Getting It Out (Again)

Getting It Out (Again)

    Occasionally, I'll receive the comment or hear someone say, I need to get started on that.  "That" could be anything from writing a book or a memoir or a blog, or taking those art or piano lessons.  And yes, I've written about this before, about getting such thoughts and yearnings out of your system, about how (at least for me) it clears up space in your head, much as finishing even one small task does (say, clearing that one corner shelf in the garage or closet).  You emerge with a feeling of "ahhh," as if now you can say to friends or family (but primarily to yourself for in truth, it matters little to others as much as it does to yourself), "There, I did it!"

    This sort of thought was captured in a collaborative effort by Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd, the former being a writer and the latter an editor; and after 40 years of working together, they decided to put down some of their thoughts on writing and on editing; their resulting book, Good Prose, proves both an enjoyable and educational read, especially for both aspiring and long-time writers, their opening lines starting with this: To write is to talk to strangers. You want them to trust you.  You might well begin by trusting them--by imagining for the reader an intelligence you imagine for yourself.  No doubt you know some things that the reader does not know (why else presume to write?), but it helps to grant that the reader has knowledge unavailable to you.  This isn't generosity; it is realism...writers are told that they must "grab" or "hook" or "capture" the reader.  But think about these metaphors.  Their theme is violence and compulsion.  They suggest the relationship you might want to have with a criminal, not a reader...beginnings are an exercise in limits.  You can't make the reader love you in the first sentence or paragraph; but you can lose the reader right away..."Write about what you know," writers are told, and it's logical to conclude that what you know best is yourself.  In fact, you may know too much.  In honest moments we understand ourselves as creatures of great contrariety.  Many selves compete inside.  How to honor this knowledge without descending into gibberish or qualifications worthy of a chairman of the Federal Reserve?  How to preside over your own internal disorder?

    Indeed, how many writers and would-be writers never start because their internal question is often, where to begin?  A few pints at the pub or a few glasses of wine at the dinner table and you'll soon hear, "I've got all kinds of stories...I should/could write a book."  And don't we all, have stories, that is?  For isn't that is what life is about, the stories of our experiences, our travels, the people we've bumped into, the narrow escapes.  But it would seem that writers and painters and other artists seem to want more, as if wanting to let a bit of the world know about it (for better or worse) and read or hear their interpretations of these personal tales or (sometimes) imagined adventures.  As the author, Molly Lefebure, put it, "In my case I was ambitious to be a writer, and any person nursing such a lunatic and unwholesome aim in life should be subjected to every chastisement possible, to drive the devil out, as it were."  In her case, she falls in love with Murder On the Home Front, her memoirs of what else was occurring during the Blitz in London (which were the usual murders and crimes), working as a secretary in morgues and witnessing forensics at work (her book was very loosely transformed into a PBS series).  But she loved to write (even going on to write children's books and become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature) and despite the title, the book proves quite enjoyable, a glimpse of a different era as well as a different vocation.  Here's one tidbit: My days were spent happily around the mortuaries, on my job, my evenings gaily gallivanting around town with my escorts; a perfect combination of work and pleasure.  Unfortunately the escorts were, almost invariably, appalled by the idea of my work and read me long, severe, prosy lectures on the subject. (Males have a weakness for long, severe, prosy lectures.)...My girlfriends, on the other hand, all envied me my job, and were constantly pressing me for gruesome details.  "Do give me the news of any good murders, darling," they would write...Whereas a boyfriend's epistle would say, "Next time you write, please don't mention stiffs.  They give me the willies..."  But oddly enough, when the sexes get together at my flat over a supper party or some such, I discover that they reverse the process.  If the subject of crime arises, it is the males then who clamor, in true he-man style, to hear gruesome details, see photographs, while the women, much to my interest, stage an equally determined volte-face..."I was going to show Mary my pictures of the Wigwam case," I say briskly and brightly.  "Wouldn't you like to see them, Mary darling?"  Mary, who last time she came to visit me, alone, could not be torn away from the Wigwam pictures, now gives a cry and waggles her head in violent protest, covering her eyes.  "For heaven's sake," says her husband, "if you show her things like that she'll never get over the nightmares...I don't mind seeing 'em" (bracing himself, like Gary Cooper going to shoot up a posse)...Women are much harder-boiled than men, but they'll fight to the last ditch before they let the men know it...

    Back to author Tracy Kidder:  There is something you want to say, and yet you are dogged by the perennial questions --sometimes useful, but sometimes fatal-- that can visit any writer.  Who am I to be writing this?  Who asked me?  And cruelest of all, Who cares?...When you write about your own ideas, you put yourself in a place that can feel less legitimate than the ground occupied by reporters or even by memoirists, who are, or ought to be, authorities on their subjects.  An all-purpose term describes efforts at sharing your mind: the essay...Essays are self-authorizing.  This is the dilemma but also the pleasure of the form.  The chances are that nobody asked for your opinion.  But if your idea is fresh, it will surprise someone...Essays often gain their authority from a particular sensibility's fresh apprehension of generalized wisdom.  But the point is not to brush aside the particular in favor of the general, not to make everything into a grand idea, but to treat something specific with such attention that it magnifies into significance...You don't need to have fought wars, climbed mountains, received the confidences of presidents; you can have the most mundane of experiences and make something that surpasses them...The reader's eye adjusts to this level of magnification...The essayist's relationship with the reader depends, as always, on mutual trust, but trust of a special kind.  In the essay, trust in the author and disagreement with the author can coexist...You ask the reader to take you seriously, to honor your conviction even if your ideas provoke more than they persuade.  You want engagement as least as much as you want belief.  You welcome the silent dialogue with the reader, even if the reader is disputing with you.  After all, you are often in dispute with yourself: beliefs are reached in the course of writing, and essays trace the course.  "How do I know what I mean until I hear what I say?" is the familiar line.  But its opposite is also true: How do I know what I don't mean until I hear what I say?

    Once again, the point being that we all have something to bring to the world.  Some write, some paint, some argue, some just quietly help without seeking reward or recognition.  Where my mother is now staying, one of the residents (now, for the most part, appearing quite bed-ridden) has her walls lined with her paintings, large neo-classical paintings filled with lush wild flowers and countrysides of yore.  To glimpse these massive paintings is to feel as if you are in a museum, a personal museum of what this person just "had" to get down.  Beautifully done, worthy (in my view, anyway) of adding beauty to any wall in anyone's home.  It's not something I feel she could do today, her appearance frail, her body seeming to not truly be able to capture what her mind would want to convey...but gaze at her walls and one can only imagine her pride at what she had accomplished.  She got it out of her while she could, her expression of what was going on inside her, how she saw the world before her, it was beauty wanting to be put down on canvas.

    One doesn't have to be a master or an expert or a prodigious talent.  One need only start...as I said with my game of conversation, the idea is not to agree or disagree but to simply start discussing.  You may have dozens or hundreds or thousands of stories or paintings or songs or visions in your head...maybe it's time to be getting them out, setting them free.  As Tracy Kidder says, albeit in a somewhat mean way, Who cares?  Well maybe now is the time to flip that around to the positive...be yourself, as they say, dance as if no one is watching, be free...because really, who cares?