After Rodney Merrill received my answers to his questions about writing and my motivation to write, he sent me an interesting letter about his writing process and his knowledge of what those who study writers say. And he asked me more questions. I tried my best to answer the new questions.

It isn’t often that we get to read correspondence between writers on writing, so this week, I am sharing two more letters in the correspondence between Rodney Merrill and me in the hopes that it will introduce you to more scholarship new to you and get you thinking about the importance of this process we love (and sometimes hate) to engage in.

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January 10, 2008

Dear Sheila,

I am drawn to the response you give when I ask why you write. You said:

I write to understand why I am feeling as I do and to investigate what hooks me emotionally. I write to explain myself to others and to myself. I write to find lessons and insight in life experience. I write because it is a pleasurable way to process images and dialog and events so that I can see some shape to my life and find meaning and if not resolution, some sort of peace.

I nod in agreement, Sheila, when I read that you write to find lessons and insight in life experience; yet, I wonder if lessons and insights are there to be gleaned or if I am carrying on a conversation with myself — which is to say: carrying on a conversation with all the conversations I’ve ever had — with the intent of generating lessons and insights into a largely amoral world without direction or purpose. I wonder if sense-making, no matter how contingent, tentative, or marginal, personifying the world so to speak, maybe what writing is about? I’m not sure. I offer this not as an answer to anything, just as a question to live inside.

“Writing to investigate what hooks me emotionally.”I like this idea of writing as inquiry, Sheila; writing to discover rather than to deliver and inform. How does writing accomplish this? Do you attempt writing on a subject and find it does or does not “hook” you? Or do you write until you end up there? And how do you know when you have been “hooked emotionally”? Is this somehow different than being “hooked intellectually” or “finding a really interesting idea”?

 I write to find out what to write about. That seems related to what you are saying here. I once thought this “method” was a waste of time because I wound up cutting the first two-thirds of the manuscript. As my wife, Kate, sometimes reminds me, efficiency is not always the goal. The process did produce the last third that I want to keep. Once I accepted the duality that I abhor inefficiency and this is just how I work, I found that the first two-thirds of the manuscript actually was not waste. It was more like seeded sod set aside for future use. I keep first drafts and read them later, often finding I can pull a few paragraphs or a few pages and use them to develop an entirely different story. Time has rolled on. I come to the first drafts with added experience and new perspectives.

I am intrigued by the idea that you write to “explain myself to others and to myself.” Explain in what way and for what purpose? To make sense of yourself? To justify yourself?

There is a subtle but significant distinction between writing to find an explanation and writing to generate an explanation. In the first case, I am excavating for material. In the latter, I am forming a collage of observations, recollections or conjectures to support my idiosyncratic narratives about who I am and what life is, and so forth. In this case, I go to self-narrative not as miners go to tunnels with pick, shovel and hoe; more as potters go to the wheel, wielding extant forces to bring forth meaningful and useful arts and crafts from wet lumps of clay.

Tell me more about seeking “some shape to my life” and finding “meaning and if not resolution, some sort of peace.” I react to these words with a sense of longing and sadness. Does this have to do with losing your son in his youth?

Again, I wonder: do we writers discover by finding or by generating? Am I uncovering what is already there or am I creating it as I go along? For readers the difference is hidden and, perhaps, irrelevant. But, for me, as writer, whether I am finding myself or constructing myself seems a distinction of consequence. Based on the “psychological breakthroughs”1 we’ve both experienced from writing, I have a sense that the “mechanism” for these breakthroughs is not the unearthing of hidden treasure; it is, rather, our creating new vessels for holding what we already know.

I would respond to Gertrude Stein’s famous a rose is a rose is a rose by saying “but is it really?”A rose on a rooftop, in a trash bin, in a vas, a rose on a coffin, a rose with thorns biting at my fingertips, a rose unexplained on the doorstep or with a note, these would not be the same rose — even if it were the same rose. Is water just water? Water in the toilet, water in a teapot, water in an iced glass dripping cold sweat, water in a pool with a dumbass kid intentionally pinning me down, H2O, the closest thing to a universal solvent, water is in each case something different. But is the difference in the meaning something we discover or something we invent?

You see personal writing as “something you can offer others from your experience, a way to share the deepest levels of your perception; sharing writing creates an intimacy between the reader and the writer, and between the writer and herself.” What is it you offer readers through your writing, Sheila? Insights that can be applied? Is it the intimacy itself — a sense of connection or communion? How does sharing writing create a sense of intimacy, do you suppose?

For me, meaning and value are not inherent in writing as words on a page. Meaning and value are inherent in the relationship negotiated between the writer and the reader; therefore, as long as the quality of the writing doesn’t actually get in the way, meaning and value is always the natural outcome of storytelling. But this relationship between the writer and the reader is both tentative and tenuous. What the reader “gets” from the words on a page will not be exactly what the writer “got” when s/he wrote them and read them back. I have a melancholic sense that the writerly ideal of writing so well that writer and reader merge into a sort of orgastic mutual understanding is out of the question because meaning is not immutable and integral to words. The meaning of a word, even when I derive it directly from a dictionary definition, depends on its relationship to other words and my relationship to those words through a lifetime of experiences. The prospect that I can and will read words, what you have written, and entertain the exact same experience of moods, sensations and meanings as you had when you wrote them is, I am afraid, negligible. I confess to being nostalgic for the days when I believed otherwise.

Just about every first year science class stumbles upon the question: I say I see “blue” and you say “I see blue too” but how do we know that we are seeing the exact same thing rather than two different things that we are calling by the same name? Whenever I see “X” and you see “Y” we both say “blue” and imagine we are having the same experience. I wonder how much of this describes the experience of readers and writers? That is, how much our orientation to life, our experiences, our local culture, combine to shape what we read and write to the extent that we think we are sharing a common experience while actually the correspondence is only vague and tangential. What is your take on this?

When I ask whether writing is about the universal truths, you respond in terms of feelings. “People are most alike in their feelings, you said, “and least alike in their thinking.”You continue:
Therefore, if your experience can evoke feelings, there is universal connection even if the reader may not have thought as you did or acted as you did. When we move others to feelings we have felt, we become intimate, connected. That is the truth that gets shared in personal writing that succeeds.
This response appeals to me, Sheila. Love and belonging are big themes for me. I was brought to tears when Stephen Hawking — the world renowned physicist who has lived with the steady physical decline of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) for over 40 years and can now barely communicate with “the outside world” — told an NPR interviewer that no matter where the disease takes him as long as he can experience being loved, life is still worth living. Victor Hugo said, “The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves.”

As someone coming at writing as both a writer and a student of social constructionism, I wonder if the constituents of thoughts and feelings are really that different and whether we can share emotions in any universal way? I have to admit that part of my motivation for doing this project and dissertation is to iron out some of these problems for myself.

When studying feelings, social constructionists often describe the rich, multi-faceted, culturally local matrix in which feelings are embedded. Since many social constructionists concerned with the emotions are psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists who favor ethnographic research methods, inquiry often begins with the language of emotions and how emotion words are localized in the culture they are studying. Social constructionists pay attention to the context in which people in their native culture can make a valid claim that they or some other person is experiencing the state designated by a particular emotion word. They also wonder about the relationship of emotions to each other, to other mental states and to various sorts of acceptable and unacceptable behavior, about what exemptions or privileges accrue to claims made using emotional language, and how emotions intersect with other aspects of the lives of the people in the same culture.

When this type of research is done well, the resulting accounts — what Geertz calls “thick descriptions” — include conceptual tools for understanding observations within the context of the culture in which they occur. What I find is an awesome diversity of patterns of social interaction in which our emotions and emotional language are embedded. Emotions across cultures seem to involve processes of ethical criticism whereby one’s feelings and emotional displays are adapted to fit with the local justificatory system. In other words, emotions are “inner speech acts” that take social account of others; that is, emotions are political acts that position our interlocutors and us in a local system of social life.

This view of inner life suggests that it is not so different from interactions between people out in the world and does not go on wholly inside us as we have been socialized to believe. Emotions originate not at inner center of our being but “out there” in the social milieu, on the boundary of the relational space between us.3

If this is the case, then emotions, like thoughts, are made possible by and limited by the culture and language that also makes our selves possible. Even our personal stories are framed by the cultural idea of story. In other words, my story is never my story and no one else’s. My story, even as I experience it privately, is both facilitated by and limited by what thoughts are possible in our culture and speakable in our language. Stories that do not derive from conventions of culture and language are invalidated, counting not as stories but as babble and gibberish. On the flip side of that, I’m not sure that my story, my thoughts, even my emotions can be understood in another culture in exactly the same way they are available to someone in my own. If you became convinced of this, Sheila, would it affect your writing or your enthusiasm for writing?

I am captivated by your anecdote about writing as a child and teen but not taking poetry writing seriously until after your daughter was born. “I believed strongly that to raise her to be who she was,” you say, “I would have to learn who I was and poetry was what could teach me that.”You go on to say that poetry writing led to writing personal essays ‘which offer the same kind of “earned” insight.’ Can you say more about how poetry and personal narrative can teach you “who you are”? How do you know there is a “who you are” to be found? How do you know when you are finding out “who you are” versus, perhaps, being led astray? And what does “earned insight” mean?

Closely related to that, how were/are “poems and fiction … truer than my daily existence”? “When I needed to learn to be true to myself,” you say, “I turned to poetry and personal essay writing. Now I count on them to keep me true to myself.”What/who is this self you are being true to? We use this terminology all the time because it is so integral with our culture but what does it mean? Buddhists suggest that meditation peels away the layers of the falseness we call “self” until eventually there is nothing left. And that nothing, the space for all else, is the true self. From that space, we generate who we are from moment to moment. I tend to believe that is spot on. In this case, what would fidelity to your true self be?

You say you need to write when “a certain feeling won’t leave me or when a certain sound, or sight, or piece of dialog I’ve heard or said sticks around and asks me to write from there.” How does this “asking” take place? Is it a feeling that if you don’t write about this, it just won’t go away? How is that any different than, say, an annoying tune stuck in your head?

I write to commemorate what I find important–whether that be deaths or births or weddings or noticing my mom acting old. I have to trust my way into material. Tell me more about “trusting your way into the material.”

In developing “how an idea becomes a manuscript, you seem to find a difference between “work ideas” and “ideas that won’t let me alone.” Do “ideas that won’t let me alone” have something that distinguishes them from ideas that you work because “I have an article due or someone wants to hear from me”? and something in common with them?

You say that an idea most readily “becomes a manuscript when I have a need to discover something I don’t believe I can do any other way than by writing to learn what I know.”I recognize this feeling, though, for me, writing is a dialog. It is talking with myself as a being in relationship to all others. Writing becomes a process of mining and sifting and connecting with all of the conversations I’ve ever had — interpersonally or mediated by books, cinema, theater — related to the idea in which I am currently interested, including prior conversations with myself generically known as “thinking about it.”Of course, I also consult the myriad conversations called “how to write a personal essay” or “what is acceptable” or “what is publishable” and so on.

I asked what happens between “an idea” and “a finished story”? You said,
“I start with where I am sitting and what I have been doing and then let the images I’ve been involved with show up in my writing. From there it seems like they just keep happening and I am not in charge, the words are.”

And three hours later, you notice it’s midnight! This is what Social psychologist Susan K. Perry calls “writing in flow” and titles her book on the subject. I am not in charge, the conversation is, “the words are.”We become consumed and subsumed by the conversation and, I think, become who we really are — a space for conversation.

I notice you use the terms “images” and “feelings” often throughout this conversation and use them in similar circumstances. Are these related or even synonymous for you? or are they different things entirely?

I’m glad to hear that you will show raw material to a writing group or editor “because I can work with their response to make myself write more deeply, to get more onto the page, to call myself on the places where I just wrote away from the opportunity to dig deeper.”

You say you don’t think you ever know how your stories should turn out. Well, I always know how mine should turn out. They rarely turn out that way … but I start out knowing.

Some aspects of your “Three-Step Response Method” remind me of an explicit presupposition of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), that the meaning of your communication is the response you get. By finding out “what happens inside a reader as the reader reads the writing” or I might say the meaning that is generated within the dialog on the boundary of the writer and a designated reader, helps the writer understand the (many) possible responses to anything s/he writes. This is bound to improve the responder’s ability to become self-reflexive practitioners in responding to their own work. I would resist the notion, however, that with painstaking and conscientious revision the writer can fine tune writing to produce in the reader the one desired meaning. Because the reader brings to the writing a lifetime of experiences mediated by his/her local culture and linguistic nuance, meaning is always negotiated.

When you say you the process of drafting requires us to abandon the idea that there is bad writing, I am reminded of the first time I read Anne Lamott’s advice on being willing to write really shitty first drafts. Although it seems too simplistic and offhanded to be worthwhile, cultivating the willingness to write really shitty first drafts has been tremendously helpful to me. I mean, I wrote them before that — lots of them — but I agonized over them and punished myself for them. I shredded them in fits of self-flagellation.

Marc Raibert of Boston Dynamics Inc., says, “Good writing is bad writing that was rewritten. Almost all good writing starts out bad.” It is that willingness to overlook “bad writing” or, as you put it, the willingness to “recognize underperforming writing as an opportunity for good writing” that keeps us working through the really stinky stuff. My writing has offered, at times, unbounded opportunity!

Although you use “modernist” terminology that locates writing inside the writer’s head, I sense that we agree in many respects on the social nature of writing, Sheila. You invite “whomever is available — your husband, writing group, a poetry colleague — “to be part of your writer dialog. Likewise, you consult others by reading “poetry and essays”…”to keep the sound of effective writing in your ears and to find a way to clear space for writing and for listening for deep perception.”

I also “do something physical” like running or walking to support my writing. I often walk when to invite the “internal dialog” and often run to become so absorbed in the immediacy of one-foot-in-front-of-the-other that it will leave me be.

How does one recognize “the real thing” in writing versus, what? Counterfeit? “Copping out”? “Writing away from the opportunity to dig deeper”?

And tell me more about “claiming my life” and how writing facilitates this.

Warm regards,

Rodney

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Here is my letter back to Rodney:

February 14, 2008

Hi Rodney,

I have answered your questions below. I hope I have helped:

I believe that sense making is what we are built for — we are constantly making sense with whatever we have available. The interesting idea to me is that “making sense” also implies making of our senses — and I try to do this in writing — include the sensory info until it brings forth the insight, self reflection, third level — not brain and/or heart alone, but something more flowing, more at one, the something we inhabit when all sides of our brain are in sync. I find that state most often through writing.

I know I am hooked emotionally when an image or incident or something someone said triggers a moody feeling in me. I have no idea why what hooked me did so, but I write to find out. If it isn’t something that really hooked me, I rarely start the writing.
Of course I write to inform, but in the kind of writing I am talking about, I am writing to discover what it is I want to inform myself (and consequently others) about.

I’d say the most enjoyable writing for me, or the most important for my sense that I am growing emotionally, is what you call the kind we approach as potters at the wheel. I think that writing is a physical experience and I like the idea of my hands on the wet clay, my foot on a pedal more than I like the idea of swinging a pickaxe over my head and into the hard earth. Writing is something yielding when it is going well. I think we have to find a way to drop the axe and get to the potter’s wheel to write well, even when writing to inform others about something we already know. When we do that, we find a shape that helps us put our knowledge into a lovely venue for others (a metaphor for shaping our book, perhaps), not a dull, linearly outlined kind of a thing.

I am not sure about the need to separate finding from constructing a self. Finding sounds better and more in keeping with what I believe — that our essence is with us from birth and we work all our lives to retrieve it, work and communicate from it. However, in doing so, we do build a construction of sorts, I think, to house this essence in the world — our personalities, our writing, our way of working in the world.

Creating a sense of intimacy — well that’s what happens when we tell the truth about ourselves. I think the best writing, fiction or nonfiction, is filled with the truth of what it means to be a particular human in a particular world. And when we are truthful and particular, we are also universal. Everyone understands the human predicament, human yearnings and desire, no matter cultural and other differences. You cannot be in the presence of authenticity and not feel the vulnerable, authentic part of yourself. Hence the intimacy. One man’s insides speaking to another man’s insides, Wordsworth said of poetry.

I still do believe that I can put experience on the page so that my readers experience what I did — that is my relationship to my readers. That is what I am striving for. If my experience calls up one they’ve had and they offer their own experience to mingle with the one I have created on the page, the relationship and the intimacy deepen. If I didn’t believe this, I would get caught up in second guessing myself and analyzing all that I write and that others write and my interest is in responding, in knowing what I feel and learn from others. I do that best with response, describing what happens inside of me when I read, especially someone else’s work.

I, too, am brought to tears in the presence of love and the affirmation that that is what is important, central, perhaps even all that life is about — not romantic love for when we are chemically attracted, but bonding love, when we are aware that everything in the universe is truly one and connected. I think the tears are tears of joy and tears of pain from the fact that we lose our way and our raised and influenced by those who have lost theirs. Those of us who have experienced love’s awful other side, hatred and manipulation, but not had our urge to love completely snuffed out, may use writing more than anyone to bring the flame forward, build a fire where there was only a spark left.

I do not think too often of cultural differences as they apply to stories — I love stories from all cultures and although I might not get all the references, they move me. Japanese, Tibetan and Icelandic films have haunted me and strongly moved me. A young writer I selected as a contest winner wrote to be that she believes art crosses borders. I believe it does — borders between people of the same nation and culture and social group and borders between those who feel the other as other. Us and Them. But writing builds a bridge.

There are many “I”s the great thinkers tell us. Who are we at any one moment? We are many people — our ego and id see to that. However, I believe there is a unifying presence, essence, something in us that integrates our selves. When I am writing well, I am writing from an integrated place. It may have taken pages as you said to get there, but I got there. It is a wonderful feeling. Then next wonderful feeling is from revision when I can make this flow communicable to someone outside of my mind and experience.

I trust my way into my material when I feel the flow. When I am not feeling it I keep writing because I know it will happen that I will feel the flow. I immerge myself in the moment that I am pondering whatever it is that brought me to the page. If I stay there with images, comment will arrive. I have to learn the difference between the ego, protective self delivering a comment so I will not get into dangerous emotional territory (unearned insight), and true comment coming from my higher self (earned insight) that has been tracking the charge on images I use.

Images and feelings — they are not synonymous for me — but as William Carlos Williams says in a poem: no intelligence but in things — I take that to mean images and specificity — images convey feeling — if I am using them correctly, I don’t have to name feelings; I have created them on the page.

I don’t mean that by hearing the inner response of readers to work-in-progress writers are beholden to fine tune for the readers. They fine tune for themselves once they have learned from readers more about what ideas and feelings the writing is generating. The writer is the authority (root word author) and knows what is needed for the writing to succeed — the reader has with responses let the writer know where the writing in whatever stage it is in is and isn’t succeeding and sometimes for what reasons. But only the writer can go back and work the words and find out how to stay in flow with them until they create a fully manifested experience for readers as well as for the writer. The writer must take the info responders have provided and somehow cook with it. In this way the writer both knows and doesn’t know the outcome. That is what makes the chemistry or alchemy of writing an interesting experience.

I have enjoyed reading your questions and impressions about the way writing works. I like having more quotes that you have provided that support what I have tried articulating from my experience. How does one recognize the real thing? I think it has to do with a deep level of satisfaction — sometimes we arrive at that early in the process, but our writing group isn’t as satisfied. Okay, that means the piece is worth working on but hasn’t managed yet to full manifest for readers other than ourselves — and therefore, really, not even for ourselves — writing is some kind of two way mirror — when the reader gets it, the writer gets more of it.

Claiming my life to me means that I am writing from my own experience and reflecting on it, using it to inform others and myself. I am accepting all it has taught me and I am teaching others. I am feeling more real as a consequence of my communication on the page. I say the unsayable in poetry, in prose. I don’t necessarily change on the outside — I still get grumpy at people close to me when they annoy me, I still have laundry to do, I still eat junk food though I read Michael Pollen. I’m me, but the deepest me has found a home (the page) and spoken. I have claimed my life.

Yours,
Sheila