But seriously now, can words really carry some magical essence of the thing? A thought experiment suggests an escape route if the magical view is too unsettling. Imagine a whole pile of bank checks written by different people. Perhaps you hijacked the mail truck and you have them all in your hand. There is no way to know from looking at the checks whether they are any good -- whether there is money in the various accounts to cover them. But imagine that as you look at all these checks, suddenly one catches your eye. In some way you can feel with certainty that this one particular $100 check is good, valid, solid. From looking only at the words before you on the paper, you can experience the existence of money somewhere in a bank. The check writer did what we all want to do as writers.
But seriously now, can words really carry some magical essence of the thing? A thought experiment suggests an escape route if the magical view is too unsettling. Imagine a whole pile of bank checks written by different people. Perhaps you hijacked the mail truck and you have them all in your hand. There is no way to know from looking at the checks whether they are any good -- whether there is money in the various accounts to cover them. But imagine that as you look at all these checks, suddenly one catches your eye. In some way you can feel with certainty that this one particular $100 check is good, valid, solid. From looking only at the words before you on the paper, you can experience the existence of money somewhere in a bank. The check writer did what we all want to do as writers. But imagine, now, getting a check for $100 with a 10-page letter from the person who signed the check, explaining why she is giving you the money. From such a full explanation you might well be able to know with assurance that the writer really meant to give you the money and, had made sure that the check would not bounce. After reading such a letter you would, when you turned to look at the check itself, feel the cash behind it. These mere words on paper, "one hundred dollars" would elicit from you much or most of the response you would have to the thing itself, the cash. But, of course, it is not the words on the check itself, alone, that give you this experience of cash in your hand, but rather the words on the check in the context of the letter. Maybe it's this kind of thing that happens when we feel words "carrying" some of what's not there. (Our response to real cash illustrates again the fact that "mere words" can carry juice -- since real cash is nothing but words on paper, too.) So maybe that's where the power in writing comes from that I want to call magic: context. For, in fact, it usually takes a longish piece of writing to give us the magic of a real experience -- a passage long enough to carry a lot of context. A short passage or excerpt alone usually won't carry the magic you felt in those very same words as you were reading the whole thing. Perhaps it is all a trick of context that makes us know and feel when there is "money in the bank" for a particular story or poem or essay. You can, thus, write the word "ball" and make me see movies of my favorite old childhood toy, but only if you surround it with a bunch of other words that are just right. We see it in lying. Most people don't lie well. It flusters them and makes some kind of tension in the body. They probably don't look the listener in the eye in the same way, or there are other little telltale movements in the body that somehow manifest discomfort. Thus the context makes a sensitive listener feel something fishy in what she is hearing, a note somehow not to be trusted. So, too, perhaps with writing. Perhaps when we write something false -- perhaps even when we write something slightly out of tune with our "real self" so that it goes against the grain of some thoughts and feelings in our unconscious -- we are just the tiniest bit flustered and uncomfortable and even though the reader is not there to notice a slipperiness in our eye movements or a restlessness in our hands, still there are comparable micro-fidgets in our syntax and diction. Inauthenticity will out. And then, of course, there is the fact that some people are good liars. They can tell whoppers without any of those telltale signs. Besides writing a handsome $100 check, they can also write that 10-page letter that makes you feel the cash in your hand. That's the ability that enables people to write great stones, poems, plays, and essays. "The truest poetry is the most feigning," says Shakespeare -- and Auden echoes in a good poem about writing. It's the ability that frees the Shakespeares from having to write about what actually happened to them -- writers who have "negative capability" and can create for the reader a seemingly limitless range of experiences they never had. But that's the question. Is it really true that Shakespeare never experienced what it was like to be Miranda-a girl who'd never seen a man other than her father? Somehow he must have created that experience for himself. When someone who has never seen the sea writes powerfully about it, she must somehow or other have experienced ' it in her head. She could create it for herself even if she'd never lived it in the flesh. Presumably the trick of the good liar is somehow to get yourself to feel in some sense or other the reality of what you are saying. Of course you know it's a lie, but you are better than the rest of us at pushing that awareness off into one convenient insulated pouch at the moment of lying and somehow getting your mind and feelings -- or your voice -- to enter into these false words in some kind of act of "meaning it." So if the magical view of language makes us nervous we can see our way clear now to abandoning it. Of course the words don't really carry any of the thing's inner juice, it's just a matter of the naïveté of listeners or the trickiness of speakers. Of course the check doesn't have any of the $100 in it, it's just the accompanying letter. Of course there is none of me present when they meet without me and say my name. It's just that some people are susceptible to primitive reactions, perhaps because they feel guilty or bothered. It's true that old responses can be reawakened. They are there inside, waiting. We all have it in us to respond like the primitive, like the child, like the little old lady -- to have a spell cast over us by mere marks on paper. It happens when the writer is good enough. But there is no magic. There is just the cleverness of good liars and the eternal susceptibility of humans to respond magically. There is nothing but the effect of tiny, subtle cues in the context. How disappointing. But we don't have to abandon the magical view. My hunch is that the writer should keep it. That is, even though we could, like clever carnival swindlers, analyze the susceptibilities of readers (suckers!) and even though we could, like careful, white-coated, empirical scientists, hook readers up to wires and study which cues on the page make for magical responses -- just as we could study how to lie well by analyzing the wrong movements that give most of us away and the right ones of the masters, nevertheless we'd be better doing what I'll bet master-swindlers and liars really do: they put their focal attention on their meaning rather than on their movements or those of their victims. It's all analogous to learning to use a cane if you are blind or blindfolded. In truth, the borderline between yourself and the outside world is where your hand touches the cane. The farthest outpost of sensation or awareness is your hand. Yet it is useful -- and it turns out to be natural with almost everyone to permit a more magical view and slide your awareness past your hand down the cane to its lower tip. By putting the focus of attention on the place where the street bumps against the cane, instead of the place where the cane bumps against your hand, you learn to behave as though the stick is part of your body: you can learn to feel not the pressure of the cane on your hand but the pressure of the curb on the cane. * If you make this act of putting-yourself-in and learn to treat the stick as part of yourself rather than part of the outside world, then the stick does become part of you. You will feel that familiar shudder when the cane touches the fresh dog turd, even though strictly speaking you didn't touch it at all. The writer, then, writes well by putting magic into words just as the blind person sees well by putting herself into the cane. If the writer is putting her attention on subtle reactions in readers and subtle telltale syntactic qualities in her writing, she will be as inefficient as the blind person who tries to read the street by restricting her attention to the actual pressures in her hand caused by the cane. Such an approach requires so much translation -- "Let's see, if this effect, then that cause, and therefore I should make the following move . . ." -- which, in turn, causes a cloud of self-consciousness and fog, in the behavior of the writer or the canewielder. You need to be like the ancient mariner who has the power simply to look the reader in the eye and start talking and thereby paralyze her: prevent her from moving away, compel her to listen, and compel her to experience everything you are saying. This will come quickest by concentrating not on the details of your technique, but on the importance of your tale. If you succeed in really believing your tale is deeply important, you already and automatically believe in magic without giving the matter any awareness at all. All the rituals that writers perform, then -- "I've got to have a number 2 pencil with a perfect point. I must work at certain times and places, I must never read over what I've written on the same day I write it, and if I talk to anyone about what I'm writing, it will be ruined" -- these rituals and fetishes are testaments to belief. Belief in the magic of getting words to come out of one's guts and a belief in the power of words to hit readers in the gut. Belief produces that universal injustice proclaimed by Christ: the rich get richer and the poor poorer. Someone who manages to have success in writing tends to write suddenly better. She's finally learned to believe that she can wield magic. She halfdoubted it before. With her success comes belief and with that comes a sudden infusion of new power. Belief is the source of a child's power. The child commands our attention because it doesn't enter her head that we could do anything else but pay full attention. One of the saddest sights of all is that spunkless child who lacks this power to command attention: she's gotten so little trustworthy attention that she's lost her knowledge that of course her words have power. But most of us somewhere on the way to adulthood also lost our knowledge that of course our words have power. "Naturally," explains the realist. "That's what we mean by being an adult. Tiny children cannot help thinking that their words -- even their unspoken wishes -- magically cause events. But if children want to grow up they must learn to see cause-and-effect accurately and forsake primitive wishful thinking." Yes, I reply from my moderate magi cal view, we must learn enough realism to understand that our every wish and word do not cause action in the world. But we must not go as far in our "learning" as most people go when they end up feeling they cannot put magic into words. If it is childish to believe that our every wish causes action in the world, it is equally childish to sulk at the loss of omnipotence and conclude that individuals are helpless to change the world and that words cannot move mountains. They can. A few people have power all the time; most people have it occasionally (though they tend to forget about it or try to explain it away); and everyone has power available. The agenda for the writer then is clear: to regain that ability to put magic into words. It takes more, of course, than merely believing in magic. It takes practice and skill. But belief is necessary, and the amazing thing is how far belief can take you toward doing it -- especially if you have already worked hard on your writing. What does this mean, then, in practice? I think it means the kinds of advice I gave in the Voice and Experience chapters. The activities I advised there are activities of really doing it: putting your awareness all the way out to the end of the cane, not merely to the end of your fingers. In a sense, you can only send your experience as far as the page, but you need to think your experiences all the way through to the inside of your reader's skull. More advice. Use the truth wherever possible. Real events. Real names. In addition, however, practice lying whenever possible. The entrance into magic is through the truth. By putting real experiences and your real self into words you will get a feeling for what it is like to wield magic, and with this feeling you can begin to practice telling lies -- practice "having" experiences you I've never had, practice getting your real self or whole self entirely behind words that are false, ironic, ambivalent, or even evasive. (Some people, of course, cannot tell the truth convincingly, but they can tell lies or wishes or dreams with compelling power. To be strictly accurate, then, I should not advise so unqualifiedly to start with truth. The best advice is simply to believe in magic and find where your magic lies readiest to hand. Once you get a feeling for your ability to put magic into words, then you can learn gradually-don't hurry -- to expand the range.) More advice. Magic is catching. It can help enormously to put yourself in the company of people who are succeeding in using their magic. Read their words. Usten to them read their words out loud. Write in the same room or the same building with them; write when they write; look for chances to go off with them for a day's or a week's work-play of writing and sharing. Read your words out loud to them. (Try to avoid two dangers: don't get negative feedback from them on your writing if you are not genuinely ready for it or if they give it destructively. Just insist that they listen and praise the bits they like. Secondly, don't let yourself be intimidated: "Oh dear, they can do it, I'll never be able to do it." Try to keep these helpless feelings from depriving you of the enormous boost you get from being with people who are using their magic.) You can catch magic even from yourself. That is, it can help a lot to read over pieces of your own writing that you know are successful and powerful. Read your good words silently; better yet out loud. This gives you the actual psycho-muscular feeling for what it was like to put juice into words. By reawakening this memory/feeling, you can more easily get into that gear again. Reading over your own good work is particularly useful when you are having a hard time getting warmed up -- perhaps after a long period of nonwriting. Success is infectious. Don't therefore start by trying to write the Great American Novel and sending it off to the best publishers, or sending poems off to the New Yorker. Instead of inviting continual rejection, insist at all costs on being published and read. Find small or informal magazines, presses, publications; if necessary, crank it out yourself on a mimeograph machine and distribute it to readers you know. Write for audiences you can actually reach: people who know you and like you, people whowrill understand you, people for whom your words will work. I can't decide whether my reasonably magical view of writing is literally true or not, or whether the stimulus-response account of language is the correct one or not. I don't quite know how one might settle the question once and for all. But the magical view is useful. For teachers, critics, and theorists will always be tempted to try to specify exactly what characterizes good writing. Some talk about certain kinds of syntactic complexity (certain numbers of words per "T-Unit," for example), some talk about sensory specificity or the absence of generalizations, some talk about unity or coherence or ambiguity or tone. it's inevitable. If I had some good ideas about what constituted good writing I would get excited and try to tell everyone. But the magical view saves us from these precise specifications. And that is a good thing for two reasons. First, I think they are false: whenever I see an abstract description of what makes good writing, I always think of actual cases of good writing that violate it. secondly, such descriptions take your attention to the wrong place as you write. They make you think about the writing as you write instead of about your meaning or topic-they preoccupy you with making sure your words have the right characteristics instead of whether you can really see the bamboo; they make you look at the glass in the window instead of through to the view. Most of all, the magical view of writing helps you believe what is necessary and true: that your words can have enormous power.But the magical view has dangers. It can trick many people into believing what is false and destructive: that the source of this power is entirely outside you, that power comes from stern-eyed gods or fickle muses or from the state of your soul (which you can't see or judge), or from "it," or from standing out of the way, or from getting all the steps right in some mysterious ritual dance.The magical view can reinforce helplessness and lead to feelings like these: | | • I don't know where the power comes from. All I can do is hope and pray. Nothing I do makes any difference. | | | • What I've written is worthless because I've been using the wrong colored 3 by 5 cards or writing at the wrong time of day. There's nothing I can do to improve it now. | | | • I've talked too much about this piece and frittered away all its vital juices. There's nothing to do but give up on it. | | | • I can't revise or improve this piece; the words just came to me because I stood out of the way, they're not my words. If I make any change the whole thing will come entirely apart and I won't be able to put anything back together again. | | | • If I ever lose what I've written I can never rewrite or reconstruct it. | | | • I can't write today; my focus is all wrong and besides I've missed the fruitful time of day. |
Thinking in terms of magic can also trip you up by making you want magic too badly -- make you unwilling to slog along writing mediocre, dead, even terrible words. Everyone has the impulse to put off writing till the mood is right. Mere laziness, perhaps, but also it reflects a truth -- sometimes you have magic and sometimes you haven't -- and a falsehood -- that when you haven't got it, no amount of effort or shrewdness will do any good. * But magic isn't everything. Sometimes what you need most is just to get something written, and wanting magic too badly will keep you from doing so. Often you can write something that is true and clear and important -- but lacks magic. If you had insisted on magic you would have written nothing at all. I return here, then, to the main theme of my book. You must learn -- and for some reason you often have to relearn -- how to churn out words whether or not you feel in tune with what you are writing. The precondition for writing well is being able to write badly and to write when you are not in the mood. Sometimes you cannot get to the magic except through a long valley of fake, dead writing. Though you must believe in magic, then, often you must be willing to do without it. ____________________ | * | "You can create magic by disciplining yourself to write and work and concentrate. Like the medicine man, you can do it on command. (Professional writers do, and have the appropriate accompanying rituals.) It's not just waiting for it to happen to you, on the one hand, or pouring out words on the paper hoping it will come, on the other hand. It's some way, through ritual, concentrating, working very hard, of getting yourself into that state. You can force yourself to see. The way may be long-lots of dead words or cigarette butts -- but if you've once experienced it you'll try for it again." Margaret Proctor, a good writing teacher, commenting on a draft of this chapter. |
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