Read...Admire what is Good and Write

I received a hand written letter from a young friend last week who tells me she  has been "starting books but keeps on getting writer's block."  I was amazed and excited that this young  woman is aspiring in the realm of writing but dismayed that she had let the concept  of "writer's block" enter into her self motivated exploration of creative fiction.  

Isn't it amazing enough that we take these letters and rearrange them into thoughts and feelings that represent our inner and outer worlds?  And when words don't flow onto the blank page hopefully we are stacking up experience in other realms...you know...out there alive and well in life day by day!

It's true that troubles and stress and illness can require the energy and impulse needed to be creative but  rather than concede to the idea of being or having a "writer's block" I want to encourage my young friend that it is better to focus on foundational building blocks.  Hands on living and solid reading  have been the master teachers of many writers.   If we  read texts that have survived the fires of time and fashion, we can study with the best of the best.

The spine of an old book that caught my eye on a  used book shelf

                            

Read old books...read great books...read the Good Book.

In William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White's classic Elements of Style   there is an encouragement to:

Write in a way that comes easily and naturally to you, using words and phrases that come readily to hand. But do not assume that because you have acted naturally your product is without flaw.

The use of language begins with imitation. The infant imitates the sounds made by its parents; the child imitates first the spoken language, then the stuff of books. The imitative life continues long after the writer is secure in the language, for it is almost impossible to avoid imitating what one admires. Never imitate consciously, but do not worry about being an imitator; take pains instead to admire what is good. Then when you write in a way that comes naturally, you will echo the halloos that bear repeating. ( p. 70 3rd Ed 1979 Macmillan Pub.) 

Abraham Lincoln was known to advise : 

A capacity  and taste for reading gives access to whatever has been discovered by others.  It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems.  And not only so; it gives a relish and facility for sucessfully pursuing the unsolved ones. ( p. 30   Abraham Lincoln Wit and Wisdom  1965 The Peter Pauper Press)

Annie Dillard asks: 

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our hearts? Can the writer renew our hope for literary forms? Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power? ( p. 73 The Writing Life  Harper & Row 1st Ed.)

And having read much  there is  just writing...a reader asked Annie Dillard, "Who will teach me to write?" Her answer:  "The page, the page, that eternal blankness... "( p. 58 The Writing Life  Harper & Row 1st Ed.)

I must thank my young friend for sharing with me that she has begun writing; it is an exciting adventure and one that I enjoy allowing myself.

All the best!

Jeannette

p.s. this post is with much love for A.M.M.

"Nobody Owes You A Reading" The Writing Life of Ralph McInerny

Scholarly journals often have to arrive at just the right time in one's life to be fully read, unless you keep them around for a long time.  But time can sometimes take us even further from our stack of intentions.  Currently living in a small cottage I decided to gather up a pile of various publications and send them off to the second hand store.  Not long into my task I found myself sitting on the floor amidst the possible candidates reading with great interest, in a March 2006 publication, an article called "The Writing Life."  When I finished my read, I gently tore the pages from the journal and mailed them off to a friend who has every intention of writing a novel in his newly achieved retirement.


A month later I received a grateful note from said friend who had in turn made  copies of the article and sent it out to six of his friends. Why hadn't I kept a copy for myself?  Fortunately I realized I could reread the article on line.  I found The Writing Life  by  Ralph McInerny and enjoyed it again.  Now you have a link to the article too. Here's how it starts:

It is the rare reader of fiction who does not at some time or other consider becoming a writer. It comes and goes over the years for many, and some carry it about forever as an unredeemed promissory note to themselves. In their heart of hearts, they regard themselves as writers. When my first novel appeared, I got a note from a senior colleague to the effect that it was sly of me not only to think of writing a novel but actually to do it. ...

  Not having read any of the man's work,  I set out to make myself acquainted with him and learned that in 2009 he  retired from 54 years of teaching at Notre Dame and that he died in January of 2010.  He was both a published scholar and a prolific writer of fiction and it is quite evident through a number of eulogies that he was a giving man deeply appreciated by many.


In  the 1960's, in addition to his teaching and philosophical work, he began to write fiction. It is the story of how he made the transition from wanting to be a writer to becoming one that he tells in "The Writing Life" essay. 

And so it began. In the basement was a workbench, unlikely to serve its original purpose for me. It became my desk. It was L shaped. I plunked my typewriter on the short leg of the L and, standing, began. Every night, after we had put the kids to bed, I would go downstairs and write from ten until about two in the morning. The markets I was chiefly interested in were Redbook, Ladies' Home Journal, and Good Housekeeping. Their initial price for a story was a thousand dollars. I sent stories out, but I was always ready with others when they came back. There was never a time when I wasn't awaiting editorial word on one or more stories. This gave room for hope. In April I began to get messages on the rejection slips and then a letter from an editor at Redbook, Sandra Earl, telling me “close but no cigar,” and urging me to keep trying.


Those early times at my converted workbench were, I came to see, my apprenticeship. For someone who aspired to write fiction I was almost totally ignorant of how a story is made. The slick magazines operated on the Edgar Alan Poe principle that a story aims at a single effect. No sideshows, nothing that does not contribute to the point of the story. I would sometimes be asked what paragraph three on page seven was meant to do, would read it, find it lovely writing but effectively idle in the story. Out it went. I was learning that one writes for a reader. Writing is too often described as self-expression. But writing is the art of making a story that will engage and hold and satisfy the interest of the reader. I typed a slogan and pinned it over my typewriter: Nobody Owes You A Reading.

This image is quite stuck in my head...he stood and he stuck to it.
I have never been a reader of mystery novels, though I have certainly heard of the Father Dowling series, and I am not sure that I am up for scholarly texts on Thomas Aquinas, but I might  give Mr. McInerny a bit more reading...intrigued as am by the  title of his  memoirs,  I Alone have Escaped to Tell You. 


I'll let you know if I do and maybe you'll let me know what you think...
P.S. Despite the perusing that led me to this article,  I did resolutely give away a stack of journals at least three feet tall but not before noticing a poem by Ralph McInerny that I just posted  on my Bread on the Water Blog.  


Sending off that stack of journals made quite a bit of room for more reading material of the "old fashioned" kind.

You'd generally get to somewhere Else if you ran very fast for a long time...

 as it was told to Alice in the Wonderland she encountered:

'Now! Now!' cried the Queen. 'Faster! Faster!' And they went so fast that at last they seemed to skim through the air, hardly touching the ground with their feet, till suddenly, just as Alice was getting quite exhausted, they stopped, and she found herself sitting on the ground, breathless and giddy.

The Queen propped her up against a tree, and said kindly, 'You may rest a little now.'

Alice looked round her in great surprise. 'Why, I do believe we've been under this tree the whole time! Everything's just as it was!'

'Of course it is,' said the Queen, 'what would you have it?'

'Well, in our country,' said Alice, still panting a little, 'you'd generally get to somewhere else — if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing.'

'A slow sort of country!' said the Queen. 'Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.

If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!' 

Snippets after Shut Down

I belong in bed.   I had actually shut down my computer.  I have been set to a purpose that is an honor and very hard  but a write purpose task.  To write a eulogy... I know there are all sorts of experts in the field, tips on how to write a eulogy abound  on the internet, but what is needed is heart.  Brevity, clarity, organization and hopefully a voice to read can all come...but heart for he who is gone and for each one who feels  his loss ( and I am such a one myself)   is really all I care about at this point.  And I came to a place where I knew it was time to retire and trust the rest of it to tomorrow.

And then I was told there were two new blog posts from my traveling daughter and I fired this computer back up and ignored the exhaustion ahead signal lights that had been flashing for so long the batteries are almost stone...  One of her posts was so long and so brilliant and painful and funny and convoluted I know I will read it again in the morning.  The other, the latest one was short, a snippet she said...a day that had not held time for writing but she typed out a little marker for the trail...and so both  in support of  her and because I am encouraged by her, I have hereby officially written a snippet too.  Good night.

3 Minutes or less: Life Lessons from America’s Greatest Writers ~ a book review

    What would you share about the subject of illusion in three minutes or less?  It’s a great writing challenge, isn’t it?  Would you be interested in reading what some of America’s favorite authors wrote on that subject when invited to share a prepared speech with such a time limit? 

     Perhaps your favorite  American author has spoken at an annual PEN/Faulkner gala. 
3 Minutes or less: Life Lessons from America’s Greatest Writers is an anthology of over one hundred and fifty such essays published in 2000 by Bloomsbury.  Every year has had its topic. The collection includes eleven different topics each addressed by ten to twenty different authors. 

     Eudora Welty delivered one of my favorite essays of the collection on the topic of beginnings.  She speaks of her sense of her own internal timeline and experiences of being freed of clock time. 

“Remembering, we discover and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge.  Our living experience at those meeting points is one of the charged dramatic fields of fiction.”

  Welty shares a passage from her novel,  The Optimist's Daughter,  that focused on confluence

“...which of itself exists as a reality and a symbol in one…Of course, the greatest confluence of all is that which makes up the human memory, the individual human memory.  My own is the treasure most dearly regarded by me in my life and in my work as a writer.”

     I felt intense freedom reading Russell Baker on the topic of illusion.  I won’t steal his thunder or explain why he says, “Our best use and our peculiar gift, if we have any, is our ability to sustain the precious illusion that the teller of the tales is not the author.”  

     Susan Richards Shreves shares the prescription given her as a young writer to tell the truth about the way things are, knowing that writing is none the less an optimistic act requiring hope about the way things could be. She illustrates this with a very personal story from her family’s history that left me with indelible images of the power of the imagination.  

     Other well plumbed topics included are Obsessions, Heroes, Confessions, Reunions, and of course Endings.  

     Some of the writers privileged to contribute to this anthology through their archived speeches are William Styron, Annie Dillard, Larry McMurtry, Rita Mae Brown, Maurice Sendak, Jane Smiley, William Kennedy, Sue Miller, Allan Gurganus, Jane Hamilton, and Thomas Flanagan to name just a few you might readily recognize.  

    From the clever and the confessional to the inspiring and profound, all of these essays are worth the three minutes they take to read and many of them invite reading again and again.  

     And having read, perhaps you’ll be inspired to organize and write what you would share in three minutes or less on a topic such as  First Love, Journeys,  A Lesson, or The Sense of Place.       

                                                              ~~~~~

Rainy Weather Predicted Didn't Arrive: Here's the Bluest Bright Day We've Had!

All these photographs were taken on Thursday, October 28th.  It was just one of those days.  I'm feeling somewhat better, but still not suppose to be bending down...so I took my camera with me to walk the garden so I wouldn't be tempted to start plucking up weeds.

The Pacific Ocean is peeking through the cypress trees and the air  was balmy...fragrant...temperate....so fine.

 Click on the pictures if you want to see a larger version.

Today is cloudy...and the water appears less blue than yesterday.   It was fun to download yesterday's pictures and realize I wasn't making up the sensation of color I remembered of yesterday.

I wonder how many rocks there are in the world named

Bird Rock?   Well there's one of them...

                                                                 

I know, I know, this is my essay and  writing blog...but I just had to share the green grass, the waters  so blue, the rocks, the clouds,  the sky...  Thanks for visiting and come back soon...I'm working on a few things.

Here's a little story written by shell fossiled in stone...

maybe it will prompt more writing from someone, perhaps from you?

Springs Pour Forth...the Trees are Well Watered

A Sunday walk in redwoods on a creek brought deep remembrances of childhood terrain...pilgrims, xenoi though we be....there are some places that are more deeply kindred than others and speak of home.

Children's stories often tell the the tale of babes lost in the woods...but for some of us we ~find~in the woods, learn to listen,where water sings on rocks and carves wood and stone ...

The quiet collects in shady pools...may it cling to us, follow us, back into people realms where we lay our hands to work of many kinds.  I recently heard a musican suggest that music is a chance to sit quietly, to be able, under the guise of enjoyment, to think on important things in life.  An artist spoke to me recently of people needing art to see things that speak inner realities, the known but unknown, the hidden but accessible if...

we want to see, listen,seek, find, be found.

He makes springs pour water into the ravines;

it flows between the mountains. 

They give water to all the beasts of the field;

the wild donkeys quench their thirst.

The birds of the air nest by the waters;

they sing among the branches. 

He waters the mountains from his upper chambers;

the earth is satisfied by the fruit of his work.

Psalm 104:10-13 NIV

A joyous Monday to you.

~~~ 

Hello Anonymous Commenter and Lurkers, This Post is for You

Dear Anonymous,

 I wonder if you are one return visitor or if several students studying English have visited.

Even though you don't have a profile, you could sign your first name to your comments and maybe even tell what country you reside in, or where you are visiting from.  It would be interesting to know what your main course of study is.   It would make your comments more meanful and personal for me.

I would be curious to learn how reading a  blog helped you accomplish an assignment  for college?  Are you searching for particular subject matter?  Is leaving a comment part of the assignment?  Notice the spelling of the word  a s s i g n m e n t.  One reason I wonder if "anonymous" is one  return reader is because this word is always misspelled in the comments the same way and I get comments with almost identical wording.  I should have saved all the comments I haven't published, I could have done a whole post with them.

I mean to post more of my writing here on WRITE PURPOSE but then I have second thoughts.  When my children were small I did not let them play out in the street  where they might be run over or stolen.  That's a little bit how blog land feels.  In some ways, anonymous readers  are part of that feeling. So maybe if the lurkers and anonymous commenters say hello it will help me risk more in this public place.   What do you think?

~If You Want to Write~ but Painters, Musicians & Artist in General -Take Note Too

I am reading a wonderful book called If You Want to Write A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit written and first published in 1938 by author and teacher Brenda Ueland (1891-1985).

One of her primary premises is that to be human is to be talented because everybody who is human has something to express, and everybody is original and has something important to say if he tells the truth. "But it must be from his true self and not from the self he thinks he should be." (p. 4)

She sees creative power and imagination as very tender and sensitive and usually "drummed out of people" very early in life, and so she sets out to share and encourage the possibility of being blessed by using one's creative powers. In a foot note she writes:

"Whenever I say "writing" in this book I also mean anything that you love
and want to do or to make. It may be a six-act tragedy in blank verse, it
may be dressmaking or acrobatics, or inventing a new system of double entry
book-keeping. But you must be sure that your imagination and love
are behind it, that you are not working just from grim resolution, i.e., to make
money or impress people." (p.14)

She understands any creative work where the feelings imagination and intelligence are employed to have intrinsic value. Writing teaches the writer, stretches a person. "It has done you good." (p. 15), she wrote in her succinct way.
In addition to the much she learned over the years from her students, friends and writer contemporaries, she draws greatly upon the lives and work of Chekhov, William Blake, Vincent Van Gogh and Mozart.
Even though I'm just a few chapters into this book, I've enjoyed aspects of it so much it would feel selfish not to share of its existence and I'd like to hear from others who are already familiar with Ms. Ueland's work. I had never heard of her and just stumbled upon a used copy of the 1987 second edition from Graywolf Press. I've since noticed on Amazon that it's been republished again. It seems deigned to be a classic. I'll leave you with one of her definitions of art:

"But the moment I read Van Gogh's letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love (1) and enthusiasm for something, and
in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty
in things to others, by drawing it.
1Or it can be a feeling of hate and abhorrence too. through the work of the men who have worked from love
seems to be greater than those who have worked from
hate.

Well, I'm heading back to a little music, some exercise, my reading and writing and preparing for Christmas.

Happy Holidays to All

~~~~~

Sun After a Storm and a Writing Prompt

Water is always needed on the California Coast and we finally got some. It didn't fall straight down though...it came every which way, but we aren't complaining.

Before the Tuesday storm,

and I heard it was just the leftover of a typhoon

that Japan took the full brunt of, things were mighty tidy in the courtyard.

Only little limbs fell and the redwoods and cypress and pines got scoured by the wind and look lovely clean and much greener now.

It sure helps to have sunshine after a storm. The old house absorbed water like a wick.

After the rain, new buds bloom...

I threw open windows to the portal on the sea....

This picture I took reminds me of a writing prompt in a series of workshops I participated in...

"If I were a gate..." I will have to find that poem I wrote and post it on "Writepurpose" sometime.

But maybe, while I get back to work...one of my readers will write a poem...

just take the prompt...and off you go...

IF I WERE A GATE...

Are you Writing a Book for Me?

I love to read. I read to meet other persons whose struggles and visions and response to life give strength to the day. I read to meet friends in the pages of other times and places. I read to travel where my feet may not go in this lifetime.

I long for stories that I could unabashedly hand to my daughters and say, read this, it will help you on your journey.

I read stories and look for the tangle of threads that is about to become smooth and woven, stories that shimmer with transcendence and penetrate the day’s complexities in all their shadings.

I look for books that I could gladly hand to my husband; stories that know that man and woman do share interior realities and that the trail home usually does involve a Hansel and a Gretel, bread and stones.

I love to find stories that have explored beyond the magnetic polarities, which don’t paint human faces on the enemy and yet, foible by folly reveal how we trip and fell ourselves.

And sometimes I ask myself what keeps me from writing such a story myself? Is the part of me that doesn't yet write busy learning or busy unlearning? There’s the knowledge of how truly little one knows, and the caution for the world doesn’t need more stories unless love increases. Like Hippocrates oath of old, I must first do no harm.

What I haven’t written sometimes feels larger and harder than the tender vessels in which it needs to be, in the very blood of my life, decanted.

But maybe you’re writing a book for me.