Vivian Gornick offering a stunning distillation of the necessity of crafting a persona to relay a story about a situation… reminds me about an earlier post and a poke in my ribs to revive a larger writing project I’ve been avoiding (why have I been avoiding it? resisting it? why?)
my daily horoscope app: “Falling in love is good for the universe” and “Forgiving someone doesn’t make you a doormat” and “You are the most elaborate and sweet dessert” (can you tell I’m swinging by a thread here?)
Following this interstitial pathway (is this a bad habit? does this signal a lack of discipline? is this the chaotic consequence of consuming too many fickle fast-food-like-social media-servings? I’m not sure…) over the next few days, I read:
an excerpt from Descartes’ Dream by Phillip J. Davis and Reuben Hirsh relaying how Descartes imagined being presented with a melon (!) – a metaphor which moved him closer to developing Cartesian (mind-body) dualism somehow…what a muck of things that has led us through…(see “warm data” above)
A poem, Love After Love by Derek Walcott (tears, tears, tears…I need to get back to that larger writing project)
A book review of ‘The Poetry of Derek Walcott’ by Adam Kirsch where he discusses Walcott’s associative freedom in his application of metaphor (I know, I know, I’m trying your patience now. Stay with me. We’ll circle back to my earlier promise, and I’ll throw in a ghost to boot! Keep reading)
An epigraph credited to Michael Ventura in Randall Brown’s Pocket Guide to Flash Fiction that I’ll quote from shortly, but noted the reference was incorrectly cited as “The Talent in the Room” when it should be “The Talent of the Room”…perhaps a trifle, but in this context changing “of” to “in” twists the foundational communication of Ventura’s essay…
And then, wrangling myself to the task of writing a monthly blog post, I reread some earlier notes and quotes I’d taken down about metaphor and can’t help but insert these beautiful descriptions from Alicia Ostriker’s A Meditation on Metaphor in By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry edited by Molly McQuade, “The sharp, honeyed burning point of course is that the pleasure we take in metaphor is a pleasure of consent, an agreement that the distance between two things is cancellable because of their likeness, whereby each illuminates some inner truth belonging to the other.” And “The implication of every metaphor is that the world is a multidimensional web of connections between animate and inanimate, larger and smaller, past and present, which await discovery.”
And I got to thinking, again, about my continued resistance to revisiting earlier drafts of writing. I’m pained to admit my fear here must be something deeper—far deeper—than simply failing to “write well”. Instead, it has to do with facing what those drafts, written partly through stream of consciousness, partly through dream, partly through half sleep, exhaustion, desperation, and yes, sometimes elation, might reveal about myself, through metaphor, that I’m afraid to know or discover.
And that’s when Ventura’s essay really pierced me, articulating my anxieties with pinpoint accuracy:
“Crazy as a writer would define it: too unbalanced to work. If you can still write, then how crazy can you be?
Plenty crazy, is the answer. The room can become a hole. Your talent of the room, your ability to be there with all your soul, can overwhelm you…
The room, you see, is a dangerous place. Not in itself, but because you’re dangerous. The psyche is dangerous. Because working with words is not like working with color or sound or stone or movement. Color and sound and stone and movement are all around us, they are natural elements, they’ve always been [in] the universe, and those who work with them are servants of these timeless materials. But words are pure creations of the human psyche. Every single word is full of secrets, full of associations. Every word leads to another and another and another, down and down, through passages of dark and light. Every single word leads, in this way, to the same destination: your soul. Which is, in part, the soul of everyone. Every word has the capacity to start that journey. And once you’re on it, there is no knowing what will happen.
Locking yourself up with such things, letting them stir, using these pure psychic creations as raw material, and deciding, each time, how much or little you’re going to participate in your own act of creation, just what you’ll stake, what are the odds, just how far are you going to go – that’s called being a writer. And you do it alone in a room.”
Which rounds us (finally!) to the promised short story, a true one, lightly edited from its original 2020 draft created in a workshop with Leigh Hopkins responding to her prompt to write a 1000-word sexual scene that merges with a death scene. It’s my first, and, to date, only sex scene I’ve written (I think…will have to blow my hard drive searching for what’s beyond memory). No title. A short commentary will follow (gawd this post is too long, with apologies).
~
R had a reputation for the biggest cock in school. That’s what the boys called it with a cocktail of admiration and jealousy. They teased him in locker rooms, school halls, the cafeteria. He took it in stride, comfortable in his skin, his abilities. He captained the football team, the soccer team and hockey. He was good at track and math. I’d noticed his smile three years earlier and vowed to capture and kiss his mouth.
On a school night, the time of year when the dark descends velvet and cool and early, we lay in his bedroom in the dark with the door closed. His parents were asleep down the hall. We were sixteen.
His penis was large. Very large. Though, at the time, I had nothing to compare it with. His penis was my first penis. I still dream of it today, occasionally, though, not as much as I’d like to. It wasn’t so much its length that was remarkable, but its girth, wide like the branch of a tree. That night I locked my lips around it and slid up and down its length slowly, the smooth hot hardness of it against my lips, brushing my molars. I thought of how a snake might easily unclick the hinges of its jaw to accommodate. My own jaw could do no such thing and the cramp of holding my mouth to receive started in. His hips squirmed beneath me as I changed position, running my tongue up from the base to the tip, the spongey tip that squished so soft against my lips. He moaned and caressed my hair. He was always gentle, patient. He worried about hurting me, but I craved the feeling of him entering me. The insides of me ached and yearned.
I tore a little every time we made love. It stung; a silver, piercing point of pain mixed with the pleasure of being filled. The sensation rippled from between my legs and a satisfaction, a feeling of being whole and complete, warmed my body, my soul.
The doctor suggested, after handing me blister packs of freebie pills, he could cauterize my perineum with liquid nitrogen. At sixteen, I asked whether scar tissue might not interfere with childbirth, you know, in the future. The doctor looked confused. Confused enough for me to say, no thank you, not today. I love that girl at sixteen. Sometimes I wonder where she went.
In R’s bedroom my lips and tongue explored the length and width of his penis, my fingers caressed his scrotum. I pulled the moans out of him, every moment adding to my own desire, the slippery ache between my thighs. Every moment made me feel in control. The feeling moved into me of just how powerful I could be. How I calmed this athletic boy to complete submission beneath me. How I’d done it with the flick of my tongue, my wet lips, my heat. The sensation of power made the hairs on the back of my neck rise. The power coursed through me, palpable. I sat up. We faced each other about a foot apart, and I smiled, the power shining out of me, luminous in the dark.
Suddenly, I knew I was scaring him. And it felt good. I liked scaring him. His fear gave me power. He moved his hand to swat the air between our faces saying, Stop! Stop that! Loud and frightened. Then, as if a switch flipped off, the power left me. I felt cold and a deep and sudden knowing moved electric through my body, a fear unlike any other quickened my heart and lifted goosebumps along my limbs. I knew with such certainty I needed to stop R from telling me what he had just felt—worse, what he had just seen. A knot of premonition hardened at the back of my throat: if he kept speaking, I’d see what he’d seen. I reached across the shadowed space between us and mashed my palm against his lips, but he said, Your smile. Your smile, stop smiling.
And then it flipped and glared at me, hovering between us. I’ll call it an apparition… a face comprised of light and dark. I never think of it as a ghost. Only a face…no body attached…a face of shadows…radiating a terrifying expression. The depressions where its eyes should have been so dark they were hollow. It smiled horribly with a mouth full of teeth, so many pointed teeth, lips curled to convey what I can only describe as sinister.
It played with us, whatever it was, having fun. A fear I hadn’t known possible filled me and I squeezed my eyes tight against it. I couldn’t speak. As I write this now, the air is light in my head and my ears feel blocked, pressured. I’m trembling over thirty years later.
Since, I’ve believed humans exist with other planes or dimensions right round us. That it’s possible evil exists and waits for the ready and willing. That the dark side is there waiting, beguiling. I’m not a religious person; this has nothing to do with all that.
R scrambled to turn on the light. Then we woke his mother. The story pales in the retelling. But I believe to this day if I ever see that face again, the fear will take me. I’ll die. I avoid shadowy twilight spaces. I walk cautiously each day knowing the choice is there.
For a long time, I felt terribly guilty and responsible for creating such a monster, whatever it was. For a long time, I believed I had made it with my power and blowjob proficiency.
I don’t believe that now.
Now, I think whatever that was, a spirit? An alien? It doesn’t matter. I believe it passed through me and played my emotions like a kitten with a tangle of string.
~
So, it’s not just my metaphors and it’s not just my words I’m frightened of; it’s stretching the skin of reality till I’m marooned or mad. Did I create that demon? Does that dark capacity reside within me? Will my writing reveal—unleash—an unmanageable wickedness? I suppose some might find my fears and anxieties absurd and certainly questionable. For too long I’ve been afraid of the dark. These days I pad around this beautiful housesitting space in the gloaming, reveling the splash of waning and waxing moonlight glancing the St. Lawrence River. For the very first time since that experience at sixteen, I’m wondering whether I forejudged the apparition, and I question my fear of it all. And, for the sake of my writing, I’m ready to play.
Let’s begin with these lines from a poem by Carol Ann Duffy, “Prayer”.[1]
So, a woman will lift/her head from the sieve of her hands and stare/ at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.
A friend calls these massive blooms the floozies of the garden. They are taller than me and have overtaken the tomatoes this year, which means fewer tomatoes to process (a small blessing, one I’ll curse in Feb).
I went to listen to a friend play in a band (he plays guitar). It was an afternoon event and the day was gorgeous, hot blue sky, tree leaves colouring up red and yellow. There were lots of friends there and many people who I hadn’t connected with in some time (since pre-pandemic). In one conversation, a former colleague announced his recent retirement and our talk rounded to creative writing. I admit that anecdote, erroneously attributed to Margaret Atwood, about the brain surgeon who says to a writer that when they retire, they’ll take up writing, to which the writer quips that, when they retire, they’ll take up brain surgery, popped into my mind. The guy is (well, was) a physician. But it’s important writers lift one another up. Writing is hard enough without tearing each other down. So, I offered up some writing (and reading) resources I’ve found helpful and then we landed on the topic of workshopping. He leaned back in his chair and said he’d tried workshopping—his tone was unmistakable; the exercise was beneath him—and he’d been disappointed to discover that (his words) “99.95% of workshop participants are women”. Long pause of silence. I began to form a response, but not before he buried himself further by saying his writing needed…here, he finally noticed he was speaking to a woman and corrected the wording I could see so clearly in the thought bubble hovering atop his (inflated) head (his writing is far more important and serious – intelligent! than what women write about), to say the workshops could never sufficiently improve his writing. I turned to his wife (also a physician. Does this matter? It does. I have a chip on my shoulder when it comes to physicians…story for another time, but I acknowledge my bias) and I agreed, it’s true, the workshops and writing classes I have attended are comprised, mostly, of women. I think it must have to do with women not feeling they have a voice in other aspects of their lives. Great swaths of generalizations painted here, but this was party small talk. The physician’s unblinking wife encouraged her husband, explaining he ought to think more about the issue because women read and buy books more often, and if he hoped to publish, it’s an issue worthy of his consideration. I downed the glass of shit wine I was drinking and flitted off. But the conversation and the question (why mostly women?) gnawed at me.
Last of the summer flowers maybe, before a killing frost.
The conversation with the physicians continued to grate because it poked (stabbed?) a few of my deepest insecurities. How I’d turned my back on pursuing an arts career in favour of science because I thought I’d be taken more seriously (as a woman) and, let’s be honest, because it paid better. But the deeper wound is that I find myself actively resisting the writing that bubbles forth most naturally in my creative writing practice: marriage and motherhood.
This is hard to write: I silence my own voice because I don’t believe it’s valuable enough.
It’s frustrating to know I’ve allowed myself to be shaped (so effortlessly) by cultural and social norms related to traditional gender roles. It’s an embarrassment. It begs the question: who from (and why?) am I seeking validation? The easy answer is “the system” – but it’s a system that continues to devalue the importance (skill, patience, persistence, compassion) of raising children, a system that reduces love and relationships to sex (and shout out to my more marginalized peeps of the LGBTQ2S+, most often heteronormative sex). As part of the system—as a woman I am—we don’t do enough to support each other to write about domestic subjects or write about our friendships. Is writing about friendship without the tension of sex or attraction a downgrade? Too boring? A lot of cognitive dissonance here. The harder answer is that yes, I do need to push through the noise and systemic pressures to value my own writing and anchor validation from within as opposed to without. It’s hard. And I know, a harried summary of such a complex issue is short on explanations. I could sing this pearl of an offering[2], but in the spirit of bare sincerity, I’m often afraid the conversations are out of my league. I’m working on bravery. Another work in progress…
This week I wrote a poemy piece in workshop (yes, a workshop comprised of mostly women) about what it feels like to walk up to the podium to read one’s poetry. My writing inspired one of the other women in the workshop to create a collaged art piece in response to a particular phrase I had written. I won’t share it here because she would like us to try publishing our two pieces together, but the art work is beguiling and unique, and the gesture made me teary. Really, it’s the ultimate compliment.
I think this must be the goal for creating art: to make something so beautiful it inspires further beauty in the world.
So, I lift my burned gaze from the sieve of my hands to tend the lyrics of my heart.
[1] This stunning image (that word ‘sieve’ does so much work) are lines from the poem “Prayer” by Dame Carol Ann Duffy. She is the first (and only!!) woman to hold the post of British Poet Laureate in its 400 plus-year history and was appointed in 2009 for a ten-year fixed term. You can listen to her read this poem here. Interestingly, when I read the poem for myself it sounded very different from her reading. Perhaps I interpret it differently too. Regardless, it’s a gorgeous poem. I love how the image embodies this post better than my own words could ever do.
[2]“One Heart” is from the Leftover Cuties 2013 album “The Spark & the Fire” – http://www.leftovercuties.com – also, a striking album cover.
Super spicy Habaneros harvested need to be handled with care (the mask and gloves and slicing outdoors depicted in the drawing above) when preserving.
Do we have a choice about the subject of our creative work? In a recent interview with Francesca Steele of Write-Off podcast, Tessa Hadley said, “There is no choice about what you write…an interesting discovery…no, it isn’t a choice, you just have to find the thing that is yours.” They were discussing the writing of domestic fiction, of which Tessa Hadley is considered a modern master. For some thoughts about domestic fiction as a genre, read this reflection by Soledad Fox Maura at Lit Hub. Also, must mention Tessa Hadley’s stunner of a short story in a recent (July 24, 2023) The New Yorker. You can listen to her read it here too, “The Maths Tutor”.
A few years ago, I would have disagreed with Tessa Hadley, believing that of course a writer could choose their subject. But now, after years and drafts attempting to write something with Meaning (capital M) about Big Important Issues (climate change, poverty, the impacts of war, attachment theory, to name a few), I do agree with her.
It doesn’t matter what I try to write, the stories of my family—growing up, as well as my experiences in a long-term relationship and raising my own children—bubble to the surface. I’ve wasted a lot of time and energy resisting this writing, or at least trying to hide it behind a Big Meaning facade. But I’m starting to make peace with the themes my writing presents: raising kids, marriage, cooking, being raised by parents with mental illness and addictions. It is who I am, how I have become the person I am, and, importantly, provided my foundation and lenses for my viewing of the world. It’s this inner voice—unique for every person—that readers will connect to if I can get it to the page. I’m only beginning to trust my own voice (that it’s good enough).
Coupled with this challenge is another: when I choose to centre my family life in my creative writing, the refrain from trusted readers is often that it’s too much all at once (I’m paraphrasing, but this is the gist of it). One dear friend explained reading my stories or poems feels almost like an assault to her senses. She really means this kindly, and I accept it that way too, but I’ve struggled to understand what I might do differently. There’s so much strangled emotion waiting and wanting to spring out. I don’t know how to tell these stories in a way a reader might absorb them with any pleasure or entertainment at a pace that engenders empathy as opposed to shock, or worse, pity.
The last few months of writing flash pieces, narratives that follow a “story arc” but are less than 1000 words, have been generative and instructive. Flash, as a form, focuses an emotional moment. There isn’t room for much else. In some of the pieces I’ve generated—over 26 unique story drafts since the beginning of May (woohoo!)—I’ve practiced approaching some of my family stories using different perspectives, angles, and styles. I’ve discovered the flash form might be a method for me to “break up” the emotions and the moments in a way that is softer on readers, easier to digest, provide some white space and pause for breath. That way, several flash pieces assembled could become a kaleidoscope (of different focal points, different angles, etc.) of “what happened”, layering texture and meaning by using not just simply concentrated content, but a strategic sequencing too. An arrangement where the spaces in between could provide much-needed rests and pauses for recovery. A working theory anyway, I’m now trying.
When I went to elementary school in the 70s and 80s, it was vogue, fashioned after curriculum direction in the UK, lessons on grammar and syntax be removed from the curriculum with the belief (not proven with time) the lessons would simply assimilate through reading, exercises in comprehension (meaning making), and natural conversation.
And a science focused career further limited my exposure to language construction (blunted it more like. Punted any raw, sensual subjectivity, the glorious immersion of being human in a living world, to a cold field of disconnection and distanced objectivity, but I digress). The result: I must always look up the definitions for parts of sentences (adverb (?! yes, it’s true), gerund, participle), the application of verb tenses and rhetorical terms (these never stay in my head, it’s a completely foreign language). I’m only recently (last couple years) conscious of the conceptual gymnastics syntax enables one to perform.
But my lack of education is not what I want to write about here today. Instead, in the way of shimmery near-rhymes, I want to describe my process learning to use syntax as a way to mine my intuition. This practice (nascent) is cultivating my writing, slowly, slowly, so slowly, making it, if not more beautiful, certainly more textured, possibly (hopefully?) more complex.
Importantly, the practice disciplines thinking. Alters perspectives. Allows the mind to become supple. Open.
There’s a June Jordan quote tacked on the corkboard in front of my writing desk that captures this sentiment so much better, “The syntax of a sentence equals the structure of your consciousness.”
By intuition in this context, I mean what the subconscious mind is telling you, learning to trust it knows so much more before your conscious mind does. Responding to writing prompts, I put my pen to paper and let the words fly. In this way, something surprising, often beautiful—an image, a metaphor, a sensory cue—always rises to the surface (usually only at the very end of the exercise). Often, I’m left with a slightly baffling fragment and no clue as to how I might proceed or stick it together with another section of text (and attempts to force it really botch the whole thing up). This is when applying syntactical techniques may be used to open a window for creativity (and intuition) to breeze in.
Here’s what I mean (so floaty in the abstract mind space, my apologies, let’s get grounded). Syntax is simply the arrangement of words and phrases to create [a] well-formed sentence1. I’ve been practicing how to write sentences, gratefully working through exercises posted so generously by Nina Schuyler on her Substack Stunning Sentences.
Nina’s exercises break sentences into their component parts, grammatical and syntactical, and she sequences and names the parts so they may be followed as a template to slot in your own words and thoughts. I work through Nina’s exercises each week (well, I try to keep up). I’m too shy to post them there (and I don’t always succeed in my attempts, often capturing only 3/4 of the layered pieces that make the whole), but the practice is so helpful to me.
Start with a base clause: grind the meaning of the sentence down to its essentialness, who is this about (subject), where is it taking place (setting) or what is happening (action). And then, by erecting layers of structure (syntax, grammar, rhetorical techniques), complexity of meaning, depth, a resonance imbued with life and rhythm is, architecturally, revealed.
The layers of structure move a reader through the writer’s thinking and meanings using, as Francis Christensen’s 1963 essay, A Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence explains, levels of abstraction or generality, movement (directing the reader’s eye to earlier or later parts in the sentence). Christensen’s theories enriched John Erskine’s. Here’s a quote of Erskine’s that I love, from a 1946 essay, The Craft of Writing, quoted in Building Great Sentences by Brooks Landon:
“What you wish to say is found not in the noun but in what you add to qualify the noun. The noun is only a grappling iron to hitch your mind to the reader’s…The noun, the verb, and the main clause serve merely as a base on which meaning will rise. The modifier is the essential part of any sentence.”
Circling back to intuition and tying it in with Nina’s exercises, working through the sentence templates (grammatical, syntactical, rhetorical) I am forced to feel my way through the possibilities of how the original thought (could be the stripped down base clause) might expand. From my own free writing, I can select an image, a metaphor, a sensory cue, an action, extract it from my draft and let my intuition, carried through the templates, show me what my mind senses before I really even know.
In a recent post to The Red Hand Files, Nick Cave responded to a question about creativity, being stuck, and art making, which again, explains this better than I can:
“As a songwriter, I have come to understand that the more I try to make art that somehow reflects what I perceive myself to be, or the identity I wish to project upon the world, the more my art resists. Art doesn’t like being told what to do. It doesn’t like me getting in the way. When I attempt to impose my will upon it, the work becomes diminished and art takes its better ideas elsewhere…[Art] insists that we retract our ego, our sense of self, the cosmetics of identity and let it do its thing. We are in service to art, not the other way round.”
Practicing this way is very slow. I sit and think a lot more (imagining) before attempting to fill each sentence component on the page. I switch to pencil for these exercises – there’s a lot of rubbing out, a lot of cross outs too. It feels a lot more like how I feel when I write poetry…the process of intentional writing I apply to poetry. It taxes the brain, but in a good way, a way that alerts you, wakes you to deeper meanings on offer.
But there is a richness of material being laid down. Suddenly every word (or component) opens so much more potential for something larger, more meaningful, more complex. It shows me what I’m thinking, before I even know myself. And this feels exciting. And pleasurable.
How classes on reading comprehension were ever severed from syntax instruction I will never fathom. Subject for a different rant.
Slowly, slowly, slowly I am learning. No longer gasping for breath, a fish out of water, just a process of learning to swim. And the education, though painful at times, is a joy.
Small beauties culled from a pre-pandemic notebook – I was drawing instead of writing when attending a writing retreat. Small beauties, simply because I love them.
1 Discovered syntax etymology is from the late 16th century, via French or late Latin from Greek suntaxis, from sun- ‘together’ + tassein ‘arrange’. What a delightful riff on the warmth of a sun.
It’s been a slow dawning, learning that my narrator—even when I’m writing my own memories, writing about my self, my thoughts, my feelings—needs to be someone playing a role, a dramatic one. Who my narrator will be (because, yes, this is very future, I haven’t figured it out yet) is distinct from point of view (how the memories are relayed to a reader using perspective, what the narrator’s relation to the story is) and distinct from the tenses of verbs (when, in time, the person of the verb is “doing” “verbing?”). Confusingly, the narrator may be what is referred to as “voice”. Perhaps the terms are interchangeable, I don’t know. Maybe something to unpack in a later post. But thinking of the narrator as the person who tells the story, helps frame many writing decisions within a larger composition, from the sentence level to the whole.
An attempt to explain what I mean and where I want to go with this:
I’m five months into challenging myself to a “just get it down on paper!” exercise. For the first time, I tracked my progress, in number of words, and the time devoted to the task, in minutes. I had wanted to get to 70, 000 words (book length). Surprise! I haven’t hit that target. These last few weeks, I’ve laboured emotionally to make peace with this and move on. See the graphical display of progress here:
Some observations from tracking:
Most important: quantity in number of words does not equal quality. Not even close. More on this shortly (and yes, a link back to who the narrator is for this work…I’ll get there).
The shape of the line for the time put in, for this specific progress snapshot, follows the same shape of progress for the number of words. This could lead one to conclude (repeating the religious mantra): time put in = productivity out (measured in number of words). This is a misleading conclusion for creative writing because again, it ignores the quality of the writing (and all the measures of quality we can come up with, things like comprehension, emotional resonance with a reader, use of imagery, compositional techniques, sentence variability, word choice, structural approach, etc. The list is endless. Endless!).
There were stretches of time (weeks) showing zero output for both measures. Practically (qualitatively) this was because there were weeks I was away on vacation and didn’t work on the project and one week managing my grief after making the very difficult decision to have one of our pets put down. Gutted. But other weeks I did work on writing, just not this specific project. Instead, I wrote a short story and two flash pieces, plus a few posts to this blog. The chart doesn’t capture this. I recorded this separtely with notes and making myself reflect about the progress I made each week (with an intention to start fresh the following week).
Can’t ignore the downward trend depicted in the chart. I started off “well” in December – lots of time and words to begin with, then the lines gradually slide, tilting towards the x-axis to confirm my progress has slowed and stalled.
Another bit of context not captured in the chart: I started tracking for this project after writing just over 20, 000 words already. So, my actual word output for this project is just over 50, 000 words. Not bad. In quantity. At least the pages confirm I can create a book-length work (well, novella maybe).
If I focused on only these outcome measures, measures that confirm it takes me 5 months of creative writing time to reach an equivalent work week I put into my day job, I’d plunge into a depression too deep to climb out from. Instead, I learn what I can from this exercise and pivot.
What I’ve alluded to already with the differences between quantitative and qualitative measures, is that quality matters far more than quantity. I’ve also discovered the draft I’ve completed, chasing after the number of words down on paper, was written for myself. All 50, 000 plus words! I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help calling it my Vomit Draft. I’ve got the memories and (some) feelings and the cultural references I wanted to fold into the piece named and listed, but I haven’t packaged my writing in any shape or form a reader would be engaged with. “I” am not my audience. I need to carve a narrator to reshape how the stories are told, a narrator who will engage an audience, a narrator who performs that work. In making this choice, I will change the quality of my writing. My hope is to transform the raw emotions and memories into something funny, something entertaining. So, the work shifts now, with intention, towards understanding which part of my self I can call on to become that narrator. I want a narrator with the following qualities:
Someone who is funny
Someone who is humble
Someone with compassion
Someone who works to understand other people’s perspectives
Someone who isn’t whiney
Someone without a chip on their shoulder (ha, ha, better get my surgical tools)
Someone who forgives
Someone kind of cool (?) (I can see my kids cringing)
Someone with charisma
Someone with audacity (this is the hardest)
Note: all qualities impossible to measure with numbers.
I’m back to the beginning with this project…and will take the time needed to create this role, this persona. I foresee a lot more time sitting at the writing desk, puzzling to reveal this narrator in the rendering of every sentence. Kick in the bum to tracking words, I’m done with that.
My passport was declined the maximum three times at the new scanning kiosks at Canada customs. I left the wave of Canadians passing with ease through the machines to find a customs officer in the flesh, “Where are you coming from?” Looking me up and down, a middle-aged woman travelling alone, he was confused. “Mexico City” I handed him my passport. “And you didn’t travel in Mexico?” “Yes, I did, but not by plane. By bus. And taxis.” “It’s unusual for a Canadian (he paused here but did not say ‘woman’) to travel like that, from Mexico City.” Given the circumstances (trying to re-enter my country with as little friction as possible), I opted for the simplest, also the most honest, response, I said, “I’m glad to be back.” “I bet” he said.
I hadn’t travelled alone; I met my sister in Mexico City. She had flown from the Yukon. We travelled the two weeks together, visiting her favourite places—Mexico City, Tepoztlan, Acapulco. She’d lived and worked a whole decade in Mexico and returned to Canada five years ago. Her Spanish returned fluid, fluent, the moment she landed. She had asked me to visit so many times when she lived there, but my kids were small, I didn’t have the money, couldn’t secure the time away from work…so many excuses. Even when her partner died suddenly, in a dangerous town just north of the Belizean border where baggies of cocaine wash up on the beach and the people carry machetes and several sport missing limbs, I couldn’t go down there, to help her through that horror. My husband outright forbade it. With good reason, really. This trip was long overdue. And we didn’t have any epic blowouts or even anything more than mild disagreements. Maturity counts for some things. Acquiescing my movements to the pace of a cigarette smoker helped: walk a little ways, smoke break, walk a little further, smoke break.
Dropping into another culture, another climate (several climates really, because with every move we made the temperature, the way the air moved and touched my skin, the scents on the wind, changed), surrounded by a language I didn’t understand, kickstarted my mind. Thoughts, sensory experiences, sparked and fizzed. Released from the demands of work, of family, of regular life, I settled into being, allowing my tongue to bend around the new language, a different grammar, novel tastes.
I didn’t write much. Jotted a few fragments, impressions. I collected flowers—Jacarandas from the purple blossoming trees, bougainvillea, frangipani, others I didn’t recognise—pressed them between the pages of my notebook. I carried my pencil crayons but never drew anything. I didn’t quite feel settled enough. We were on the move. There was too much to look at, take in, make meaning of. Everything was fantastically loud: competing car radios, shop front music blasts, horns, bells, the screeching of brakes, the barking of dogs, the crows of roosters, birdsong, people yelling, begging, singing, whistling, babies crying, children laughing, and Mexican style fireworks which really sound just like cannon blasts. They made me jump. Every. Time. One expat suggested the fireworks—long baton-like sticks held in front of a person as if carrying a flag, gun powder stuffed in the top end and lit—as Mexicans reclaiming the fear they’d felt when colonial conquerors landed with their real cannons in centuries passed. Maybe.
It felt good to get my brain buzzed. To slow down. To simply feel.
I read four books, two by Mexican author Elena Poniatowska (an émigré from France). Her writing is gorgeous and, I imagine, even better in their original Spanish (the short story collections I read were translated by George Henson and Elizabeth Coonrod Martínez). Here is a good and very recent overview of her life as a writer, from The Washington Post, written by Kevin Sieff.
Amidst the concrete, the gates, the walls frothing barbed wire, shards of glass, the flowered vines spilled forth, the flowers rioted, the birds swooped and sang. In a place where even the laundry hung to dry on the rooftops is caged, there is art on the walls and parades of people celebrating. I spent my time ingesting it all. Feeling full.
It is always useful to try to trick my thinking out of usual habits and patterns of thought. My brain is lazy and too often follows the path of least resistance to finish a task. When writing, this laziness leads to cliches and shallow (one dimensional) observations that do nothing to pique the interest of a reader (or me, the writer, for that matter). Also, I prevent wider interpretations, deeper meanings, messages from the subconscious, before they have a chance to arise. Mind maps are a quick and (relatively) easy way to provoke (and see) expansions of meaning and the connections between them.
It is best, when creating a mind map, to relax and clear your mind…think meditation or yoga practice here. Sometimes it is good to set a timer for these exercises – 10 minutes tops – otherwise it could keep unfolding. That’s okay too…just follow your intuition on this one.
On a blank piece of paper, in the middle of the page, write a word or phrase you are wrestling with (or select one at random from the middle of a book, a dictionary, a cereal box, it really doesn’t matter…sometimes the most banal source will yield the richest ideas). Circle the word or phrase. Relax (yes, I keep having to tell myself this). Look at that word/phrase and allow your mind to drift and dream. Write down the images and associations as they come, anywhere on the page…as the associations are written down, they spark additional thoughts and images. Write these down too. Enjoy it. When the images start to wind down or the timer goes off, stop. It’s good to get up and walk away from the desk for a minute or two: make a cup of tea or gaze out the window. I’m usually too impatient though and dive into the next step, which is to look at what has been rendered on the page and start to draw lines of connections between them (often I do these steps simultaneously too). Very soon, the lines become tangled and cross each other. This is okay. At this point I realise there’s a lot more to think about than I had originally thought but I can now see avenues of exploration I might move through.
Mind maps are good to use as a writing prompt when facing an intimidating blank page. But they are also great tools for deepening existing writing: maybe an interesting image, or a provocative object, or a weird description or phrase has surfaced in a draft…but it doesn’t feel right—it nags—it doesn’t quite hang together with the sentiments (paragraph) around it. Trust the nagging/curiosity feeling. Copy the image/object/phrase onto a blank piece of paper to use as the starting node in a mind map.
Mind maps might also be used as art making device, subbing in a sort of shorthand thinking for how a work of art might be built. Theo Anthony, an American film maker, uses mind maps to work through generating ideas and connections, but then takes this one step further by planning his shots (camera type, lighting, angle, sequencing etc.) according to the nodes on his developing, evolving, project-based mind maps. In a way, this allows a lot of technical planning (to be on location, to select film equipment, etc.) without the creative constraint of a complete storyboard. His process, using mind maps this way, retains a flexibility, and enables resonances and surprises to illuminate organically. In a way, it’s as if he provides the operational support for the art, image, and beauty to reveal itself through the making.
I read a lot of scientific papers for my day job. I also keep up (read: try to keep up, it’s impossible) with a mish mash of related current events (politics, economics, social issues, social media, etc.). It’s a lot of information to synthesize; bits and pieces overlap and often contradict one another. I use drawing to help me see patterns and connections better. Drawing also helps me untangle processes or ideas.
When I say drawing, I mean I’m creating a picture, a figure, a graphic (or a combination of all three) to simplify a complex concept as a snapshot. When you’re given five minutes and four slides in a PowerPoint presentation to explain a sweeping history, a body of conflicting evidence, and a suite of recommendations for how to move forward, you get pretty good at honing essentials.
But I’ve oversimplified how this is done.
Getting to essentials is a process of creating a lot of different graphical (and text) forms so that each time I work through it, I’m understanding my material differently, more deeply…and, I think, most importantly, for me, I begin to understand the material enough to communicate it to another person (an audience, a reader).
I have found similar methods helpful for creative writing projects, assisting me to see patterns and connections, but also, generating new ideas, connections, or images when I’m stuck.
I’m still in the beginning phase of creative writing, so my skill level remains stubbornly low—the raw materials and meanings I’ve generated in my own writings…well, I haven’t developed an ability to understand what it is I want to say, well enough, to be able to communicate it clearly to a reader. Practice. Practice.
But the following “drawing” methods help…drawing as in drawing out (of chaos, a fog, or confusion).
Here is the first in a series of posts outlining non-writer (ish) methods to see and arrange text differently (for deeper meaning making, understanding, to provoke variations in perspective, draw connections from disparate elements, and generate new thinking about your own writing or another’s).
Colour-coding
One way to do this is by highlighting, using a variety of colours, different aspects of written text to chunk out various elements of craft: dialogue, emotions or mood, word repetitions, abstract words, metaphors, back story, etc. I was introduced to this technique in a workshop with Rachel Thompson and I have also written about how Douglas Glover applies this technique to analyze craft styles. When you hold the text away from you, squinting your eyes to blur the words and looking only at the splotches of colour and how they hang together (or not), you can see how the various components relate to one another in a piece, whether any patterns are illuminated, or any other resonances.
I’m still at the stage of learning to do this in other writers’ texts so I can teach myself how to do this better in my own work. It is a slow, but gratifying, endeavour.
To take this idea into a less two-dimensional space and enable working with aspects of text more physically, consider using coloured index cards on which to jot down quick summaries of different structural elements of a larger work, for example: cultural references; reflections; speculative projections; historical references; theme elements, etc. These are examples of higher-level structural elements; of course, one could drill down to more detailed craft levels like those listed above, especially in a shorter work. The idea here is to arrange the coloured cards on a wall (I use the floor) in the order they have been created or written (or the order you think they should go in), and then start to shift them around. Arrange and rearrange and ask yourself these questions:
How does meaning change when the patterns of coloured index cards change?
What vibrations start to hum when certain elements are placed side by side – does a different meaning emerge from the space between?
When does a repeated pattern start to become boring? When does predictable become uninteresting? Or, at what point will a reader drop this and go find something more exciting to do?
…one must be able to find a plot, a route, a “solution”.
Italo Calvino on Invisible Cities, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art No. 8 (Spring/Summer 1983), pp. 37-42.
This method helps “see” a path, a solution. Or it can open a door into creating something else.
I started this latter technique for a writing project, a longer form CNF work I’m working on now, thinking it would help me to uncover a structure or a pattern I could use to write into (ha ha fast track my writing, no dice). But I implemented it too soon (always jumping ahead of myself). Instead, I’m challenging myself to generate more foundational material before I launch into this bird’s eye view and structural playfulness.
I pulled out a piece of creative nonfiction I submitted for publication a few months ago and scanned the first few paragraphs. I was horrified by what I had written. More accurately, I was appalled at what I had left out and embarrassed by how I had written what I had written.
To be specific, because abstractions really are the issue here, what I had not written were (and here’s a list – insert eye roll- and, I think this is becoming repetitive – a theme of these posts?):
my inner thoughts
a lot (all?) of my emotions
how I felt about the experiences when they happened in the past
how I feel about the experiences, looking back on them now, from my current vantage point (a point of missed wisdom, learning and reflection? Evidently).
Actually, it’s not really a list is it? It’s deepening layers of specificity of the same thing.
And the way I had written that CNF piece: with a lot of poetic flourishes (think feather boas, purple lipstick and high scissor kicks) as well as insertions of scientific facts harvested from an eclectic shelf of show off curiosities I seem to trot out when I feel cornered. The vocabulary I used was high and abstract; the syntactical maneuvers a bit somersault-roundoff-backflip-like, or, at least attempting to be….more of a trip and fall on my ass performance. [btw: click that David Lee Roth scissor kick compilation link, it’s hilarious.]
But here’s a positive discovery: I suddenly “see” this in my own writing (at least, tentatively…I remain a neophyte in this regard, but one must acknowledge even the smallest of progressions on this writing journey…there I go again, the inner scientist taking over with her mastered objective distance).
The thing is, for quite a while now, I’ve thought my lack of depth and insight in my writing has been a technical issue. So, I’ve busied myself studying sentence structure, syntax, hybrid compositions, and I’ve practiced with a super focused commitment to the craft of writing and my work just kept getting worse. I’ve been frustrated …bordering on hopeless (is it that I can’t do this writing thing?) and I wondered whether to quit.
I did quit for a month or two or three over the summer. I was miserable.
Sure, I could quit.
But then what?
So, not a technical issue.
I have other writers (alive and dead) (and artists) (and, in the spirit of full transparency, my therapist) to thank for gently nudging and supporting me to progress my learning these recent weeks to discover (and be able to “see” in my own writing what I haven’t been able to before): I’ve been withholding my self from the page (my thoughts, my feelings, my reflections, my values, my beliefs, my opinions…). The painful truth is that I haven’t believed what I have to offer is of value….so I play dress up instead.
It’s my own voice I must nurture. And accept.
In a truly wonderful November workshop, facilitated by Steve Edwards, through Larksong Writer’s Place, I wrote the following words in response to a prompt about what knowledge I would want to impart to my younger writer self (or a writer just starting out):
“…write with abandon. That is, not to censor yourself and to let the inner critic hold sway. And give yourself permission to question—interrogate—the reasons you think a certain way. And if the inner critic remains too loud—ask the inner critic what it needs to be quiet? What nurturing is it missing? What voice is it afraid of? Can you work together instead of pulling one another apart?”
Recently, Steve Edwards tweeted “Reminder to my fellow teachers who already know this but tend to forget: learning doesn’t always look like learning; growth doesn’t always look like growth. Your attention & care is a powerful force.” Thank you, Steve. This is exactly how I felt in your class: held and seen and cared for. I also sent this quote to my sister, also a teacher, who lives and works in a small Indigenous community north of the arctic circle.
And to my many friends and writer friends and loved ones (for I am blessed with so many of you), thank you for continuing to read me, lifting me up when I am down, and waiting, patiently, for my own words…in my own emerging voice.
