The greater truth

"A lot of what frightens people about writing is this precise idea that once we put something on the page we are rendered vulnerable. There is truth to that, but the greater truth, for me, is that once I put something on the page I am also rendered a little less vulnerable. I have created for myself a piece of turf on which I am willing to stand." 

From The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life by Julia Cameron

Regardez bien

Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu’avec le coeur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.*

Le Petit Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 

Le Petit Prince by lab604 @ Flickr

* This is my secret. It's very simple: you can only see clearly with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye. 

Guilty as charged

Sometime during the Year of Getting Organised, I came across some old material.  You know, stuff I’d written, typed with an actual typewriter onto actual paper, a long time ago.  Some of it was while I was at school, along with some truly cringe-worthy short stories from my early adulthood. 

And it was bad.  Baaaaaaaaad.

Once you get past the psychic slap of how truly awful some of it was – if you can get past it – you can read it again, for insight. 

What I found in this early writing was a sense of my own stuck-ness, and in the very middle of it, a desperate need for beauty, for inspiration, for connection, as lifelines out of the mire. There’s even a (hideously plodding) story based on this very theme – a theme that even I didn’t recognise at the time.

But I also saw fragments of my craft emerging: the oblique slant of words used in fresh way, some nascent plot ideas, and a blunt personal honesty that was possibly the reason that continuing to write was so daunting.

I also recognised was what was missing: artistic self-belief.  The brazen self-worth needed to foist my imagination into the bright rule-bound world.  The mindfulness to persist with writing from that space, to plough through my inexperience until I achieved something that even my cracked self-censor could grudgingly acknowledge might be ok. 

So, what can I take from this insight?

In the time since I wrote that material, I have come to understand a number of things.  Like, that writing improves your writing. And living, without writing, also improves your writing.  I understand now how fickle a commodity confidence is – that its weight and value is mediated in direct relationship to how badly you need it.  That it makes bad writers lazy and tortures good writers and constricts their efforts to a trickle.

And that none of that matters while you’re writing.  The most important thing is to just keep going.

I have learnt that uncertainty is bearable. Not knowing all the answers is a good thing. The bits that are missing tell just as much as the bits that are in the story.

But mostly the thing that I have learnt is that the writing is only 50% of being a writer.  You can be technically precise and grammatically correct, and still fail at the wholeness of the craft.

The other 50% of being a writer is the story that you bring to the endeavour – and that’s where the magic takes place. It’s where the jagged edges of your lived experience abrade a raw opening in the words, creating a space for the numinous to enter. It’s what gives life to your work.

So, these are my crimes, if any: believing too much that I had to be “good at” writing before I’d even begun, and believing too little in the stories that needed to be told. In this, I include my own powerful history, left unspoken for too long. In this respect only, I am guilty as charged. 

For these errors of omission, I hereby make restitution: not in silence, but in well-timed speech. Not in secluded reflection, but in decisive word-driven action.  I will hone my craft until it has the gleam and heft of the finest Damascene steel, and holding it as a sabre before me, I will carve a path to my own bold future.  

Sharpen

It’s been a while. I’ve been really, really busy.  And then the school holidays come, with incessant demands on my attention, sucking the last of my intellect from my skull, draining it through my nostrils like an ancient Egyptian funerary nightmare. 

But when I’m not writing, the unexpressed writhes and scratches within me, until I can contain it no more and it claws its way free. 

So I carve out a space, sharpen my nib, and I write again. 

Note to self: dragons*

"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him."

 The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (1937) 

Smaug, by Eric Fraser

* Actually, make that reptiles, generally. Reptiles that slither close and hiss softly but do not blink, and those that skulk quietly in the long grass. And the ones that spit venom. Especially those.  But not tortoises. Tortoises are usually wise rather than cunning.