Tell all the Truth but tell it slant
by Emily Dickinson

Tell all the truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—

Sometimes, we fear that we won’t be able to survive a deep seeing into the events and observations that disturb or move us, the circumstances, emotions, losses, successes, friendships, love, work and beauty in our lives.

When I experience fear, I remember that writing is the tool that helps me change. I remember that seeing truths as they arise from the experiences I can capture on the page (usually by coming at my subjects slant) will open new space inside me as the old feelings and questions are now contained in a piece of writing where I put them. The perception and understanding that I couldn’t quite get a hold of without writing has been released into the new writing and no longer has to swirl around inside of me. I have articulated what was before inchoate and unsayable. By finding a way to say what I couldn’t say before, I made room for new experience, new writing and further understanding.

Of course, that room can be scary, too, because when we allow space for change, we allow space for the unknown. Every writer has to learn to work with this aspect of our craft. Rainier Maria Rilke tells us this in his famous poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo.”

Archaic Torso of Apollo
(Translated by Stephen Mitchell)

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

 Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

How do we learn to use our craft to “dazzle gradually?” How do we learn not to fear the new spaces we’ll be creating? I think the answer is this: when set our fingers to the keyboard or pens to paper, we have only to immerse ourselves in the craft.

One of my craft mentors is William Carlos Williams, who is famous for summarizing his poetic method in the phrase, “No ideas but in things,” which appears in his 1944 poem “A Sort of Song.” He advocated that poets leave aside traditional poetic forms and literary allusions, and rely on metaphor to see the world as it is:

A Sort of Song
by William Carlos Williams

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.
— through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.

Reading this poem, I feel excused for my customary associational thinking, which drives others crazy (which is why I have learned to keep associations to myself and write from them).

All of us key off of a word or phrase or sight and think of other times and memories. When writers do it, though, it amounts to more than the fleeting association. We look for how to meld the things that are suddenly seemingly balanced in our minds. The reason the memories and images have come to mind, one with the others, is what we attempt to find out. Doing so, we nourish the saxifrage that splits rock and release the truth’s superb surprise. We experience the moment that will change our lives, or at least our perceptions, beliefs or emotions. This is the moment we come clean to ourselves, and if any read our writing, to others. If we can find this reason for what is in our minds at the same time, we will not have wasted our lives; our lives, in fact, will be redeemed.

For instance, if an argument about how to best accomplish a task leads to angry words I wish I hadn’t spoken and in my angry, sorry silence, I notice the outline of my husband’s wet swimming trunks showing through his slacks as we drive after swimming in a river in CA, I write from the moment that I am noticing this. I include the swim and the sunset I see as I am feeling the tweak from that wet trunks image and from that describing comes the evocation of the emotional aftermath of this fight:

The Coastal Route After Arguing
by Sheila Bender

As we drive, I see wind
moving the dune grass
like flames on the hillsides.

This is how river light
looked as I watched canyon walls
today, you diving upstream.

I’d hollered that great noise
between us again, mountain tops
of stone pulverized in air,
you like an unaware camper
caught in dark, descending ash.

Now before dusk, the sun burns
a hole in the sky and the sky
turns grey around that wound.

What will you do with the hurt,
wet outline of your trunks
showing through the jeans you drive in?
For a moment, we look at the sunset,
orange wings of a monarch
spread behind clouds.

So, how does this process work? How do we find our truths while writing about things, and, thus, not waste our lives but change them?

We use a kind of alchemy that starts with a trust in images –“the show don’t tell” we’ve all heard writing teachers advise. This requires delving into the moment from which we are writing, grounding ourselves and our readers in it with us, through our five senses, because when we are hearing, tasting, touching, smelling and seeing, we are finding the intelligence in things, or rather, creating the conditions under which the truth will reveal itself and change everything.

We use objects, things, that by themselves might not shake our world, but joined with the rhythms and the sounds in the matrix of our writing, they create a new essence, and all the things we were writing about or including as we went along, are now a trail to a new world where some of the truth resides. Such truth may be stalwart as a mountain or ethereal as a shooting star, but either way, we recognize how real it is.

It is as if by involving the senses in our writing, we fill clouds with just the right amount of water to make rain precipitate. Or perhaps it is as if we create conditions for fermentation and make grapes into wine.

I love this process. I love following the “kernel” that an image is and growing a piece of writing from it until the writing itself has transported me to the uncharted waters where truth lives for each of us.

So, it is that usually we don’t fully know what we are writing toward until we have written our way there. And when we have, we have gotten to the truth by telling it slant, by inviting the intelligence in things to work on our behalf.

Writing this way, we sometimes don’t even realize what we have put on the page, how rich it is, how many footprints there are — and wings. With this kind of writing, it is as if the journeyer is both on the ground, drawing energy from the temporal world we all live in, and at the same time moving above the ground toward timelessness. Truth is in the sensation of taking both of these journeys at once.

William Faulkner said in a 1956 interview in the Paris Review, “There is no such thing as was — only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow.” He didn’t mean that we can’t write in the past tense to find truth, but it does mean that when truth is revealed it is always the present, happening now, an arrival. Faulkner also said in a Paris Review interview:

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut.” He also says, though, “Sometimes technique charges in and takes command of the dream before the writer himself can get his hands on it.

Whether we are looking for the organic structure of our writing or it has found us and commands that we use it, there are shortcuts to preparing for the alchemy to work or at least shortcuts to keep the quotidian world from interfering with the alchemy we might engage in, with the releasing of the intelligence in the things that make up our everyday world. I also think that as writers we can gain affirmation about this by recognizing the magic kernel in another’s work:

It is an exciting thing to recognize the spark in another writer’s work, something analysis doesn’t lead to, something that feels more like witnessing. When you learn to do it in your own work, you’ll start noticing it in others. When you notice it in others and trust that you have recognized something even if other readers and experts don’t recognize what you do, you will begin to learn better how to allow yourself to come at things slant and find your route to wisdom.

When I was in graduate school in a creative writing program, every candidate had to take a critical theory class. My seminar required that each student lead a discussion of a Post Modernist piece of literature. The day the student leading the discussion of William Faulkner‘s The Sound and the Fury asked us all to describe the “pleasures of the text,” I resolved to be truthful. After about seven of my class members described the delight of the book being in its many layers and the way they could peel those layers like they would an onion (I get no pleasure out of peeling onions, only stinging eyes), I ventured my response: “I really liked all that mud at the opening of the book.” No one in the class could hide their dismay at my “unstudied” response and simplicity.

Many years later, when I was teaching at Shoreline Community College north of Seattle, I had a break and went to the school library where I perused old issues of The Paris Review. I came across a 1956 interview Jean Stein did with William Faulkner and I delved in. I came to a passage on page 13 of the lengthy and entertaining interview and read words that made me burst into loud laughter:

INTERVIEWER
How did The Sound and the Fury begin?

FAULKNER
It began with a mental picture. I didn’t realize at the time it was symbolical. The picture was of the muddy seat of a little girl’s drawers in a pear tree, where she could see through a window where her grandmother’s funeral was taking place and report what was happening to her brothers on the ground below. By the time I explained who they were and what they were doing and how her pants got muddy, I realized it would be impossible to get all of it into a short story and that it would have to be a book. And then I realized the symbolism of the soiled pants, and that image was replaced by the one of the fatherless and motherless girl climbing down the drainpipe to escape from the only home she had, where she had never been offered love or affection or understanding.

Being open to the magic, rather than analyzing it, fosters the awareness necessary for good writing. To pull off such magic in one’s writing requires forcing oneself to be both specific and open to wherever the specificity takes you, a getting comfortable with not being in control but in being able to recognize what is leading to what, what feels right, what draws you in rather than keeps you on the surface.

****

Here’s an exercise that will help you along the path of allowing writing to lead you rather than you leading the writing

Think about something in your house that you would never want to part with. Know that you are going to give it a burial today. Write about the object, how it came to be in your house, why it is time to bury it and where you will bury it. Describe yourself digging a hole. How do you carry it to the place you will bury it? What do you say as you bury the object? What do you think when you arrive back in your house again?

Write freely–the fact that you don’t really want to bury this object will make your writing strong, will help you get to the alchemical place of writing it slant, of allowing the writing that will redeem.