I am a young schoolgirl watching the early dark fill my bedroom windows. I sit at a small drop leaf desk doing vocabulary homework, folding paper long ways in half and writing the date in whichever upper corner the teacher has asked me to. By now I’ve heard stories about Plato and Socrates. Thinking about how teachers have come together with students for thousands of years makes me think about past, present and future. I write the date on my homework, and I am suddenly jolted by the idea of someday putting down numbers starting with 2000. I will be over 50 then. I can not imagine what I will look like or what I will be thinking or anything about what my life will be like.

Years go by, and from the other side of life, I want to address my younger self about the journey we will take through fear, guilt, regret, loss, loneliness, intimacy and flow in divorce, with lovers, in raising children and in remarrying, in undoing and redoing first family ties, in mourning. She and I will become a poet, so I read words by Virginia Woolf to her:

…here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it…

I tell the girl sitting at her desk and pondering time and dates, that she has an impression, a wave in her mind and that she will learn one day to identify it. I smile at her expression when I invite her to sit with me and tell her how we will look for the rhythm and the words it will dislodge over the years to come. “To become that which you were before you were,” the Sufis say, “with the memory and understanding of what you had become.”

Writing from personal experience, we come to the page to do become familiar to ourselves by becoming new to ourselves. We work to clear our vision so we will include images, observations and comments informed by who we have become but not restricted by imposed beliefs. It is as if we attach what we recognize to a wave we feel inside and watch something new but familiar roll to into our consciousness. Or if you see the wave Virginia Woolf named as a radio wave (transformative technology in her time), you might describe the moment of finding a rhythm deeper than words as the moment of finding a way to deliver a message from inside the spirit of one’s life.

 One hard part in the process is making sure that when we write from the emotion or sight that Virginia Wolff says creates the wave in the mind, we do not obscure meaning and insight with gratuitous self-talk.

Compare the two paragraphs below, which are from the beginning of a draft of a personal essay written from the deck of a ship:

I am feeling terribly relaxed and thoughtful just now. The sea is rolling slowly toward the gray horizon just after sunset. I stare at it for hours. It is my mantra. My life has not been a great joy of late. My job is taking more and more and giving me very little nourishment for the spirit. I wander back and forth across the Atlantic in a continuous twilight fog of jet lag with no direction. I can see that now in a moment of clarity.

And:

The seas are very calm today, almost glassy at times, but visibility is very poor. This is the time of year when northeast winds blow down from the Sahara carrying a very fine dust that fills the air. They call it the Harmattan. I like the name. The dust can last for days and becomes quite distracting, but this cools down the otherwise steamy temperatures.

These paragraphs seem to me to cover similar emotional terrain: something is obscured whether it is by twilight fog or the Harmattan dust. The first paragraph may seem at first glance or listen to be the more personal, insightful one, with “I” repeated four times as compared to the one “I” in the second paragraph. But look at how much more slowly that first paragraph gets to its point, how decorated it seems with self-consciousness: the I is feeling “terribly relaxed,” for instance–what is the “terribly” telling us? Is it actually covering up the real feelings surfacing, the real situation by making us judge the speaker’s state of relaxation? The sea is rolling toward a grey horizon at sunset. The speaker stares at it for hours, he says, but it will be dark very soon–what is it possible to see staring at the sea at night? Because he says the sea is his mantra, I am expecting a phrase to repeat over and over.

I know I sound overly literal here, and that we can understand that he has been staring at the sea for hours up till the sunset and that he might mean mandala rather than mantra, but an illogically constructed metaphor is distracting. That I have had these thoughts about what is left out means something to me when I look for points where the writing skirts depth. Let me explain by going on with my response to that first paragraph.

The sea is a mantra, the speaker says, but he skips over how and mentions his job. We never find out how the mantra works for him, so once again we are jilted out of sharing in the experience of his hours of watching the sea. What does he think or not think all those hours he looks at (and hears) the sea? How does he get to the moment of clarity he states he has?

Insight usually comes all of a sudden and usually when we are doing something other than the task we have been concentrating on. Rollo May, the author of Courage to Create, one of my Bibles, says insight and discovery come in moments when we switch from focusing on a difficult task to relaxation, when we are stuck and working hard to get unstuck, but then leave our task. We may take a drive, a walk, a shower, prepare food or call a friend when the insight arrives.

In writing, concentrating on images and place as they are in the moment of writing is similar to distracting oneself from stuckness by taking a break. So when I look at the second of the speaker’s paragraphs, I start to feel insight I may have missed in the first paragraph. I see the seas, calm, glassy and under dust. (For a view of a Harmattan sky click here: dust.) I like the simple statement the speaker makes about liking the name Harmattan. It seems that while he is focused on the Harmattan, an insight begins bubbling up, one he will notice and understand if he keeps writing. I wish he would tell us more about why he likes the name of the winds, how the sound of the name makes him feel, and what associations the name brings to his mind. The fact that the dust lasts for days and can become distracting but cools down steamy temperatures seems to be a way of describing life in transition. What, I wonder, did this speaker do right after he last flew across the Atlantic and before he boarded the ship? What was difficult (steamy)? What does he think during this time of distraction, of cooling down? What does he see in the glassy sea? I am ready to go on reading.

Beyond the apparent value of saying “I” and summarizing feelings, the first paragraph does not focus the speaker on his inner situation. Although the writing may be honest, it is also limiting the ability of the writer to reach insight and move toward growth.

As a reader, I do not want the speaker to tell me the sea is his mantra (or mandala) unless he describes how that works. Alone, these words only take the place of the speaker actually evoking the sea as he sees and hears it during this few days under the conditions he describes. When the speaker tells me he is terribly thoughtful and relaxed and that his life has not been joyful lately and he lacks direction, I nod my head in agreement because I know he is stating a truth but I can’t find a way into his experience.

In the second paragraph, however, I am right with him. By concentrating on the place and scene before him and by describing it in ways the senses understand–glassy sea, winds, poor visibility, dust, heat and humidity–the speaker brings his readers inside the emotions, and we are eager to learn more, rather than stand there merely nodding our agreement because we know our speaker is speaking about something important to him.

When you read your drafts for revision, note what your words are saying; do not allow yourself to let them just seem to say something. Note where your images are metaphors for your feelings and where by taking liberties with the logic of the metaphor you are obscuring your feelings and blocking exploration. Take away what is too “tell-y” and then let yourself follow the sensory images you use into the ocean, away from what you know toward something deeper that you can’t yet see, like the life my younger self could not fathom.

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It’s your turn now. Put a date in the corner, whatever corner you like, and get started writing. Come to the page with a desire “To become that which you were before you were.” Let the words you already carry with you that summarize how and who you are fall away. The wave in your mind will guide you to the words and images that flow toward something new and familiar at the same time.