Spelunking in the psyche

Well, I was doing that personal writing, and then there were holidays in there, and life maintenance, and what with one thing and another, I kinda forgot about posting to the blog--and wasn't quite sure what to say in any event. This is, after all, a public forum, and personal writing is, well, personal, so there's only so much I can say about it.

But I will say a few things about it, not in terms of what I'm actually writing about, but about this process, and how it connects to other writing more generally.

For one thing, although eventually there will, in fact, be an "audience" for what I'm writing, that audience will be one person. And I realize that most of what I'm doing actually isn't intended for that individual at all; it's for me. I need to do a lot of "writing out," which can be a form of acting out: I have to "perform" the various personas that get involved: the warrior, the victim, the philosopher, the psychologist, the supplicant, the judge, whatever parts of my psyche get involved in the issues I'm working out. But "writing out" also is a process of clarifying thinking. That was a continual struggle (and continual area of failure) when I was a teacher: trying to get students to understand that writing is actually a form of thinking. Putting something into words--even spoken words--does help us clarify what we think, but putting what we think (or feel) into writing has advantages that speaking does not: one can go back to rework, clarify, change wording, change order in which things are presented, all in hope that what is going on inside the writer's psyche can be comprehended, or perhaps more accurately apprehended, by the reader.

However, we can never know how a reader will see what we've written. Le Guin was very willing to allow readers to see things in her works very differently from what she had in mind when she wrote them. Example: One of her characters is from (future) earth, from a future nation called Borland. Since the character is black, I always assumed that was from "Boerland," i.e. some part of what had at some point been South Africa. She had something similar in mind (as long as the character didn't talk with the Dutch-inflected South African accent but rather with the British-inflected version)--but she said that some readers had assumed "Borland" was a stand-in for "Portland"--as in Oregon, because that was her home town, and she was OK with that idea, too. (She also was generally OK with readers pronouncing things however they chose, though there were a few instances in which she got rather fierce about the correct pronunciation of names.)

I suppose a writer whose work is out there in the public, especially if one is fortunate enough for the work to start to receive critical attention of any kind, must get used to "misreads" of her (or his) precious and treasured words. I don't have that concern in terms of any of my public writing: no one is paying that much attention to it (and likely never will, which is fine by me). But when a piece of writing is intended as specific communication to another individual--or even a very specific group of individuals--then the challenge to prevent potential misreads becomes more highly charged.

So in order to clearly convey what I feel/think/mean, I must work to put it in language that is absolutely clear--or as clear as my skill can make it. But that in turn requires that I understand what I feel/think/mean well enough that I know what words best convey it. Personal writing of any kind, then, becomes an exercise in knowing the self. I can be a lot sloppier about clarity in my journal writing, as that's intended only for me (and yes, I have a plan about my journals when my life is close to complete: I will read each one, taking them in chronological order, and then, after reading it, ceremoniously burn it.) As my students often said, "I know what I mean"--and in a journal, that's enough. (I will say, though, sometimes I go back to an old journal and read an entry and have zero clue what--or more often who--I was talking about. Memory like swish cheeze.)

The connection I see between that personal spelunking--exploring the inner reaches of the self and bringing back whatever crystals or dull stones one finds there--and writing creatively is that the successful writer must have at least an intuitive sense of the inner life of the characters. That's why one of the exercises I gave my fiction writing students was to answer a huge list of questions about the character. None of the answers would end up in the story, but it helped the writer fully visualize and get a sense of the character, each arbitrary decision informs the writer's understanding of the character's inner self. ("What kind of shoes does the character wear?" "Hand-tooled cowboy boots"--ah! we know something about this person already.)

So although the writing on which I am currently embarked--and have been and will be for some time--is purely personal, it still informs my creative work: what I get to know about myself helps me understand all humans more clearly, including the ones I invent, and the effort to communicate clearly is good practice generally.

And as a sort of post script to this examination of this writer's process, I should note that the two stories I submitted to The Masters Review were very kindly rejected. They said, "However, your submission stood out among others and received praise from our staff. Unfortunately, we always have to decline some excellent pieces, but we are grateful for the chance to read such high-quality work." That may be boiler-plate, but if it is, it's very nice boiler-plate. So, now I get to go back to the list of literary journals I have somewhere and throw a dart to see where I might try next.

Thus begins the new year. May we all find the words we need for every situation in the year to come.