On the Stories We Tell Ourselves

I'm working on this book every morning, getting up at 5:30 so I have time before work, missing very few days, and feeling more momentum than I ever have as "writer."  I've written a lot of poems, and those are cool because you can finish one in a single morning.  Sometimes I've finished eight in a single evening.  And although there's revision, all of it is on a single page so it's manageable revision.

Prose is different, especially long prose, and I'm astounded by the--and there's no other word--mystery of this process.  How I show up every day, put my hands to the keyboard, and, more often than not, know exactly what comes next, even when I think I don't.  There are all of these little voices in my head saying "You shouldn't say THAT" and "My, that was an ugly sentence" and "WHAT is Soandso going to think?!"  But I find, miraculously, if I keep going they shoosh up, and I keep going and something else arrives in my brain to put on the page.  I'm not trying to say that God is telling me what to say, that I'm speaking for Him by any stretch of the imagination, but in a way, doing this every morning makes me believe in God in a way that I haven't before.  My goodness, there's something out there fueling me as I try to work stuff out on the page. 

But this is a strange thing, to rummage around in my past like I'm looking for a pair of shoes, looking for something that goes with something else, looking to make sense of my experience to someone that doesn't have immediate access to my brain.  Or really, to my own brain.  I'm probably trying to make sense of things to my own brain, since the story of how a very young girl went to Mississippi and now lives in Boston with a Sam is a story that I don't entirely understand myself. 

And so today I'm thinking about the stories we tell ourselves and the way we narrate our experiences, even inside us. In a way, this sense of story is what shapes our lives.  What I mean is this:  Once, when I suffered a painful (if mostly mutual) breakup, I realized I was obsessively trying to land on the story I would tell myself about it.  Was it: boy and girl simply not right for each other, which happens often and everything will be okay?  Was it: boy a big mean jerk who never loved me anyway?  Was it: Woe is me; if I could have just lost 20 pounds then he would have loved me?  Was it: I never liked that guy and I'm gonna get pretty and successful and then he'll see what he missed out on?  When I realized I was doing that, shuffling through stories, I worked really (really) hard to only tell myself the most useful story, the one that would help me move forward gracefully.  It wasn't that the other stories weren't true.  I could acknowledge that in one way or another they were probably all a little bit true.  But the one I wanted to dwell on, the one I wanted to package up and store on the shelves of my brain, was the kindest one, the most generous.  It took me probably a year to tell myself that story often enough that it overrided the other ones that kept presenting themselves.  But I remember that one day I cried about it and knew I was crying about for the last time, that I was ready to let the story alone. 

In a way, I feel like that's what I'm doing now.  I'm telling myself a story.  I'm trying to make it as honest as it can be, presenting as many of the scary questions as I can.  And hoping that, when I'm done, I'll have made a story I want to keep, even if no one else in the whole wide world reads it.  I'm trying to move forward gracefully.  I'm learning something new about that story every time I put it on the page. 

Virginia Woolf, On Keeping a Journal

"What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace any thing, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself...into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life."

--Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary

What I Do When I'm Stuck

Writing a poem every day is hard. Writing is hard. One has to call up images and ideas out of the brain, and those images and ideas, sorry to say, aren't always there to be had. I used to feel like I had poem and essay and story ideas arrive, already cut from the cloth. But if I waited for them now, I'd never get a word on the page. My brain is far (far) too crowded.

So somehow, and I can't really remember how, I came up with this system:



Step 1: Find a pretty box

Step 2: Go through old magazines and cut out every picture that strikes your fancy. Pretty ones, gruesome ones, weird ones. Advertisements are often better than actual articles for this. Advertising is pretty darn clever. I have a picture in that box of a girl wearing a dress made out of white porcelain teacups. It doesn't get much more clever/interesting than that.

Step 3: So now you should have a stack of pictures, a pile of them, a cohort. Grab a random handful of these images and spread them out in front of you.



Step 4: This is the step that I can't explain. Let the cutouts trigger lines and images, memories, dialogue, character, setting, whatever. You have to sort of turn your brain to jello here, and let it meander around in what you have in front of you. See what happens. I've found ways to write about stuff I had absolutely no entry into, using these images. I wrote a story this week, based on pictures of a sliced tennis ball, the Milky Way, and feet.

(Optional Step 5: Teaching. This makes a fantastic teaching tool. My students' biggest problem--one of the biggest--was that when they tried to think of images, they were boring. Their stories had absolutely no tangible objects in them, no details, aside from a passing reference to spaghetti on page three or some such. These pictures helped more than I can say. I'd either give each of them one at a time and we'd pass it once they'd found a way to put it in (sort of a game approach) or I'd grabbag each of them a random stack and they'd get to work that way. Gosh those poems were great, the ones that came out of this. Some of the best I've seen.)

Plus, the box really is pretty, no? I was never sorry on a day I got to carry it around.

Quote from Carver, Note from Me

First, Raymond Carver, on writing: "Writers don't need tricks or gimmicks or even necessarily to be the smartest fellows on the block. At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing--a sunset or an old shoe--in absolute and simple amazement."

And, from me: 'tis poetry month, folks. Time to read (and write) poems! I'm attempting to write a poem every day again, and hoping hard not to fail at it, as I did last year. Wrote one this morning, which wasn't any good, but hey! It exists! Which is what counts for now. I'm telling myself it's okay to miss days (although I'd prefer not to), so if I get 20 poems out of the month, I will be such a happy camper. I'll try to keep you posted on how it goes. I'll try to stand and gape at things in absolute and simple amazement.

Trying to Net Some Elusive Fish

A Few Quotes from Kay Ryan, found in X J Kennedy's Introduction to Literature:

"First, when I write a poem I'm completely occupied with trying to net some elusive fish; I'm desperate to get the net (made of words) knotted in such a way that it will catch the desired fish (a half-formed idea, a wisp of a feeling). I'm not thinking of anything but that; I'm not thinking of me, I'm not thinking of you" (627).

In response to the question, what is the purpose of poetry:

"The secret, long-term purpose of poetry is to create more space between everything. Poetry is the main engine of the expanding universe. You yourself will have noticed how reading a poem that really strikes you (that will be one in 25, if you're lucky; a poem can be great and still not strike YOU) makes you feel freer and less burdened, even if it's about death. You feel fresher, more awake. This proves my point; your atoms have been subtly distanced from each other, like a breeze is blowing through your DNA. That's poetry loosening you" (627).