ON WRITING WELL
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ON WRITING WELL
From the room you sit in, to the ink you use, the process of writing – despite the many verbose treatises, and much publicized philosophizing – remains shadowy and illusive. One cannot gain favor from the Muses merely by asking, nor can a writer simply extract her best sentences at will. Nevertheless, writing about writing continues to be some of the most intriguing pieces to read. Some even live by them. These five passages attempt to illuminate the corridors of the creative process, if one is only willing to spend enough time waiting, straining to see.
1.
If you feel the need to write, you absolutely should write. Don’t trust those who say: I’m telling you for your own good, don’t waste time on that. The art of discouraging with kind words is among the most widely practiced. Nor should you believe those who say: you’re young, you lack experience, wait. We shouldn’t put off writing until we’ve lived enough, read succinctly, have a desk of our own in a room of our own with a garden overlooking the sea, have been through intense experiences, lived in a stimulating city, retreated to a mountain hut, have had children, have traveled extensively…
Elena Ferrante, “Writing That Urges”
2.
LS: How do you activate truth in your writing?
RS: Allegory, mostly. And metaphor. And juxtaposition. Example, comparison, relation. I'm less interested in what things are, more interested in where they are and what to do about them. Recently. I’ve been dropping the “is” out of my metaphors and relying on the reader to make the associative leaps - for instance, saying “and the moon, terrible” instead of “and the moon is terrible.” Verbs of being are hard to make exciting. They diminish multiplicity. They’re argumentative. They provide the benefit of strong rhetorical declaration - the body is this or that - but run the risk of stalling out, or even stagnating a poem. Verbs of action are propulsive, which is often more useful than pointing at a thing and defining it. There’s truth in definition - a necessary truth, I’ll agree - but there are other aspects of nouns worth addressing.
3.
Let yourself go! Let go of everything! Lose everything! Take to the air. Take to the open sea. Take to letters. Listen: nothing is found. Nothing is lost. Everything remains to be sought. Go, fly, swim, bound, descend, cross, love the unknown, love the uncertain, love what has not yet been seen, love no one, whom you are, whom you’ll be, leave yourself, shrug off the old lies, dare what you don’t dare, it is there that you will take pleasure, never make your here anywhere but there, and rejoice, rejoice in terror, follow it where you’re afraid to go, go ahead, take the plunge, you’re on the right trail! Listen: you owe nothing to the past, you owe nothing to the law. Gain your freedom: get rid of everything, vomit up everything, give up everything. Give up absolutely everything, do you hear me? All of it! Give up your goods. Done? Don’t keep anything; whatever you value, give it up. Are you with me? Search yourself, seek out the shattered, the multiple I, that you will be still further on, and emerge from one self, shed the old body, shake off the Law. Let it fall with all its weight, and you, take off, don’t turn back: it’s not worth it, there’s nothing behind you, everything is yet to come.
Helene Cixous, Coming to Writing
4.
[The struggle of writing] is to intercept silence. Poetry is silence, a silence comparable to an underlying light around me, in me, on the paper. I know that if I lean over my desk, this silence will be summoned to spill forth drop by drop and that, subtly, the sharpened point of the pen will break free of my heart and spread across the expanse the brief trembling of a drawing. Poetry is a drawing that expresses the silence…
Silvia Baron Supervielle, The Lights of Home
5.
I tell my students one of the most important things they need to know is when they are at their best, creatively. They need to ask themselves, What does the ideal room look like? Is there music? Is there silence? Is there chaos outside or is there serenity outside? What do I need in order to release my imagination?
Elissa Chappell, The Paris Review, 1993
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