By Deena Metzger. 1992.
Part I. On Creativity
There was a little girl who, when she was three years old, wrote, or rather told, her first poem:
Tree
It doesn’t grow in water,
it doesn’t grow in sand,
but in happy children’s hands.
After that she didn’t write a poem she liked for over twenty years. When she was three, she knew something that she then forgot and only gradually began to remember over a long period of time. When she was three, she knew the magic of words; she knew that words could create magic, that they were magic. She knew that they could create worlds, could describe worlds, explore worlds, and also be the bridge between one world and another.
In their purest use, words not only describe reality and communicate ideas and feelings but also bring into being the hidden, invisible, or obscure. Words can leave us in the known and familiar, or transport us to the unfamiliar, incomprehensible, unknown, even the unknowable. Words, therefore, are the primary route toward knowing both the particular worlds we inhabit and our unique and individual selves.
The Language That Speaks of Our Inner Selves
The world of public discourse–political, social, diplomatic, commercial–has so corrupted language that we are rightly more suspicious of the meaning of words than we are convinced of their veracity. Language has been turned on its head. Still, language contains the possibility of revelation. Those who fiercely pursue the writing of journals, life histories, or autobiographies do so because they sense that the words that have been used to rob them of their individuality are the very means by which they can restore dignity and create identity. When truthfulness is honored, describing the world and describing ourselves are the same act. Creating art and creating ourselves are the same act; art, world, ourselves–these are continuous with one another.
It doesn’t take us long to realize that when we inhabit this inner realm, when we are with ourselves, we are participating in a vast underground world of common understanding and communality some of which may have been with us from the very beginning of time. What Carl Jung calls the collective unconscious–what i like to think of as the creative unconscious (in its communal aspect) or the imagination (in its personal aspect)–is the sea of internal and eternal values, images, cultural memories, and experiences that inform dreams and creative work while, just as often, challenging the prevailing modes of the state, the society, or the community in which one lives.
(She seems to be saying, even when we dive deep within our own private, individual experiences, we are really expressing universal feelings and experiences shared by everyone, by virtue of being human. The internal (individual) and the eternal (universal) are the same.)
The inner world is for each of us–novelist, diarist, or diplomat–in our equally ordinary and extraordinary lives the essential territory where everything that might be known resides until it can be called forth into the public arena. Credited or not, the images, inspirations, dreams, nightmares, intuitions, hunches, understandings that arise from the inner world are the prima materia from which everything, including ourselves, is constructed. To be willing to live within the imagination is to commit oneself to the gather together of the pieces that might begin to form a self. To avoid this territory is to avoid the encounters that might validate, inform, or enhance one’s experience.
The Forbidden Inner World
Yet the truth of the matter is that just as the inner territory is proscribed, the self in modern times is also under assault. To go there is considered solipsistic, narcissistic, small. The smaller intimate history of individuals or marginalized people and cultures is not extended the dignity and value accorded to the history or nation-states and canonized philosophic or religious movements. Autobiography, journal writing, and life history are considered lesser forms when compared with the grand sweep of novels, elegies, epics, and biographies of public people.
Because the inner exploration is so essential to every creative life, we must challenge these attitudes and risk the exploration of these forbidden realms. For despite the prevailing judgments, it is clear that vitality, zest, the very life force itself lie inside and are not be dismissed, that what is acceptable never has the range of what is still unknown and unexplored, and, finally, that it is the unique vision and exploration, our own subjectivity, that we all secretly seek and cherish.
Becoming a Writer
To write is, above all else, to construct a self. Only secondly is it to record one’s history, to express feelings and ideas, to create characters, or to communicate with others. Journal entries and life histories, as well as fictions, poems, and plays, are variations on the most fundamental human need to know oneself deeply and in relationship to the world. Beginning that first requisite novel–that commentary on my adolescent life–was evidence of a serious commitment to discover who I was and how I saw the world.
Learning to See
I began by looking at the small. …I began in my journal to step away from meaning, to relinquish interpretation for the recording of small details that might at some point add up to a larger story. The color of a wall, a woman and a child staring at me from a window in an East German village, a pebble picked up from a grave, the posture of the Polish nun who opened the door to the convent at Auschwitz, the components of a meal–these became the touchstones of the story that later emerged.
Facing the Fear and Welcoming the Creative
Beginning is difficult. We are afraid of failing. We are afraid we will have nothing to say. We are afraid that what we will say will be banal or boring. We are afraid it may endanger us. We are afraid it may be a lie. We are afraid that what we say may be the truth. We are afraid of succeeding. We are afraid no one will notice. We are afraid someone will learn what we’ve said–and it may be ourselves. We are afraid there will be consequences. We are afraid we will pay attention. We are afraid we will have to change our lives. We are afraid we won’t be able to change. We are most afraid that we will.
It is right that we are afraid. If we are fortunate, we will say something, it will be the truth, it will be eloquent, it will have power to it, we will listen, and we will change our lives.
Writing the Seen and the Unseen
Who we are is what we see and what we don’t see. After we know ourselves through what we see, we can come to know ourselves equally through what we don’t see. What did we miss today? What part of our lives did we lose through abstraction, distraction, preoccupation? One of the key teachings of Buddhism is awareness. Practicing awareness is as essential to the writer as it is to the monk. Practicing awareness allows us to develop emotional and spiritual peripheral vision, to become aware of the subtleties at the extremities of the familiar. We can recover what we saw but couldn’t or wouldn’t attend.
When you think you have nothing to say, when your life feels dull and tedious, try writing: Things I didn’t see today.
…for some of us, our hearts, our eyes, what we love, and what we see are cut out of us in school; for others it occurs through the taunting of friends or the impatient ridicule or rationality, pragmatism or expediency. … Each of us has been undermined and diverted from ourselves by a series of small incidents and assaults from various quarters; from these experiences we learned, carefully and painfully, that it was best to go underground.
Stories Construct A Self
Stories heal us because we become whole through them. In the process of writing, of discovering our story, we restore those parts of ourselves that have been scattered, hidden, suppressed, denied, distorted, forbidden, and we come to understand that stories heal.
Stories From Our Imaginings
I don’t think I would have become a writer if I hadn’t imagined myself as one. When we fail to imagine in our lives, we may live someone else’s life, becoming the victim of another’s imagination–advertising has such an effect–or we may live out something that only passes for a life, is less than a life. When we begin to imagine our lives, we discover that it is our life, our whole and entire life that we are imagining.
A life lived only in the so-called real world is only part of a life. Our spirit wants so much more that only the imagination can satisfy it.
The Questions at the Heart of Every Story
At the root of our lives is a question, a series of questions, a quest, some fundamental concerns or obsessions; the mystery, the story, and the meaning of our lives reside there. A story also has a question at the core of it, and the question leads to the mystery within the story.
Failing to honor the persistence of the question, we are in danger of merely solving problems, reducing and trivializing experience through our explanation. Looking to story to solve rather than illuminate life problems, we miss the intricacies and become lost in reductionism.
Hemingway was entranced with the expression or failure of heroism in ordinary life, while Joseph Campbell wanted to fathom the archetypal nature if heroism itself. Anais Nin had unlimited curiosity about the inner life and its manifestations, while John Bergere is equally fascinated by the social and political sources and consequences of the way we see. A writer develops a body of work, and we come to recognize the characters and stories she relates, but this doesn’t mean the writer is repeating herself. Rather the opposite. Over time, the questions the writer is asking become deeper and more penetrating until the questions, not the answers, become his signature.
Review your work. What do you think about? What are you trying to understand? What obsesses you? What images, symbols, metaphors, dynamics repeat themselves in your work? What core concerns do these reveal?
Part III. The Larger Story: Archetypes, Fairy Tales, and Myths
Approaching a Larger Story
1. If there were only a few stories in your life that you could tell, which would they be? List the stories. Remember that a story is an event, a consequence. It is a moment in which something is revealed or has an implication. A story occurs in time. It goes from one place to another. Something happens or is altered. Something is experienced, and meaning emerges.