Prompt # 70

Yesterday I got to play in paint and image and colors and words with my friend Emma who gave us the opportunity to build a visual journal and think about/work with the creative process.There's something about doing that work that brings me to a really quiet place. I call it work because it ends up being big work even though it starts with play. I end up with surprising writing, new ideas, my characters speak up and take over. Poems get written along with to-do lists for creativity. I also know it's big work by how hungry I get after doing it. It's like writing or sex or swimming. It's hard work and fun and you burn some serious calories.

 I'm a big fan of drawing or doodling on the page before or while I'm writing especially If I get stuck. It gets the other side of the brain involved, it opens up a different creative vein. It doesn't matter if you don't think of yourself as an artist. Drawing belongs to you just like writing does.

One of the most interesting exercises we did in our newly made journals was to write about or to, or scribble on our internal critics. I have several. They sit around a big board room conference table, smoking cigars and talking smack about my work. I tried to kill them off once in my writing and I started dreaming about them and getting more and more urgent messages about the writing. Now I just play practical jokes on them, dial down the volume on the loudspeaker in my head and shred any faxes they send up front. They like to dictate their directives to a very hot secretary who wears spike heels and a gray tweed skirt and a button down white crisp blouse. She wears cat eye glasses and chews gum and doesn't speak. Too bad, I'd like to hear what she really thinks. She just takes down their notes word for word and sends them to me. They'd like me to just be all together quiet. Or write limericks. They are okay with limericks. Or any writing that isn't at all risky. That doesn't ring true. I think they are as concerned about my content as the form. They are worried I might someday tell a secret that should never be told. They seem to be here to stay. They have those fancy comfortable chairs, the ones that are cushy and ergonomic and spin in circles. They have air conditioning and big windows with a gorgeous view on the world. It's a good life for those critics and they are in no hurry to leave though I've been trying to send them to Florida to retire, where they can watch pretty bodies on the beach and critique tan people while playing cards and drinking whiskey and patting their paunchy bellies with liver spotted hands. I have a theory about co-opting them for final draft revisions. This will take skilled negotiating but I'm going to try. If I could harness all of that negative energy to help with the work- well that would be amazing. 

I think it's good to get playful when thinking about the critics. Not unlike thinking about people who have been damaging in my life. I like to re-frame them in ways that shrink their power and I love it when I can laugh about them. Laughter is very helpful in shaking perspective to life and re-arranging things that seem concrete and inescapable. 

There are uses for the critical eye as long as it's rational and not bent on destroying your work. I like my critical eye when I'm ready to revise and that's long after the first draft writing. I need to set fresh writing aside awhile. At least a month, longer is better but not always possible. I do my best to never remove a line of writing till it's sat awhile. Till I can look at it with some objectivity.Sometimes I get in there despite my best intentions and cross out a line as I'm writing or substitute a word. It's riskier to write on the computer that way because it's too easy to make a line disappear for ever. On a long sheet of legal paper I can see my original line and my crossed out ideas. It's all there for me. That's why I like drafts that I save. Now I do that on the computer too. I copy and paste my work into a new document and label it the version it is and save the originals. Sometimes the original has something I've lost in my edit. Sometimes the edit is better. It's easier to know for sure if the critics aren't running the show if I save the drafts. Sometimes I cut off their air conditioning so they are restless in that airless office and can't pay such close attention to what I'm doing. 

     

What about your internal critic or critics? Do they plague you as your writing? Do they eat your ideas before you can get them to the page? You can talk back to them. They are renting their real estate from you, even if you don't like them much. You can be playful if you like or tell them to take a hike or invite them to participate later in the final draft. You can envision those voices coming out of an old fashioned radio with a big volume knob. Turn the dial down bit by bit so that they are muted and soft. That can work better than out and out war. For me anything is better than letting them run the show. Engaging with them one way or another or softening their power is better than just letting those voices wear me down. If they wear me down I don't write or I don't write fearless. I write small and polite. That doesn't serve anyone. 

Its all material, even the critics. You get to change their story and yours too if you want. The creative process is mysterious but it's power it unmistakable and it belongs to you. You can play with it. It can be deadly serious or fun or both. It's up to you. 

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Inside

BY LINDA HOGAN

How something is made flesh

no one can say. The buffalo soup

becomes a woman

who sings every day to her horses

or summons another to her private body

saying come, touch, this is how

it begins, the path of a newly born

who, salvaged from other lives and worlds,

will grow to become a woman, a man,

with a heart that never rests,

and the gathered berries,

the wild grapes

enter the body,

human wine

which can love,

where nothing created is wasted;

the swallowed grain

takes you through the dreams

of another night,

the deer meat becomes hands

strong enough to work.

 

But I love most

the white-haired creature

eating green leaves;

the sun shines there

swallowed, showing in her face

taking in all the light,

 

and in the end

when the shadow from the ground

enters the body and remains,

in the end, you might say,

This is myself

still unknown, still a mystery.

Linda Hogan, “Inside” from Rounding the Human Corners. Copyright © 2008 

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How something is made flesh, no one can say...
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where nothing created is wasted...
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This is how you break through silence...
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The critics like to....or... this is what I have to say to you
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If I could write without a censor (or censure)* this is what I would tell you
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* censure works for me too because my critics are a body, like a government- puffed up and in committee

And another for the road, because it's Monday because why not one more poem?

Like Two Negative Numbers Multiplied by Rain

BY JANE HIRSHFIELD

Lie down, you are horizontal.

Stand up, you are not.

I wanted my fate to be human.

Like a perfume

that does not choose the direction it travels,

that cannot be straight or crooked, kept out or kept.

Yes, No, Or

—a day, a life, slips through them,

taking off the third skin,

taking off the fourth.

And the logic of shoes becomes at last simple,

an animal question, scuffing.

Old shoes, old roads—

the questions keep being new ones.

Like two negative numbers multiplied by rain

into oranges and olives.

Source: Poetry (September 2012).

It's Monday. A hard day of the week for many of us. Is there a way to build in time just for you? Can you write a little at lunch or on a break or after work? If it's a writing day can you make the day work for you so that you write and rest both? Can you hush the voices that tell you you can't or that it's not good enough?  

I hope this day is good to you and your creative.