on writing and gentleness

Do you ever feel like the world is whispering to you? Like it’s saying, “Here, look here, pay attention to this.” It happens in rhythms, in repetitions. The same things keep coming up. Around my birthday, I bought myself an online writing course created and run by award-winning author Sarah Selecky. The Story Course has been so brilliant—so eye-opening—and so…gentle. Sarah’s approach to writing, to craft, is gentle. Even her voice is gentle.Reading over the first pass pages for The Sisters of Straygarden Place, I realised I’d used the words “gentle” and “soft” over and over, like a dusting of fine sugar over the whole story. Softly, softly, gently, gently. Part of me wants to wrestle these repetitions out of the manuscript, wants to throw bleach on the story and scrub it clean, make it “hard and clear” as Hemingway advises. Part of me wants to leave the words in there, like witnesses.Softly. Gently.This morning, I listened to an interview with Kelly Barnhill (author of The Girl Who Drank the Moon) on 88 Cups of Tea, and as Barnhill spoke about her own relationship with writing, a sense of gentleness—of wanting to touch the world gently—radiated from her words. I’m not sure if she used the word “soft” or the word “gentle” but that is how she sounded to me. Deeply gentle. I think there’s sometimes a temptation, with creative work—especially in revisions—to be hard on ourselves. We need to order everything, line everything up. We need to be perfect.I have this temptation in me. I want to give in to it. I want to peel all the layers away until there’s nothing left. I want to burn everything down and start over, every time. It is much, much scarier to allow something to exist—a book, a painting, a feeling, a relationship—than to erase it.Erasure is so clean, isn’t it? It feels so clean, so simple. But that’s not what love, or life, is about. I started thinking about repetition in nature. One raindrop falling after another. The rhythm of seasons. A bird calling its call. The stripes on a shell, curling inwards. A tree, and a tree, and another tree. All repetition, all unique. There is a vicious part of me that wants to erase everything, keep starting over and over, until something is perfect. But that is not how to love the world. In her interview with Yin Chang, Kelly Barnhill spoke about how our job is to love the world, to love all the parts of it, to accept it all, and to love it. And maybe that’s what I need to do with my life, and maybe that’s what I need to do with my manuscript.Accept it all, and love it all, gently, and softly. Be deeply gentle. Be deeply gentle.