Blogging, in my experience, is the very best way to break a writers’ block. It is a little like journalling, in that you write fast, with lower standards, suspending your inner critic. You write fast, and write a lot. And the habits of writing fast, writing fluently, translate over to one’s real writing.
Milton said he wrote prose “with his left hand.” If one is both a serious literary writer, and a blogger, one could view blogging as “left-hand writing” which one does partly to keep thinking, keep writing, keep one’s fingers nimble and ready to the task.
I do my “real” writing so much more easily and confidently because, 6 days a week, I update my three blogs,
wanderingbetweentwoworlds.blogspot.com among them, and so have got used to writing fast, to the best of my ability. Not striving for perfection, but for a piece of writing which is “good enough.”
The Magical Moment in Which You Realize that You Are, or Will Be a Writer
The Magical Moment in Which You Realize that You Are, or Will Be a Writer
Anne Sexton said she realized that she was a poet (I suppose she meant that she had the capacity to be a poet) while watching John Berryman read on TV.
It really a magical moment, the sort of moment in fairy tales when Snow White or Sleeping Beauty discover that they really are princesses.
My own moment came in two installments. In my early twenties I started writing poetry in a rush. And it was like,”Okay, I love this, I can do it. Not as well as Keats, okay, but well enough to give me, and perhaps some others, pleasure.”
My next moment happened several years later. I was reading a description of a family united around the consumption of gargantuan meals in Patricia Hampl’s “A Romantic Education,” and thought “Yes, that’s like my family. I can do this too.” Around that time, I read Annie Dillard’s “An American Childhood” about a bookish and privileged childhood in a steel town much like Jamshedpur, India, where I grew up, each chapter about a different passion or obsession, and I thought, “Yes, I can do this. And this is how.”
Life intervened in the form of two children, health issues, the need to work to pay for the girls’ private school education, but now I am back to writing happily, hoping to complete my memoir, and my slender volume of poetry.
In Which Remembering Your Original Call Proves a North Star When You Have Lost Your Way
One’s original call often contains clues for the way you are to go when you have lost your way.
I started writing oh many, many years ago. I was praying about what my next move should be, and was setting my sights entirely too low.
I heard God say, “Apply to Oxford University.” I was living in Madras, India.
I asked, “And how will I get the money to go there?”
And I heard a reply, “You’ve got your pen, haven’t you?”
And I started writing poetry in an ecstatic rush. 8 poems I remember. I probably don’t have them any more, and probably wouldn’t be proud of them if I did.
A little later, I entered a national creative writing competition, and won the first prize.
So I started writing as a gift from God.
And then tried to do it with my own strength for many years. Focusing on prizes, praise, money, recognition…
And it never went the way I hoped it would.
I took a break from writing for nearly 4 years to establish a family business, a publishing company.
And had the greatest difficulty in returning to writing. Writer’s block, or maybe a plenitude of distractions.
I was able to return to writing through a renewed surrender of my life to God, a request for living waters to flow through me, and repenting and letting go of unforgiveness, and of sin revealed to me.
I was able to write again as easily as I did at first, and with the same joy.
Writing for the joy of it, not worrying about what editors or publishers or critics thought.
And that revitalises me when I get tired and writing palls. I remember how I will get recharged: By returning my writing to its giver, to write with his strength, not mine.
To be a conduit for the living waters of the spirit of God.
“What I do is me; For that I came”: The Song of the Creative
What I do is me; For that I came.
The wandering liquid notes
Of cuckoo and mourning dove
Float through our garden
High and full of joy.
They sing because they can,
They sing because they must.
On Milford Sound, I saw dolphins
Leap through the fjord
Like lambs at dusk in the Lakes,
They swoop up because they must.
They cannot contain their joy
As you made the cuckoo
Sing its insistent song,
As you made dolphins leap
With joy through the seas of the world,
You gave me the joy of words.
Help me to make them shine and sing,
As a bird thrills, as fish swish.
Let me use them to praise and play.
Let me rejoice like a bird in the gardens of your world,
Swish like a fish through your seas of mystery.
Help me make words swirl
In this world which sings with wonder
For it is what you have made me to do:
To create loveliness from loveliness.
Virginia Woolf on writing
To write in the fewest possible words, as clearly as possible, exactly what one meant, that was his only lesson in the art of writing--Virginia Woolf on her father Leslie Stephen.
Who said, “Learning to write is learning to think?”
I would realize that time and again in my apprenticeship. You delete a tangled sentence, and think again, “What exactly am I trying to say? What is the impression that I am trying to convey?”
It’s the same when I look at my children’s work, or the work of students (when I used to teach writing). I ask, “What exactly are you trying to say?”. It’s no good trying to sort a tangled sentence. Just go back to the original thought, and make sure that what you are saying represents it.
Clarity first, beauty second.
Saul Bellow’s autobiographical account of breaking through writers’ block
Saul Bellow’s autobiographical account of breaking through writers’ block with the creation of Augie March.
My first thought was that I must get rid of the hospital novel—it was poisoning my life. And next I recognized that this was not what being a novelist was supposed to have meant. This bitterness of mine was intolerable, it was disgraceful, a symptom of slavery. I think I’ve always been inclined to accept the depressions that overtook me and I felt just now that I had allowed myself to be dominated by the atmosphere of misery or surliness, that I had agreed somehow to be shut in or bottled up.
I seem then to have gone back to childhood in my thoughts and remembered a pal of mine whose surname was August—a handsome, breezy, freewheeling kid who used to yell out when we were playing checkers, “I got a scheme!” He lived in the adjoining building and we used to try to have telephone conversations with tin cans connected by waxed grocery string. His father had deserted the family, his mother was, even to a nine-year-old kid, visibly abnormal, he had a strong and handsome older brother. There was a younger child who was retarded—a case of Down syndrome, perhaps—and they had a granny who ran the show. (She was not really the granny; she’d perhaps been placed there by a social agency that had some program for getting old people to take charge of broken families.) Now, just what had happened to handsome, cheerful Chuckie and to his brothers, his mother, and the stranger whom they called granny? I hadn’t seen anything of these people for three decades and hadn’t a clue. So I decided to describe their lives.
This came on me in a tremendous jump. Subject and language appeared at the same moment. The language was immediately present—I can’t say how it happened, but I was suddenly enriched with words and phrases. The gloom went out of me and I found myself with magical suddenness writing a first paragraph.
I was too busy and happy to make any diagnoses or to look for causes and effects. I had the triumphant feeling that this is what I had been born for. I pushed the hospital manuscript aside and began immediately to write in a spirit of reunion with the kid who had shouted, “I got a scheme!” It poured out of me. I was writing many hours every day. In the next two years I seldom looked into Fowler’s “Modern English Usage.”
Perhaps I should also add that it has been a lifelong pattern with me to come back to strength from a position of extreme weakness: I had been almost suffocated and then found that I was breathing more deeply than ever.
It was enormously exhilarating to take liberties with the language. I said what I pleased and I didn’t hesitate to generalize wildly and to invoke and dismiss epochs and worlds. For the first time I felt that the language was mine to do with as I wished.
In writing “Augie March,” I was trying to do justice to my imagination of things. I can’t actually remember my motives clearly, but I seem to have been reacting against confinement in a sardine can and evidently felt I had failed to cope with some inner demands.
Reading passages from “Augie,” I seem to recognize some impulse to cover more ground, to deal with hundreds if not thousands of combined impressions.
To my cold octogenarian eye, it seems overblown now, but I recognize nevertheless that I was out to satisfy an irrepressible hunger for detail. The restraint of the first two books had driven me mad—I hadn’t become a writer to tread the straight and narrow.
I had been storing up stuff for years and this was my dream opportunity for getting it all out. I was also up to my eyes in mental debt. By this I mean that in becoming a writer I hoped to bring out somehow my singular reactions to existence. Why else write? I had prepared and overprepared myself by reading, study, and fact-storage or idea-storage and I was now trying to discharge all this freight. Paris (Europe) may have set me off. I didn’t actually understand what had happened during the Second World War until I had left the U.S.A. I now seem to have been struck by the shame of having written my first book under Marxist influence. In 1939, I had seen the Second World War as a capitalist imperialist war, like the First World War. My Partisan Review Leninist friends (especially Clem Greenberg [Clement Greenberg, the art critic]) had sold me on this. Even in writing “The Victim” I had not yet begun to understand what had happened to the Jews in the Second World War. Much of “Augie” was for me the natural history of the Jews in America. The Jews in Germany, Poland, Hungary, French Jews, Italian Jews had been deported, shot, gassed. I must have had them in mind in the late forties, when I wrote “Augie.”
Every morning when I walked to my rented workroom I stopped to watch the municipal workers who turned on the water for the daily street wash. In the streets there was just slope enough to sluice the gutters, and watching the flow of water between the curb and the barrier of wet burlap gave me the only ease I was getting on those gray days, and the release that came with this was inexplicably verbal in form. I was not much interested in explaining this transfer from fluidity and low sparkle to . . . well, to polyglot versatility. I discovered that I could write whatever I wished, and that what I wished was to get into words the appearance of a gallery of personalities—characters like Grandma Lausch or Einhorn the fertile cripple, or Augie March himself. Years of notation ended in the discovery of a language that made everything available.
A language might be restrictive or it might be expansive. An excess of corrections caused shrinking. Philip Roth puts it well when he speaks of the teeming, dazzling “specifics” in the opening pages of “Augie March.” These specifics were not deliberately accumulated for some future release. They were revealed by the language. They represent the success of an unconscious strategy. You might put it that Mr. Einhorn had been in hock for years; for decades. He and I together had been waiting for an appropriate language. By that language and only that language could he be redeemed. I couldn’t have been aware of this development. It was not an invention; it was a discovery.
The novel I now began to write wrote itself: “I am an American, Chicago-born.” The narrator was a boyhood friend whom I had lost track of thirty years ago, when my family had moved from Augusta Street. I often wondered what had become of this handsome impulsive kid. The book I found myself writing was therefore a speculative biography.
There was something deeply unsatisfactory about the language used by contemporary writers—it was stingy and arid, it was not connected with anything characteristic, permanent, durable, habitual in the writer’s outlook. For as long as I could remember I identified body and limbs, faces and their features, with words, phrases, and tones of voice. Language, thought, belief were connected somehow with noses, eyes, brows, mouths, hair—legs, hands, feet had their counterparts in language. The voice—the voices—were not invented. And whether they knew it or not all human creatures had voices and ears and vocabularies—sometimes parsimonious, sometimes limitless and overflowing. In this way the words and the phenomena were interrelated. And this was what it meant to be a writer.
Learning French
When I was younger, I used to read about all the things one should do to prevent a middle-aged brain degenerating into an old and useless brain.
Learning languages was on every list.
That’s always been a passion of mine.
So, one day, you wake up, and discover: YOU are middle-aged.
Time to learn those languages you always promised yourself you would.
I had Hindi as my second language in school. so choose French.
I didn’t realize how much I would love learning it. I love the sound of it. It honestly fills me with a kind of ecstasy when I understand what my teacher is saying perfectly.
I love the way some French people talk, as if they had a plum in their mouths.
I love translating their expressions to English, and then laughing!!
I love how learning a new language is literally like seeing things from the point of view of another race.
I like reading Le Monde online, and seeing how their World News, is different from the Guardian’s or The New York Times. Subtle shifts in world view.
It is a lovely language. Roy says it is not a serious language: it is a joke language, but I love it, and I agree.
Christian Fiction and “Shadowmancer” by G. P. Taylor
Christian Literature, writing which compromises neither its literary quality nor its ability to point us Christwards—is a holy grail for those of us who are both Christians and writers.
Lewis created it, and Tolkein, and Bunyan.
I read Shadowmancer by G.P. Taylor to Irene, then 8 and she was gripped by it. I heard him Taylor at New Wine, and he is a charming and hilarious speaker.
Shadowmancer is well-constructed, certainly, by traditional rules. Each chapter has a gripping climax, and you end it with your heart in your throat. Irene can hardly bear for a chapter to end. All the same, though the blurb calls it children’s fiction, children’s fiction it most certainly is not.
There is a sense of evil, casual cruelty, menace, and threat that disturbs me. The fate of noble Raphah, the Christ-figure is almost too painful. What I do like a lot, even though it is overt, is the casual quotation from Scripture. Taylor has evidently immersed himself in it, which not all Anglican vicars, I daresay, have and it spills forth, soothing the soul.
Good Christian fiction I can recommend includes Marilynne Robinson’s “Gilead.” She has a good man, a truly good man, as a protagonist, Reverend Ames. Not an over-wound, passionate Christian, he is probably a Christian with a small c, but the goodness of the gospel has soaked through him, He is decent, trustworthy, someone for whom it would be an effort to behave badly. Christianity is so woven into the fabric of his life that is what he is– a Christian almost without any overt effort on his part, an “anima naturaliter Christiana.” A naturally Christian soul!
“Peace like a River” by Leif Enger has another kind of Christian as a protagonist. Jeremiah Land, like Reverend Ames is someone whose first reaction is to pray (as it is increasingly becoming mine). When his hothead son murders bullies who abused his little sister, we see Jeremiah deep in prayer. Land is someone who experiences miracles as a second language. Peace like a River is a startling, and successful attempt to bring the miraculous into the realm and discourse of contemporary fiction.