Sunday, February 20, 2011

February 19th and 20th

So, I've been reading the Treason of Isengard, which is just one of many huge, thick books that Christopher Tolkien put together out of old drafts of the LoTR. (And the only one that I happen to own.)

It's fascinating. You can literally watch his father's creative process as he crafted the story. Did you know that at several points he had no idea what was going to happen next? Also that Aragorn was originally a hobbit named Trotter?

I know; thank god that changed, right?

Can you imagine how that story would have gone? "Not all that glitters is gold, not all that forages will become pork..." yadda yadda.

I used to think you had to know exactly how the story would unfold in order for it to be worth writing, but that's not at all true. Even Tolkien did not know exactly how his story would end, or even progress, when he began it.

More importantly, I used to confuse the story with the first draft. The first draft is never the story. The story is what happens after you edit. The first draft is this huge, unwieldy block of raw material from which the actual story is chiseled. The block does have value, because if you have no block, you can't get to the story.

So, I was also reading The Tolkien Reader (ok, ok, I admit, I was once obsessed with the man's work... And I shopped a lot at used book stores), so anyway, in it I was re reading Tolkien's essay on faerie stories. This paragraph just jumped out at me:

"Fairy-stories were plainly not primarily concerned with possibility, but with desirability. If they awakened desire, satisfying it while often whetting it unbearably, they succeeded. Fantasy, the making or glimpsing of Other-worlds, was the heart of the desire of Faerie. I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighborhood, intruding into my relatively safe world, in which it was, for instance, possible to read stories in peace of mind, free from fear. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fafnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever cost of peril. The dweller in the quiet and fertile plains may hear of the tormented hills and the unharvested sea and long for them in his heart. For the heart is hard though the body be soft."

I can't help but whole heartily agree.

February 20th

So, I have heard back from brother and friend regarding my faerie tales and the verdict appears that the stories and the story telling are good, but they want more. More background, more detail, more motivation, more character development, more about particular scenes.

Apparently, I have awakened desire; they want to be more in the story, or to have the story unfold more deeply around them, they want to feel more connected to the characters.

This brings up a question I keep wrestling with. Do I keep them faerie tales or not?

Faerie tales are brief, often bloody, have no nuances and deal with the primary things of human existence, such as life, death, marriage, children, property, religion, hate, forgiveness and the unexplained. They are a window into another word, an ancient world; you can smell the very wind of the Dark Ages in some of them.

Mostly, they leave huge swathes of things unexplained. If I start delving into all the details on the outside of my tales, then they will become short stories, or possibly novels. That scares the crap out of me.

It occurred to me yesterday that I'm not just writing, I'm confronting really old internal conversations that I used to have about writing. For example, I started to fill in more detail in one of the stories and the entire time, I'm hearing these thoughts in my head, over and over again:

"This is stupid. This is a complete waste of time. This is childish. Your imagination cannot support this much detail. The story will get watered down. You can't edit this much material. These ideas are hackneyed. That's a flat idea. This doesn't need to be in the story. This is going to fail. You're going to give up on this. You're going to ruin the original story."

And on and on. It's really difficult to press on against that kind of internal headwind, you know? It got worse when I started to sketch out a really simple map to start positioning places. Oh my lord.

"Who do you think you are? This is the worst thing I've ever seen. This is the stupidest thing I've ever done. I'm so embarrassed by this. This is beyond childish. This is such a waste of time. I can't believe you're doing this, what do you think you're going to do with this? I've never seen anything more stupidly pathetic than this."

Where are earth are these thoughts coming from? They're just brutal.

Straight out of my past, that's where. That's where I lived when I first wrote those stories. And then, soon after I married, I gave up on my writing.

No wonder, right? I didn't have the strength to change my internal conversation and I had other pressing matters, like my failed and abusive marriage, and figuring out who the hell I was, so I put the writing away.

Now that I've drawn it out again, it's alive with ghosts. Not just the stories, though they are too, it disturbed my friend that read it, since she had the same history as me and it brought back everything vividly to her. They are like very unpleasant little snow globes with all the pain and limitations and hopelessness of our youth caught forever inside.

So, I'm having to do therapy work and write simultaneously. Those thoughts are not coming from outside of myself- I think like that. Or at least, a part of me does. My therapists says whenever we come up against a part of us that we don't like, or whose message we don't want to hear, the first thing to do is not to resist, or to try and block the thought, but to wonder what is the self loving motivation behind them?

It's not by accident that Christ says, "Love others as you love yourself." Self love is astounding. Even the parts we think are hating all over us are, in fact, motivated by love. I've found this to be true for myself in every single case.

It seems clear to me that I'm trying to protect myself from failure. If I don't reach too high, then the fall won't hurt as much. I didn't have a healthy way of processing failure, so I couldn't build any true confidence. The only way to avoid the unbearable pain of failure was not to try at all.

So, I have to pause several times as I'm writing, to tell myself, "I hear you. You are terrified of failure. You really believe that I have insufficient talent or imagination to bring this off and also I understand that you operate by this rule that I can only start something that I'm going to finish, by very black and white rules.

"I understand that, and I know why you think that. I understand that this is very scary to you, but let me tell you something; I have already failed. Yes. In fact, I have failed so many times that I can't even count the times. I want you to take a deep breath and really look at yourself. Has the failure been too great? Has it left my integral self damaged? Have I been undone by the failure, has the pain been indefinitely crippling?

"That's right, the answer is no. It has not. All my failures have never taken one thing of value away from me. It only illuminated a hundred other things I hadn't been able to see until then. I'm looking forward to further failure, because I love to learn. Failure is not a method of subtraction, it adds to the sum total and it is not a dead end, it's the road branching off into other ways of thinking.

"Besides, sometimes the doing of something is of more value than the result. Sometimes the process is what is important. So, I'm going to continue on with the process of writing this story. Maybe the story won't come to anything, but I'm still going to put effort and work into it, because just doing that is of value to me."

I have to stop and say these things a lot. My work is progressing very slowly because of this, but as I continue to teach that part of me a new way of thinking about failure and risk, more and more energy will be diverted from fear and into the creative process instead. And the creative process is fun.