I emphasize the complexity of reading because I think that what you must do as writer, if you want power in your words, is equally complex, mysterious, and hard to define. But it's simple to say. My entire advice for this chapter -- though I will spell it out more fully and practically at the end -- can be boiled down to this: if you want readers to breathe life into your writing so that they get a powerful experience from it, then you must breathe experience into your words as you write. I don't know why it should be the case that if you experience what you are writing about -- if you go to the bamboo -- it increases the chances of the reader's experiencing the bamboo. But that's the way it seems to work. The more you try out this hypothesis
I emphasize the complexity of reading because I think that what you must do as writer, if you want power in your words, is equally complex, mysterious, and hard to define. But it's simple to say. My entire advice for this chapter -- though I will spell it out more fully and practically at the end -- can be boiled down to this: if you want readers to breathe life into your writing so that they get a powerful experience from it, then you must breathe experience into your words as you write. I don't know why it should be the case that if you experience what you are writing about -- if you go to the bamboo -- it increases the chances of the reader's experiencing the bamboo. But that's the way it seems to work. The more you try out this hypothesis about reading and writing, the more you will see it confirmed. I can illustrate the process most vividly with a workshop game where you try to tell images so that others actually see them. What often happens is that the student describes something, perhaps a maple tree in the middle of the front lawn with flowers growing around the trunk. But it doesn't quite work. It doesn't make me see it. I say, "Wait. I can't see it. You must not have seen it. Close your eyes and wait till you really see it. Stop looking for words, look for the vision itself. Don't hurry." And we wait a bit while the speaker closes her eyes and tries to see the image clearly, and then she says, "I can see it now, but it's a little bit different now. " And she tells her image, but the tree isn't in the middle of the lawn. It's really near the sidewalk. And it doesn't have flowers around it, it has long strands of scraggly grass that the lawnmower didn't get. And as she tells it, it does work, we all see it clearly. It's as though her first image was an imperfect or distorted view of the "real" image, the second one. The first time she was trying to see it through a poor telescope so she had to invent some details. When I push, she focuses the lens better and can finally see the image clearly. Of course there is no reason, theoretically, why the speaker couldn't see the original image of the tree in the middle of the lawn with flowers around it. And it's a perfectly good image. That's what characterizes a good writer: the ability to see anything. But this inexperienced writer needed to put all her efforts into having an experience instead of trying to stick with any particular image, and when she did so, she got more experience into her words, but the tree moved near to the sidewalk and the flowers changed to scraggly grass. Probably that first image was "constructed" on the basis of a half-remembered scene while the improved image goes back and taps that memory itself. Or perhaps neither image is an exact memory, but the second one makes more use of memory fragments than the first one did. 'Me first one was too much of an idea or conception, not enough of an experience. I seem to be saying that if you could actually go to the bamboo and stand there looking at it -- if you could suddenly be transported back to your old childhood bedroom which you are trying to write about now-your words would automatically have more power. And, of course, they probably would. But I can get closer to the heart of what I mean by "breathing experience into words" by pointing out that actually looking at the bamboo with your own eyes is not necessarily enough. This is the lesson you learn in a drawing class where they have you do push-ups in really seeing, not just looking. You must do the classic Nicolaides drawing exercise where you are not allowed to take your eyes off the object for the entire time of the drawing, not allowed to look at your paper at all. The goal is to learn to really see-to pour all your energy into your eyes and into the object. Not to let any of your attention leak away from the object you are drawing to anything else, such as whether your drawing looks right. The drawings people produce when they can't look at their paper are very instructive. They are liable to have obvious distortions of one sort or another. But they usually have more life, energy, and experience in them than drawings produced when you keep looking back to your paper and correcting your line and thereby achieving more accuracy. They give the viewer more of the experience of that torso or apple. (I remember a drawing of a nude I made this way, and it was really quite good; I was proud of it and wanted to show it off, but the genitals were embarrassingly large. With this method, you tend to enlarge what you pay good attention to.) It may be complicated for psychologists or philosophers to deal with this distinction between seeing and really seeing, but it's simple enough to notice it on certain occasions: you stand there on the lawn and really see that beech tree and somehow the perception fills you or fully occupies you -- the tree is wholly present to you. Or else, you stand there and, yes, you see it, but somehow you don't see it fully, for you are slightly distracted or numb or unable to focus your attention. Some of your energy or attention is elsewhere. There is incomplete impact or commerce between you and the tree. (Obviously this isn't really a binary distinction between "merely seeing" and "really seeing," but rather a gradual continuum that stretches from pathological distractedness up to mystic participation.) The principle that emerges, especially after many image workshops, is simple. If you want your words to make a reader have an experience, you have to have an experience yourself -- not just deal in ideas or concepts. (I will talk about conceptual or idea-writing in the next chapter.) What that means in practice is that you have to put all your energy into seeing -- into connecting or making contact or participating with what you are writing about -- into being there or having the hallucination. And no effort at all into searching for words. When you have the experience, when you have gotten to the bamboo, you can just open your mouth and the words that emerge will be what you need. (In the case of writing, though, you will have to revise later.) It is probably easier to really experience something if you are actually standing there looking at it. But not necessarily. And it is probably easier to really experience something if you have actually seen it -- that is, you will probably do better writing about memories than about made-up events. But not necessarily. For the essential act in experiencing something is wholly internal: the opening of some slippery gland or the clenching of some hidden muscle to allow a full participation between one's self and the object (or event or experience or sensation). To achieve this act of full experience, sometimes it feels as though we must do something positive: clench or scrunch or try harder to focus all our energy. But sometimes, on the other hand, the essential act feels like a letting go. We must learn to release something and just allow the perception to fill us up. I permit myself a grand vagueness here. I think the subject warrants it if we talk at the level of theory. But, in practice, things are simple. When I read a piece of imaginative writing that doesn't work -- doesn't give me the experience it is talking about (such as the magenta clouds piece), I have learned that I can tell the student, "I can't see it! I don't believe you are really seeing or hearing it as you write. Don't think about words. Go back and experience it. Then see what words come." This advice usually helps. For you as writer, then, the crucial distinction is between trying to experience your subject fully versus trying to find the right words. In the one activity your energy and attention are directed wholeheartedly to what you are describing, in the other your energy is directed at your language or at your reader or at considerations of what kind of writing you are doing.I don't mean that you should never turn your attention to the words or the audience, or never try to figure out whether you are saying the right thing in the right way. You can and should do exactly that -- just as wholeheartedly -- during a later revising process. You can make drastic changes as you revise and still win readers to create powerful experiences in their heads, so long as the ingredients you are revising grew out of a full experience of your subject. When you devote all your energy to having an experience, the words that come to you may be a great mess. For one thing, there may be too many words. When you try to experience your subject and let the words come as they please, you often find yourself wordily taking two and three shots at the same target. During revising, you will need to omit many of these words. In addition, you may have to rearrange many things -- even make drastic changes of shape. Sometimes there are fewer words because you don't feel obliged to spell out everything you see in your raw version. If you revise only by cutting and rearranging elements in your raw writing, you end up with a revision made only of first-draft words-words written while you were experiencing your subject matter and not thinking about writing. But you can also add new words and passages as you revise -- self-consciously and critically making judgments about what the style, context, audience, and meaning demand. When your raw writing grows directly out of full experience of your subject, the life entrapped in these words enables you to generate more words during the revising process that also contain life. The life in those original words keeps you in touch with the experience and enables you to dart back into it even if only for a moment as you search for a better word or phrase -- even though you are engaged in the cold, calculating process of revising. ____________________ | | There is such a profound and hidden power to sacred words that to one thinking upon things divine, diligently and earnestly pondering them, the most suitable of all musical measures occur (I know not how) as of themselves, and suggest themselves spontaneously to the mind that is not indolent and inert. |
Some Examples Consider this story by Chris Magson: Bill and I were friends, closer than brothers. We grew up on farms next to each other, near Keene. Our families were close, too. When the war broke out, we both signed up, rather than being drafted. We went through basic training, and were assigned to the same unit. We fought for two years on the Pacific atolls and islands. It became hard to remember the days before, in New Hampshire. One day while establishing a beach-bead on some God-forsaken atoll, our unit was wiped out. Bill and me were all that was left. No wounded. I never have figured out what happened. One moment, we were ducking our heads to dodge the flying ammunition, and the next moment everything was quiet, except for the sounds of bloated flies feasting on the sores of the corpses. We kept our heads down, not daring to twitch. After a while, Bill stuck his head above the mound of sand we were hiding behind. "Frank," be whispered to me, "there's nothing out there." When he said that, I took a peek. Nothing but the mangled bodies strewn on the sand. I recognized a few. Silent, we gathered up the dog tags. Most of them were discolored. We didn't see a sign of the enemy. Not alive, anyway. We took all the water and food we could carry and set off to find the highest part of the small isle. The growth was stunted, and yellow. We didn't say much. We heard nothing, not even a bird. Bill was walking in front of me about twenty paces, but when he stepped on the mine, it sent me flying. I fetched up against a tree. 'Alen I came to, the first thing I saw was the bloody bundle of rags that was Bill. He had no legs or arms anymore. I went over to him. He was alive, but just barely. Numbly, I tourniquetted his seeping stumps and shot an ampule of morphine into his shattered hip. I looked at his face, and turned away again. He was trying to speak, so I leant near his mouth. "Frank," he said, his breath flagging, "don't leave me like this . . . rifle." I knew what he wanted, and I put my gun next to his ear, but I couldn't squeeze the trigger. Blood came out of his mouth and I thought he was dead. I left him, and stumbled weeping uphill. I walked until I noticed that the plants were getting green, and I could hear a bird. I stopped and sat. I poured a little warm water from the canteen over my hair, and wondered what to do next. The sun was white, and it bounced off the rocks nearby and struck my wet eyes. I got up and walked some more, hoping to find shade. I didn't find any, so I kept walking. I stumbled into a glade without noticing. I looked down, and the grass under my dusty boots looked trimmed. I sat down and wondered about it. Anything to keep my mind off of Bill. It was about then that I saw something in the middle of the opening. It looked like a bank safe without a door or handle. On the top of it, there was something like a funnel tilted off to one side. The object was a dull grey, and the funnel-thing looked like an old gramophone trumpet. There was no grass around it, just a circle of yellow dust. It hurt my eyes to look at the thing. It made a noise just then, a sound like a pulse beat. I couldn't hear it exactly, but I could feel it in my bones. The pulse got louder, and more vibrant, and it kept increasing until my eyes watered. It went THUM THUM THUM and then, out of the funnel, shapes in dark smoke erupted. They rolled into themselves like furry smoke rings. I remember Bill's grandfather used to delight us when we were little by making them, his creased face working. But it wasn't smoke rings that came out of the thing, but shapes, rectangles, smoky pyramids and perfect spheres. I watched it, not believing. The shapes curled out, and instead of fading, they came to the ground and flattened out, while retaining their shape. The thing let out an anvil-shaped burst, and stopped. "Hello, I've been waiting so long," something in back of me said. I whirled around, and stood facing the lady. She was dressed in a kneelength black skirt and there were pearls clustered round her throat. She was about fifty, or maybe forty. It was hard to tell. She spoke again. "Now, I can leave. Thank you so much for coming." She held her hands out by her side and closed them, saying, "Come children, we must go now." She walked away, her arms positioned like she was holding hands with two children. She looked back at me smiling, and said, "You must understand. I know they are gone, but the delusion is enough for me." I shouted at her as she left the clearing. "What do you mean! Please!" The thing in the center THRUMed again, and I turned around. Bill was walking toward me, waving his arm and smiling. He broke into a trot. There are three passages which I feel trying hardest to be powerful: the early silent moment with flies and corpses, the death of the buddy, and the final pathos of the woman's feeling for her children. But though these passages tug at me and ask me to have a powerful experience, I find I refuse. I hold back from putting myself in and constructing the feelings asked for by the words. His. rendering of the smoke machine, on the other hand, seems powerful. I experience it vividly. I'm taken out of myself and given a kind of participation in that strange series of images and in this way I am genuinely moved by it. My hypothesis is that the writer experienced that. machine more wholeheartedly, with better focus of attention, than he did. any other part of the story. When I spoke to him I discovered that the machine, exactly as he described it, had appeared to him in a dream the night before he wrote the story and that it had indeed been the germ that gave rise to the whole story. He was, in effect, starting off from a powerful experience and I would say that be managed well, as he wrote, to put himself back into that experience, to connect with those perceptions in his dream. Let me contrast this powerful passage with the other three that are trying but not fully succeeding in making me construct an experience in my head. The final one with the woman and children seems particularly weak. It seems generated almost entirely by a clever (though obscure) idea the writer had-a gimmick almost-as he cogitated a way to end the story. He didn't let the story end itself; he had to figure out and manipulate an ending. The middle passage about the death of the buddy, I would guess, does to some degree grow out of an experience, but I sense it also grows out of the idea of this event: it is a conceptualized event as much as it is an experienced event. My guess is that the writer had an experience of sorts-some kind of losing of a buddy, yes-but really wasn't willing to pay anywhere near the price in emotional investment it would have taken to go past the feelings to the event itself and experience precisely this loss of a buddy through gruesome, close-up death. That early moment of silence with flies and corpses is an interesting borderline case. It is a powerful sentence with its sudden contrast: "One moment we were ducking our heads to dodge the flying ammunition and the next moment everything was quiet except for the sounds of the bloated flies feasting on the sores of the corpses." It doesn't quite win me to have the experience it is talking about, but I may be more finicky here than some readers: Ij think my refusal comes as much as anything from the fact that he is trying to make me have such a strong experience so early in the story. If I came on these words later in the story, after I bad built up more trust for him (which I do build up-until the gimmicky ending, where I lose it) probably I would consent automatically to build for myself the experience he was trying to convey. (My hunch is that he was experiencing the time-lapse -- a striking psychological event that probably intrigued him in his own experience-more than the gruesome physical details.) Since I started looking at writing and my reactions in this way, I have begun to sense a kind of small-is-powerful principle. That is, often I find the most powerful parts of a story to be renderings of smaller, less intense experiences. Writers often fail when they try to render deep, harrowing ones. They run into a double barrier. Not only is it harder for them as writers to put themselves wholeheartedly into such strong experiences; but even if they do so, they are asking for an enormous expenditure on the part of the reader. Of course, it can work the other way around: a powerful or harrowing experience, because of its impact on the writer, can lead her to focus better all her attention upon it so that she experiences it fully again as she sits down to her desk two months or two years later. Notice, however, that bigger is only likely to be better if it is an experience you have actually had. When you try to make up intensely powerful events, you are especially likely to fall on your face. And, in general, as I see writers learning really to experience what they are rendering in words, I see them tending to deescalate the emotional scale, and focus on smaller, humbler events than they used to try for. It is the hallmark of inexperienced writers -- corny True Magazine writers -- constantly to clutch for more and more "powerful" experiences. Since they don't really experience all these harrowing events as they write, they don't come up with words which inspire a reader to do so either. Consider this short piece by Randy Silverman: Snaggle-toothed, crouched in a hall that is dimly lit, draped in a non-descript raincoat, stands a man. He is drunk, he's not a poet. Lke a dream on a moonless night, he stands there and does not think. He is the remains of a life he would rather not remember. Lost behind the bloodshot doors of misery lay a man of heart. In the eyes of this stranger was no sign of recognition that a rather large, green, iguana was scampering up the hall towards him. The iguana's tail brushed his shoe as it ran down the hall, followed closely by three or four excited children. The iguana scurried in an open door down the hall, and the kids disappeared close behind it. The door slammed, and the hall was again thrown into dim-lit silence. The snaggle-toothed man, now leaning against a door frame, gurgled to himself a song he no longer remembered. His eyes wandered around the hall, taking in the old paint and plaster. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the glass window of the door across the hall, and he paused. A faint recognition ran through his mind, like a hedgehog moving in its tunnel. He remembered his wife, Mira, as she looked at him with her deep penetrating eyes, so serious. Her mouth showed no sign of a smile or ripple of a frown, a Mona Lisa mouth. Her hat was cloth and fit close to her head, turned up at the edges. One shoulder was bare. The man looked away from the glass and down to the floor. He hunched his head over and heaved a sob of grief, then another, and another, until his eyes burst into tears. His head bobbed up and down like a cork for a few minutes, then the tears subsided into a calm stream, washing his face and beard. Suddenly he noticed a tugging at his pants leg. Looking down, he discovered the tugging was coming from a little girl of no more than four, standing there next to him in her nightgown. In her left hand she was holding out a napkin for him to take. He reached out his hand and took the napkin from her and put it to his face. These words have the power of making me construct the experiences rather than just reading the directions. I hear the music. I believe that in the act of writing, Silverman managed to focus wholeheartedly on the events or images, to participate in the experience he is rendering. There is no energy leaking off to the side in a search for words or concern for the reader or doubt about the value of what he is describing. (Of course, he may have thought about all these things while he revised.) I sense a slight lessening of power in this early passage: "He is the remains of a life he would rather not remember. Lost behind the bloodshot doors of misery lay a man of heart." The passage interprets the scene -- tells us how to feel -- rather than just giving us the scene. In contrast, however, the very next sentence about the iguana represents for me a surge of greater than usual experience. In the later simile about the hedgehog and the memory of the wife, I feel a better than usual ability to let the words grow out of experience. My hypothesis is that Silverman managed in this story, and especially in those strong passages, to stand out of the way-to keep his self or mere thinking or feeling out of the way-and to let the experiences somehow find their way into words under their own steam. (It is interesting to note that just as when you read something good you don't feel you are expending any effort, so, too, when your writing goes particularly well, you may not feel you are expending effort either. When you make a good enough connection with the bamboo, neither you nor your reader has to do any work; all the energy comes from the bamboo, from the gods, from fission. All the same, you may feel drained and tired at the end of one of these lucky writing sessions.) My emphasis on the need to have the experience is just another way of giving the old traditional writing advice: show, don't tell. That is, if you want readers to feel something, it's no good telling them how to feel ("it was simply terrifying"). You have to show them things that will terrify them. When I feel a writer trying to convey an experience by intoning "nevermore" or "ineluctable" or "chthonic," I resist her and do not get the experience: she is taking her attention away from her perception of the bamboo and becoming preoccupied with trying to make an effect. Explaining or trying too hard for fancy language is like holding up laugh cards to the studio audience at a radio or TV show: we resist when they try to tell us how to feel. The advice here is almost (but not quite) the same as that other traditional advice: to give lots of specific sensory details and avoid generalizations. That is, if I persuade you to be specific in describing the tree and not just gush about how beautiful it is-to give the color of its leaves and the texture of its bark and the sound of its leaves in the wind-that will probably force you to go back and reexperience that tree. But it is not the sensory details in themselves that will make your description work, it is your experience of the tree that does it. Sometimes when people are advised again and again to put specific details in their writing, they start to make them up without experiencing them. Here at the end of this passage is a particularly lifeless-because-not-experienced sensory detail. After work, Don went to a show he had seen advertised in the newspaper. It was in a hotel ballroom not far from the shop. Don went into the main showroom, his feet tipping into the thick crimson carpet. This was written by a student who seemed to me to suffer from a tendency to write from ideas and conceptions rather than from ex perience. I was searching for something to praise -- something where I could say, "Do more of this," not just "Don't do that" -and I lit on the bit about the feet hitting the carpet. And "tipping into" is an interesting metaphor. I ended up saying, "Do more of that," but, in truth, I suspect that the whole detail of the feet hitting the red carpet grew out of an idea or a ready-made phraseand-idea that the writer had encountered in her reading, not out of experience. I couldn't really feel any experience of feet hitting carpet. (Of course, reading is a source of real experience, too: one can borrow phrases and even long passages out of one's reading-as many great writers have done -- so long as you experience them and thereby make them yours.) In short, "See the tree!" or "Experience the tree!" is better advice than "Give more specific details about the tree!" Experiencing the tree can, in fact, lead to unspecific writing that is nevertheless powerful -- as the following passage illustrates: We drank in the garden. It was a spring day -- one of those green-gold Sundays that excite our incredulity. Everything was blooming, opening, burgeoning. There was more than one could see -- prismatic lights, prismatic smells, something that sets one's teeth on edge with pleasure -- but it was the shadow that was most mysterious and exciting, the light one could not define. We sat under a big maple, its leaves not yet fully formed but formed enough to hold the light, and it was astounding in its beauty, and seemed not like a single tree but one of a million, a link in a long train of leafy trees beginning in childhood. JOHN CHEEVER, "The Lowboy", The Stories of John Cheever ( New York, 1978) |
