The Muses Among Us

Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer's Craft

Kim Stafford

• Editorial: University of Georgia Press
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780820340364
• Categoría: Languages & Linguistics
• Categoría: Creative Writing

The Muses Among Us is an inviting, encouraging book for writers at any stage of their development. In a series of first-person letters, essays, manifestos, and notes to the reader, Kim Stafford shows what might happen at the creative boundary he calls "what we almost know." On the boundary's far side is our story, our poem, our song. On this side are the resonant hunches, griefs, secrets, and confusions from which our writing will emerge. Guiding us from such glimmerings through to a finished piece are a wealth of experiments, assignments, and tricks of the trade that Stafford has perfected over thirty years of classes, workshops, and other gatherings of writers.

Informing The Muses Among Us are Stafford's own convictions about writing—principles to which he returns again and again. We must, Stafford says, honor the fragments, utterances, and half-discovered truths voiced around us, for their speakers are the prophets to whom writers are scribes. Such filaments of wisdom, either by themselves or alloyed with others, give rise to our poems, stories, and essays. In addition, as Stafford writes, "all pleasure in writing begins with a sense of abundance—rich knowledge and boundless curiosity." By recommending ways for students to seek beyond the self for material, Stafford demystifies the process of writing and claims for it a Whitmanesque quality of participation and community.

QUILTING YOUR SOLITUDES

A Letter to My Class

The other night in class, I heard from each of you why your busy lives have kept you from writing. It broke my heart—especially since I share your predicament and had to confess a dry spell of my own. What shall we do about time and our writing?

Life is a river of stories. Time is a storm of many flavors. What net can catch them? What is the tool, the flask, the spoon for sipping? What is the process to funnel the galaxy of language and story to the writing nib now?

When I watch a great beech tree in a gentle rain, one leaf twitches alone, then another leaf swivels in the great stillness, then another. Looking up from inside the green dome, I begin to learn how my own mind works. One thread of thought wakens, then another, and far away another. There is great reach between glimmerings. How do they find each other? How do they gather and recognize their kinship, these ideas? They find each other during those rare stretches of writing time that come to me, when I can sit still long enough to invite the full spectrum of the possible. And what about most of the time, in the daily rush? My writing would be doomed if the realm of writing were limited to long stretches of solitude. They are too rare. But good luck comes also in sweet morsels of tranquility lasting only a few seconds. My life of writing is rooted in the fragment. And the tiny notebook is my tool.

All coherence in my writing begins in the ready hospitality of the little notebook I carry in my shirt pocket. Because the book and pen are always there, and because my memory is weak, I take dozens of moments each day to jot phrases from the flow of life. I take down a conversation overheard, notes on a sweep of fragrance, an idea that brims up. During a committee meeting, I take dictation on my daydreaming mind to catch a few quick connections in a story I started last week. While I’m on the phone, I hear myself reporting a remark by a student that will not leave me, and flip open my book with my free hand to write it. At dinner, it comes to me I have been trying all day to record a dream. I put down my glass, take out the book, and get the key phrase stored for later. And sometimes, just before sleep, as the busy buzz of daylight loosens its grip, I heave my body upright, turn on the lamp, and pour a few insistent words onto the little page.

Coherence is born of random abundance. Memory begins by releasing my attention from the official task at hand. The palm-sized book folded open is where every piece of my writing has its beginning. Some twinkle in the language around me makes me raise my head, listen close, and jot.

Writing the Little Pieces that Please You

If I examine my own experience, I find the process of writing the little pieces that please me happens in some variation of the following sequence: finding freedom, using my little notebook, writing a postcard, expanding to a letter, jotting a further gathering of ideas, finding a title, writing the draft, hearing the musical key, expanding, getting response, revising until the piece needs to escape my meddling, and then submitting for publication. I offer these my quirky habits for your own consideration and experimentation. Some works happen in a shorter compass, but this full sequence is available, and may keep us going in manageable increments during the rush of life.

1. FREEDOM

“Creative people,” reports my friend Ojeda, the jazz musician, “are people comfortable not knowing—yet.” Freedom means not knowing, yet staying alert. Writing begins in the body. The sensitive instrument of the body must be poised before language, the first note, speaks. As my father said, “you can usually be free some of the time / if you wake up before other people.” Often, for me, this means a kind of bifocal attention. I listen to the official discussion of any committee I’m on, but I also listen to what is not being said, what is implied but not overt, and even what is said but not heard. Freedom means hearing what it means when a colleague says, “Here’s an idea I’d like to toss into the wringer.” (“Wringer”? Isn’t it “Toss an idea into the ring,” a festive circus metaphor? The “wringer” will crush ideas.) I reach for my notebook to take down what I heard.

2. THE NOTEBOOK

In solitude, or in the throng, a few words come to you. They may not seem the right words, but you welcome them. The writer’s prerogative is to take small things seriously. A glimpse, a flicker of recollection, an evocative phrase of a few syllables spoken by someone near you. So you take down observations and ideas in the moment they arrive. The small notebook welcomes small ideas, and compact ideas grow in their own way as you write. First you find them worthy, though small; then you let them grow into shapes that others may find worthy. You relax into total hospitality, you gather scraps with no great claim. You begin as a connoisseur of whispers. And this little solitude could be in the midst of a rush before a deadline, on the bus, at the party. All kinds of moments—short, many, always.

If I check my pocket notebook today, I find random lines in which, for some reason, I have faith:

—could you feel raindrops so completely you would polish them?

—how to teach a class: laughter, then tears, then anything we want

—I will put down my wine & be drunk on sorrow

—patrix: the male cradle of becoming through mind alone

—Freud’s patient afraid she would disintegrate if anyone had her signature

This kind of collection makes me realize how life is a universe of fragments yearning for coherence. The intrinsic electricity I feel in this collection results from the diversity of the fragments and their longing to enter into conversation with one another. When I really sit down to write, I do not start with an empty page. Instead, I take out my notebook to sip from the many flavors clustered there. Or I comb through a half dozen notebooks for some constellation of points that might collectively plot a story, an essay, a speech. The matrix, or cradle of my experience in writing, is thus the constellation of gifts from the world, where I would have to invent the word patrix (reaching forward from my notebook entry) to identify invented wisdom that comes from mind alone. The patrix spins too weak a thread for me.

My high school English teacher—a marvel named Scholastica Murty—invited us to keep journals, and she issued us nicely bound blank books. After a decade in that habit, I found the standard, booksized journal bulky and ostentatious—both in size and in my habit of filling them with my emotions. Working with others, in crowded, noisy rooms, I now like a journal the size of a grocery list, and I like finding my work in the words of people around me. I like smuggling stray thoughts into my notebook constantly. If anyone has influenced my practice directly, it may be Dorothy Wordsworth, whose Alfoxden and other journals show the power of detailed, external observations to convey interior experience. She demonstrates the power of listening with your whole body to what happens around you.

3. THE POSTCARD

What follows the tiny notebook entry? In another free moment, the postcard to yourself may be the right urge for the next sliver of time. Sometimes on the computer, sometimes on a blank page, I do a little writing from a promising lead. Take five minutes now and then to revisit something from your notebook, some glimpse or phrase, and to jot second thoughts, associations, “unrelated” material that comes, for some reason of its own, to your mind. Fragments matured to the size of a postcard stay with me, nibbling at my mind in the background. The world is busy, but the mind tenacious. The writing life is all about faith in a fragment.

4. THE LETTER

Now talk to someone far away, a good listener. Take one of your postcards and tell this thing you care about to someone who cares about you. (Sometimes in class we make a list of good listeners—both alive and gone: people who want to know everything from you. The list does not need to be long to be useful.) Somewhere in this letter, the subject may begin to gather wisdom—a tender increment. One sentence does more than the others. Or a cluster of sentences begins to find new momentum. Copy this sentence or longer sequence from the letter into your notebook, then mail the letter. You and your friend are both ahead. Your friend’s faith in you has advanced your faith in your own ideas.

5. THE GATHERING

That rich cluster born somewhere in your letter now wants to find affinities—those magnetic ideas and moments of recollection and oblique association all in the same realm. This beginning is hungry. This nugget is the author, and you the scribe. On a fresh page, when you have a moment, you might list affinities that come to mind: moments from your random autobiography that connect, other fragments from your notebook, recent discoveries and quandaries, moments of insight from the last twenty-four hours. And somewhere in this gathering, several phrases may nominate themselves as titles for the whole.

6. THE TITLE

I put this here in the sequence, but sometimes the title comes before any of the actual writing. Sometimes in your notebook you will title a moment, a departure, a discovery. The title establishes new territory, a realm that belongs to you. Or the title may be hiding in the writing you have done. See if you find it somewhere in the random notes on your gathering page. Is there a phrase, or a word used in a new way, or a compact sentence that could become your little door opening a new dimension of experience that it is now your privilege to explore?

Looking back, I find a bundle of titles here that might help us. So far, if I were to title what I am writing now, I might call it “Faith in a Fragment,” “A Realm that Belongs to You,” “This Beginning Is Hungry,” “A Tender Increment.” Each title would not only identify the piece we are writing here, but might also transform our sense of what it is. These clues to naming the developing subject tend to hide everywhere in the flow of the writing.

7. THE DRAFT

Take ten minutes. Twenty would be a luxury. Sometimes five is all you have. Put your title or your sentence cluster at the top of the page, put your notebook and your gathering page to the side, and start talking on paper. Ask questions. Tell stories. Take detours. Tell secrets. Whis per and sing. Revel in words and textures. Let your whole body mutter and shout in the words that come. In class, we call this freewriting. In your own realm, it is simply your writing. Good things gather: huckleberries and whiskey in one bite.

8. THE MUSICAL KEY

Right away, or when you next have time, read what you have written aloud. Aloud. There is a line in a fifteenth-century monastic rule that specifies: “No one shall read while others are trying to sleep.” Reading then was always done aloud, for literature is musical thought. In your writing now, what sings? Which sentence or phrase has a rhythm that you find enticing, commanding, enlivening?

Then ask, “What do you know that you didn’t write?” Write what you didn’t write, but in the musical tone of the part that sings. And then keep going as long as you can.

9. EXPANSION AND THE SECOND GENIUS

In my experience, revision happens best when it can have the same fervency as first writing. We might call this principle “the second genius,” a deeper discovery latent in the first draft. In the realm of the second genius, discoveries do not happen alone, but in the rich context of earlier writing. Effects are magnified. Single jewels find a place in the firmament. You delve, sift, stir, and dig deep in your new property for gold. Somewhere in the first draft lies an opportunity to make great discoveries by adding what fits, and then by cutting what doesn’t match the richest additions. The second genius is the midlife crisis of your young draft—messy, touched by loss, full of new power.

Transformation is possible at every point. By the magnetic principle of your eccentric mind, you add episodes, sentences, words, and you take out episodes, sentences, words. You change the order of what remains. You fine-tune every sentence by the musical ear you are developing exactly for this piece. Adding, cutting, moving, and tuning—these are the possible moves in revision, all energized by the spirit of the second genius.

It’s a tough truth that drafts often get worse in revision, before they get better. This is natural. The first genius had a shine that may be tarnished by revision. There is a clear lawn, then the messy digging that begins a garden, then the order of the garden when it flourishes. It takes time, but you keep going through the messy stage, encouraged by the memory of how writing led you to the first genius, which began with nothing. But the first writing was often too small, too thin. It was shorthand for the whole message. This is why the second genius—the totally new finding of rich association and connection—is so essential.

10. RESPONSE FROM A WRITING GROUP

Beyond the good listener, don’t share anything until you know what you love in what you have written. For if you, the artist, know the essential and unshakable pleasure at the heart of your work, bad advice can’t hurt you. Sharing something to which you don’t feel deep and present loyalty, however, is a waste of time for everyone, and dangerous. For if you don’t know this deep pleasure in your writing, even good advice can stunt your work and steal your pleasure.

Writing groups advance work in progress to the extent the writer holds a matured sense of a work’s core of integrity. As my father said, “An artist is someone who decides, not someone who goes to another and says, ‘Is this good?’” If you hear that question from your own lips, take your work back to your studio and find its heart of pleasure on your own.

11. THE END OF REVISION

One day, it is time for the child to leave home. To remain longer would reverse the principle of healthy growth. That day comes when the child is mature enough to go out into the world, and the parent has other things to do. In the terrifying words of Donald Graves, we should not linger so long with a piece of writing that we begin “giving a manicure to a corpse.” In my own practice, the end of revision may be accompanied by the abrupt sensation I am reading a piece written by someone much smarter than I am; a percussive click to the last line; or a flood of tears.

The bread is done when you can smell it from the next room. And your writing will get sassy, speak for itself, take on a life of its own you must not injure by meddling too long.

12. QUILT BLOCKS

A piece is finished. It is ready to escape you. Maybe it is the size of a poem, or a paragraph destined to be a paragraph alone. Maybe it is the size of a story of five hundred words, complete. Maybe it is a story that is complete in itself, but wants to be with other stories. Maybe it is a completed episode that wants to be part of a novel. Whatever the size of the completed piece, it came into being during a series of short time segments, twenty minutes or less, and the building of a larger structure—a book of poems, a collection of essays, an episodic nonfiction book, or a novel—can be constructed from quilt blocks of roughly the same magnitude as you accumulate them over time.

If this weren’t true, I couldn’t write in the midst of a busy life, and you could call me hypocrite to teach writing to students who are not independently wealthy and in possession of unlimited writing time. You’re busy, I’m busy, we’re in the same boat here. How do we move beyond the construction of small units of writing that satisfy us locally? As a first step, let’s publish the pieces we have completed—the stories, poems, and essays—and simultaneously move to a consideration of compiling the larger work.

But first, before we follow that path to the end, let me pause a moment and test the first nine steps of my plan by writing a story to see what happens.

FREEDOM:

What has reached my hearing recently? That meeting with the lawyer? Too painful. Any dreams that lasted? Guess not. Something about that autumn maple tree outside, more vivid than ever, a kind of fire? Sounds hackneyed. Any recent learning from my teaching? Yeah, but I’ve already started to write about that. Wait: that story my mother told me, about the leaf, and the man. Wasn’t there something in the notebook about that?

THE NOTEBOOK:

Mother’s story about the man who offered to pick a branch outside the library for her.

THE POSTCARD:

So there’s...