 |
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
||
 |
 |
|
||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
You Dig?October 24, 2005 A local writer I'm working with called me up a couple of nights ago. She's disgusted with the project she's working on, a memoir about a certain period in her life: it's so boring, she says. She's got a point: compared to what she's done in the past, it seems pretty flat at this point, but "this point" is also a first draft, and for various good reasons she's also developing this piece on tape instead of on the typewriter or in longhand. The physical aspect of writing is so important to me: over the last two or three years, I've gone back to writing most first drafts in a fountain pen, then typing it into the computer and editing it on-screen. I love the shape of the words, whether they're in my barely legible scrawl or in precise Times Roman. Even though I love the sounds of words, I'd have a hard time making the transition to aural composition. But the unfamiliar medium isn't the only problem here. I told my client that she needed to put herself into her stories more. The parts of that come alive are the parts where she laughs or gets mad or acknowledges being lonely. In previous projects we've done together, the stories she tells about family members are quite wonderful, but when she herself takes the stage the tale grow sketchy, or it goes flat. Oh, that's boring, who could possibly be interested in that? I'm not very interesting. I don't believe it's really, or at least primarily, about the fear of being boring or uninteresting. I do believe it's about fear: the fear of tapping into strong feelings and passionate, perhaps unpleasant, experience. It takes courage to explore this stuff, and to keep pushing through the warning signs and the roadblocks till you scratch the surface of the motherlode. This takes courage, but the payoff is that the more you do it, the bolder you get -- and the stronger you get. The secret of the 12 steps and many another spiritual path is that you don't immediately bound to the top of the mountain. Most of us would get the high-altitude equivalent of the bends if we got there too fast. It's the journey that prepares you for the heady experience of standing on top of the mountain. Mining your own truths and then shaping them with words takes practice. Putting them out in the world takes courage, sure, but all that practice creates courage even when you're not thinking about it, so the chances are you're continually denying that you're brave even when you secretly suspect that you are, at least part of the time. Writers and artists are supposedly prone to alcoholism, addiction, mental illness, and various screwy behaviors, and sure, there are plenty of stories out there about chronically drunk writers, writers who spent years in institutions, writers who committed crimes, writers who cracked up. I've got this theory about them, or at least some of them: they reached the top of the mountain in one bound or two, without the long step-by-step journey that develops your strength and your courage. And for one reason or another they couldn't handle what they saw or heard or felt or learned, and they couldn't find guides around to help them deal with it, so they had to damp the dissonance with excessive booze or some other form of craziness, or maybe they pulled the plug and never wrote again. What I want to say to my client is that a first draft is like the patch of land that archaeologists outline with string. Now it's time to start digging.
|
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
Home - Writing - Editing - About Susanna - Bloggery - Articles - Poems - Contact Copyright ©
Susanna J. Sturgis. All rights reserved. |
||||