Emma Darwin's Blog, page 6
January 26, 2017
"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader": True or false? Plus choirboy syndrome
So, the poet Robert Frost said, "no tears in the writer, no tears in the reader". This, I think, we usually take as being about writers having to be willing to feel what they want their readers to feel. Indeed, although Wordsworth, in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, famously describes poetry's origin as "emotion recollected in tranquillity", he goes on to say
the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.
In other words, you re-connect with the memory, thought, or sensation which you are no longer experiencing - and in doing so you will be affected again by something like those feelings. Wordsworth and Frost are, by implication, also talking about authenticty: that if you want to affect the reader strongly, what you write has to have made that connection, in the sense that it has to come from some kind of honest place in yourself.
Perhaps that's obvious if - as people tend to assume, often wrongly - the poet's poem is rooted their own experience. But I think this re-connection is also key to writing well when the project is fiction, or something else which ranges more widely, or is about something that you don't have direct experience of. If the job is using your imagination to enter into an alien (in the technical sense) experience then in some way you'll need to find a connection with an analogous part of yourself, and then that "kindred emotion" will be awakened.
But I think it's easy to take Frost's injunction in the wrong sense: to assume it means that the uncensored outpouring of emotion is what's needed to make writing that will draw those emotions out of the reader - but that would be a serious misunderstanding. All actors know that if you totally break down on stage, no one in the audience will be able to hear a word, you'll mess up the staging, and wreck the story the play is trying to tell: the art is in finding that authenticity, but keeping part of yourself outside it and in control. And although I'm not the only writer who has found tears in their eyes when drafting a big scene - especially at the end of a book - we're still quite capable of writing. Through our tears we go on tweaking the words, keeping an eye on the basics of pace, tone, psychic distance and showing-vs-telling, getting the punctuation right, spelling correctly and making sure we've dropped the right clues and held tight to the ones we don't want to drop yet.
The fact that there's more to do in revision doesn't negate that dual experience, nor does it mean we are shallow hypocrites, just that we have developed a certain human faculty to a greater degree than normal. Actors are both inside their part and outside it, like jockeys, whose job is to awaken the flight response in the horse, and then control it. A soldier, too must learn to awaken the fight-or-flight response in herself or himself and the platoon, and then control it: the control is as necessary to the job as the innate response. Presumably Wordsworth's necessary "tranquillity" is about starting from that place of control, before beginning to re-awaken the emotion. The fact that you can operate in that divided way doesn't mean that you've lost touch with authenticity and honesty; it's just part of the necessary schizophrenia of the writer. (I'd be interested to know if keeping these separate processes going simultaneously is something we share with our fellow great apes, or something distinct to human animals)
And there's another way that Frost's point, important though it is, can mislead writers and artists. Remember Andrew Stanton's "Law of two-plus-two"? He explains that the audience can't help doing the maths to make Four, and that they positively want to, provided they don't realise they're doing it. It is not a coincidence that the original title for Stanton's TED talk was "Storytelling is Joke Telling": we know that explaining a joke kills it, but actors know more: that if you start laughing at your own comedy not only will you wreck the pace, rhythm and tone of the production, and find that your speeches go unheard, but, worse, the joke dies. It's the audience who must make the joke - and do the laughing. Even standup comedians only laugh once the audience has started. So the Fours the audience make for themselves - the tears, the laughter, the understanding - will always be more powerful than the Fours you write out for them, en clair on the page: it's their own Four.
One more thought: remember choirboy syndrome? How agonisingly long you can go on giggling inside, when you mustn't laugh out loud? And, too, recall how much more heartbreaking it is to see someone in terrible circumstances trying not to cry, than when they do cry. Denying your audience the explicit Four, as it were, can work even more powerfully if you also deny your characters the relief of completing the emotional equation by reaching their Four ... at least, not yet. Probably soon, although fortunately - but unfortunately ... maybe not yet ... now, just a little ... but shhhh! someone's coming ...
Is Robert Frost's advice to writers brilliant or disastrous?
So, the poet Robert Frost said, "no tears in the writer, no tears in the reader". This, I think, we usually take as being about writers having to be willing to feel what they want their readers to feel. Indeed, although Wordsworth, in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, famously describes poetry's origin as "emotion recollected in tranquillity", he goes on to say
the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.
In other words, you re-connect with the memory, thought, sensation, which you are no longer experiencing - and in doing so you will be affected again by something like those feelings. Wordsworth and Frost are, by implication, also talking about authenticty: that if you want to affect the reader strongly, what you write has have made that connection, has to come from some kind of honest place in yourself. That may be obvious if - as people tend to assume, often wrongly - the poet's poem is rooted their own experience.
But I think this re-connection is also key to writing well when the project is fiction, or something else which ranges more widely, or is about something that you don't have direct experience of. If the job is using your imagination to enter into an alien (in the technical sense) experience then in some way you'll need to find a connection with an analogous part of yourself, and then that "kindred emotion" will be awakened.
On the other hand all actors know that if you totally break down on stage, no one in the audience will be able to hear a word, you'll mess up the staging, and wreck the story the play is trying to tell: the art is in finding that authenticity, but keeping part of yourself outside it and in control. And although I'm not the only writer who has found tears in their eyes when drafting a big scene - especially at the end of a book - we're still quite capable of writing. Through our tears we go on tweaking the words, keeping an eye on the basics of pace, tone, psychic distance and showing-vs-telling, getting the punctuation right, spelling correctly and making sure we've dropped the right clues and held tight to the ones we don't want to drop yet.
The fact that there's more to do in revision doesn't negate that dual experience, nor does it mean we are shallow hypocrites, just that we have developed a certain human faculty to a greater degree than normal. Actors are both inside their part and outside it, like jockeys, whose job is to awaken the flight response in the horse, and then control it. A soldier, too must learn to awaken the fight-or-flight response in herself or himself and the platoon, and then control it: the control is as necessary to the job as the innate response. Presumably Wordsworth's necessary "tranquillity" is about starting from that place of control, before beginning to re-awaken the emotion. The fact that you can operate in that divided way doesn't mean that you've lost touch with authenticity and honesty; it's just part of the necessary schizophrenia of the writer. (I'd be interested to know if keeping these separate processes going simultaneously is something we share with our fellow great apes, or something distinct in homo sapiens.)
And there's another way that Frost's point, important though it is, can mislead writers and artists. Remember Andrew Stanton's "Law of two-plus-two"? He explains that the audience can't help doing the maths to make Four, and that they positively want to, provided they don't realise they're doing it. It is not a coincidence that the original title for Stanton's TED talk was "Storytelling is Joke Telling": we know that explaining a joke kills it, but actors know more: that if you start laughing at your own comedy not only will you wreck the pace, rhythm and tone of the production, and find that your speeches go unheard, but, worse, the joke dies. It's the audience who must make the joke - and do the laughing. Even standup comedians only laugh once the audience has started. So the Fours the audience make for themselves - the tears, the laughter, the understanding - will always be more powerful than the Fours you write out, en clair on the page: it's their own Four.
One more thought: remember choirboy syndrome? How agonisingly long you can go on giggling inside, when you mustn't laugh out loud? And, too, recall how much more heartbreaking it is to see someone in terrible circumstances trying not to cry, than when they do cry. Denying your audience the explicit Four, as it were, can work even more powerfully if you also deny your characters the relief of completing the emotional equation by reaching their Four ... at least, not yet. Probably soon, although fortunately - but unfortunately ... maybe not yet ... now, just a little ... but shhhh! someone's coming ...
January 12, 2017
When a good stopping place is a bad starting place
Today is supposed to be a writing day, and the morning is my prime writing time. The project is going well, I've got Scrivener fired up, and I've run my eye down yesterday's work to remind myself where I've got to. And yet ... I've just spent the last hour not-getting-on-with-it: faffing about with useful-but-not-urgent work and domestic things, consoling a Facebook friend who's struggling with the outcome of a nasty book contract clause, doing a bit of necessary professional tweeting, and making cups of tea that I then forget about.
This is nothing to do with serious procrastination: I'm not frightened of the project, nor de-fuelled from some other life stuff, and my Inner Critic got bored with my deafness and blindness to it, and left home some years ago; it now lives in the next street, only popping around occasionally to tell me that I'm lazy, useless and stupid because I haven't weeded the grass out from between the paving stones of my front path. This kind of Inner Critic I can live with.
No, the reason I'm struggling to get going - to put in the first ten or twenty minutes of hard work that will get me through the door in the wall - is that I stopped last night at the end of a chapter. And, as any child knows who's pleaded to be allowed a bit longer with the light on, the end of a chapter is an official "good stopping place". (Indeed, my small, newly-literate sister used to plead for permission to finish not the chapter, nor even the page, but the word.) What that book-devouring child doesn't know, of course, is that a good stopping place for a reader is a bad starting place for a writer.
It's obvious when you think about it: when you're writing a first draft, however much you're a planner, you do rely on the writing of one sentence to lead to the point where your brain knows how the next one starts. If one definition of "narrative" is "a causative chain of events", then within the writer's self each sentence is an effect which is caused by the previous one. But, to some degree, the end of a chapter is the end of that chain. The next cause must be created from nothing, before it can allow the effect to form.
Of course, reckoning to keep going until you reach a temporarily concluding moment in the story - the end of a chapter, scene, section - makes a lot of sense. And making for that moment keeps you going when it's being difficult, when your head aches from shutting up that Inner Critic, when your bum is sore from sitting for so long. It's the same principle as learning to knit on a stripy sweater: you can always push to get to the end of a stripe, even when finishing the front (or, worst of all, the second sleeve) seems impossibly distant. You can pack up for the writing day knowing that you've done a chunk of the work, and put your writerly feet up with the satisfaction of a job done.
But, of course, the overall job isn't done, and the next day - or, worse, the next month - all you can see is the conclusion you reached back then. That blank page headed Chapter Twenty looks as horribly blank as the one that was headed Chapter One, even more months or years ago. If - as writer and storyteller John Taylor puts it - when you're writing you're living in the world of their book, then a "good stopping place" closes the door on that world. Your plans may (or may not) tell you what in basic material facts this chapter needs to contain, but the "causes" you carefully or intuitively built into the previous chapter are no longer urgent to you: they don't naturally give rise to the effects in this one.
Apparently Hemingway recommended stopping mid-sentence, and you can see why; and since he was usually stopping in order to open a bottle and get plastered, how he made sure that he'd nonetheless get back to work the next day, presumably grimly hung-over, is worth thinking about: trying to remember what the rest of the sentence was a good, undemandingly small-scale way of getting back into it. The text doesn't say "Morning! Now write the rest of the novel", but "Morning! Now, what were the next few words?" That little bit of thinking, that putting of a tentative head through the doorway into the world of the story, seems much more possible. And, as we all know, any gap your head can get through, the rest of you can follow through.
So, if you use the momentum of wanting to reach a good stopping place to keep you going, how do you start up again? In the Facebook conversation I had about this topic, Lloyd Shepherd suggested exploiting that sustaining momentum by carrying on to write the first couple of paragraphs of the next scene/chapter, just to feel that you're launched; then he stops. Kathleen McGurl says she does the Hemingway thing, stopping mid-scene or even mid-sentence.
Mind you, if, in the evening, I did know what the rest of the sentence should be, I doubt if I'd leave it un-written: I don't myself feel it would be the best use of fresh, morning writing time to have to re-invent. More broadly, I think many writers don't have the confidence to not write something that they know they could write: they panic if they haven't got a notebook, they're terrified if the Person from Porlock comes calling that their 'Kubla Khan' will go unfinished.
Of course, poets may have real cause to worry, because they don't have the basic needs of narrative to provide the hints about what might come next - although maybe patterns, metres, rhyme-schemes and prosody can provide such hints instead. But I suspect (can't prove) that some narrative writers' reluctance to just-start-the-next-chapter is also caused by fear: if you start the next scene, you're starting a new chain of cause-and-... and what if you find in the morning that you can't remember the effects that the causes set going? But if I'm thinking in terms of scenes, what's to stop me making some notes about how I'm imagining the scene panning out? Note: notes, not actual writing; then re-calling the story-reasons for this scene and embodying them in narrative is as good a way of getting back into it as you could want.
But confidence, I think, is key here: "confidence" in its original sense of "with faith". You do need to act with faith in yourself that, even if in the morning you can't remember what that second-half of the sentence would have be, the second half that you now come up with will be just as good.
At heart, this about something wider and much more crucial, in developing your creative practice: letting go of the toxic kind of perfectionism. It's the kind which is convinced there is One Perfect Version of the story in your head; and that there's therefore One Perfect Way of writing which will ensure that the perfect version happens. As a writer, you have to make your peace with the fact that all art is contingent: if you'd started this book on another day or after reading a different writer; if you'd finished your painting in a different studio; if you'd been able to get to a certain place for research - or not been able to get there; if you'd sung your Butterfly in a different production in a different opera house with a different Pinkerton ... the result would have been different.
As writers we're more in control of our materials and creative circumstances than most other kinds of artist, but that doesn't mean that absolute control is either possible or even desirable. Instead of straining for absolute control, you have to develop your craft in handling words and ideas, and your craft in handling your creative self, to the point where you can have some faith that you will cope with - even make the most of - whatever circumstances you encounter, and the result will be a good result, and therefore in a crucial sense the right result. It's making your peace with contingency, and having confidence in your craftsmanship, which means that you don't have to make it home and close the door every night: that you can safely stop at a "bad" - i.e. a good - contingent, perched-on-the-hard-shoulder kind of stopping place, and know that in the morning it will be all right.
And what if, as John Gribbin put it, a "bad" stopping place means you spend all night with sentences unrolling in your head? Maybe making the notes, like a to-do list, will quiet those voices down. Maybe not. But - with all sympathy for insomniacs - perhaps that's just the price of being a writer. There are worse fates.
