Stories & Soliloquies

Tag: writing

• Professionalism

  Posted at 10:24 am by michellejoelle, on November 11, 2013

  There’s an idea floating around out in the sphere of writing-blogs. People seem somewhat annoyed by the notion that “anyone” could be a writer. It’s a serious profession, they claim, and it should be left to the professionals.

  While they are right about it being a serious profession, the idea of just leaving it to the professionals who are officially sanctioned feels wrong. There are two pieces in particular that I came across while perusing the “Freshly Pressed” page at wordpress.com, and to which I replied hastily and, probably, inelegantly. I’ll try to do a bit better here.

  The first is this article on the difference between being a professional and being a hobbyist. If she were to just leave it as “here’s when you can call yourself a professional” I’d probably not have even taken note, but she seems to exalt the professional title beyond what its worth. She meets a man who claims to be a photographer. After some interrogation, she learns that he is “actually” a bartender, and in the article sort of shames him for “pretending”, without ever really getting to know his art. Now if he lied and said he was a successful professional, that’s a different issue – but it doesn’t seem to be the issue at hand.

  There are times when professional credentials are hugely important – medicine, teaching, mechanics, etc. In these areas, the general populace doesn’t have the ability and knowledge to check the work of the purveyor, and in those cases, past history is rather helpful. For example, I wouldn’t be able to determine which doctor was best by simply checking their work – it would be complicated and require that I learn a significant amount of science. In that case, I’m glad for credentials.

  With art, however, success is measured by both critical acclaim and popular opinion. Artists can be a one-hit-wonders, industry credentials be damned. Beyond this, you can be a bad artist and still BE an artist. Lots of bad artists and writers are paid prodigiously for their work, while many incredibly talented people are overlooked.

  And to be fair – there are also loads of terrible accountants, mechanics, and dentists who are perfectly well credentialed.

  More to the point, can’t you still identify with your art even if you’re not a successful professional? The author’s definition (which she borrows from another blogger) of who can claim to be a writer is someone who has commercially accepted, published work with a great sales record. By this definition, Kafka was merely a hobbyist – a lawyer, primarily, who sometimes wrote. Is that really what we want to say? 

  A lot of the time, owning your art is what makes you successful. I went through a phase in college where I told people I was a painter. And I sold a painting. Claiming your art as your identity is like giving yourself permission to be the person you want to be, and to do the things you want to do, regardless of whether you have external validation. 

  In this second article, the author says no to NaNoWriMo, and compares trying to write a novel in a month with trying to compose a symphony in a month, or choreograph a ballet in a month. She’s worried that people might some how be harmed by this attempt – it’ll take them away from their true art, or it’ll discourage them when they realize that novel writing is something to be left to those with the refinement of a lifelong practitioner.

  It’s a comparison designed to hold the novelist up as a highly trained specialist. But novels come in so many forms that even among the great and well-known novels, such specialization is not reducible to something as specific as choreographing a ballet. It’s closer to trying to choreograph some dance, of any degree of difficulty, and any degree of quality. Just like someone choreographed Swan Lake, someone choreographed the hokey-pokey, too. Some novels are Slaughterhouse Five, and some are just fun stories which can speak to people without incredible nuance.

  And even if you don’t have the training to be great, your work still has value. I organize dance workshops where we invite literally anyone off the street to come in and learn how to dance. There’s a huge annual event called National Dance Day, where everyone is invited to try and learn a choreographed dance and take lessons. Just dive in and try it, because even if they’re not ever going to be a professional dancers, it is still great fun.

  Trying to write a novel is closer to that.  Sure, if you get up off the couch with no training and launch your self into a split-leap, you’ll hurt yourself, but does that mean you should shy away from Zumba? If I attempted to write an astro-physics textbook, I might strain something, but attempting to write a quiet ode to my childhood? I think I can handle that without getting hurt. Signing up for NaNoWriMo was actually an incredible way to give myself permission to make my passion my priority – even if I’m not a professional.

  NaNoWriMo and National Dance Day aren’t the only programs out there asking people to join in a task that seems impossible. Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir invites people to record themselves singing a vocal part and upload to a website where his team will merge the files together to create a full choral sound. It’s a beautiful, wonderful thing. There are also a number of citizen science initiatives out there that ask people to do what would otherwise be outside of the realm of possibility. Kaggle competitions let people with passion prove themselves with the quality of their work. NASA’s citizen science program lets people join in the fun of data collecting. You can do science without being a professional scientist.

  No one is pretending these initiatives will make you into a professional. For that, you’ll need training, practice, and talent. But there’s still value there. While there are some good criticisms of NaNoWriMo out there (like this one by Michael Allen Leonard from Public Domain), generally speaking, I can’t really see what harm there is in encouraging people to challenge themselves. The worst that can happen is that they stop trying, and then the naysayers get what they wanted in the first place – fewer people “pretending” to be writers.

  Write because you love it (and click that link, because Christian Mihai is worth it), and you are a writer. It comes from you. 

  Most likely, the novel I write this month will be terrible and no one will ever read it. I’m ok with that. I do a lot of things at which I will never be great simply because I love doing them. So if I’m out, and someone wants to know who I am, I might just say that I’m a writer, a painter, and a Lindy Hopper, even though I am a professional at none of these things.  

  And yes, I’ll say I’m a lowly adjunct philosophy professor too. I’ve got all the credentials I need for that.

  Related articles

  • NaNoWriMo isn’t bad. You are. (chazzwrites.com)
  • 10 Top Reasons People Use To Avoid Choral Singing (singingoutloudblog.wordpress.com)
  • Naysayers, be gone!! (jingology.wordpress.com)
  Posted in Essays | 13 Comments | Tagged Kaggle, NaNoWriMo, National Dance Day, professionalism, Virtual Choir, writing

• Sacramental Imagining Part 2

  Posted at 8:53 am by michellejoelle, on November 4, 2013

  I started this essay after meditating on my preference for writing and reading in environments that are beautiful, natural, majestic, cozy, and old – environments that have texture and history and meaning unto themselves, which smell like old books or pine needles in the rain, with light filtered through stained glass, or a large window overlooking trees or a stream. In the first part, I focused on my experience of writing as it is rooted in my physical surroundings.  In part two, I turn my attention to the potential consequences of experiencing writing in this way. 

  Part 2: The Reader

  If the writer brings more than just the literal story to the table, the reader does too. There’s a double texture born of a confluence of a writer’s experience and a reader’s.  The underlying texture of the words written or told can roughly intertwine with the wordless texture of the reader’s imagination to create something beyond what the words plainly state to access what they say, and not just what they say in general, but what they say to the reader.

  I imagine the reader’s thoughts as the tendril-like loops of the soft side of Velcro. They reach out and curl around the rough threads imparted by a writer as the story sinks its hooks into the reader, and temporarily binds the two together. At least, this is how I like to imagine it. When we put down a good book, we say we are “tearing” ourselves away.

  But I know that not everyone does this when they read, and that not all great writing is done in environments of great meaning or beauty, in which case it is likely that when I read, my own sentimentality comes crashing over the text like a sloppy, open-hearted tidal wave.  Or perhaps I am right and every writer does this whether they want to or not, and their surroundings leech into their writing and give it meaning even when it isn’t beautiful, granting the words something that affects me nevertheless.  In some cases, it is probably the very lack of sacramentality on the part of the writer that allows readers to take a work in their own ways – this could, in fact, be the very best kind of writing, for it imposes nothing upon the reader.

  On that score, I agree with Tolkien’s distaste for allegory. He explains that intentional allegory, in which a writer intends a particular message, the writer exacts a kind of tyranny over the reader and limits their interpretational possibilities. The same is true in non-fiction writing that has an agenda, or in philosophical writing that is manipulative rather than expository. It is certainly true that overly saturated writing can be prohibitive, or else come across as too thick with intention to leave us comfortable enough to have our own sacramental experience.

  But that doesn’t mean the tacit experiences of the writer and the reader have to be mutually exclusive, and I don’t think that meaning has to be subtextual to be authentic. Augustine, in his Confessions, expertly layers in metaphors of nature and wildlife that have no overt connection to the message of the text, and yet enhance the reading experience. Whether he did that on purpose or whether it bubbled to the surface on its own doesn’t really matter.

  Is there a way to have a transcendent experience of writing that doesn’t transgress on the reader? Harry Potter oozes the sentiment of its writer and traps its readers in such a totalizing way that people want to live in that world. I can’t see this as a bad thing. However, there are other works where this same trait turns manipulative, and leads readers to an obsessiveness that seems less than optimal. The difference, I think, is that one model invites readers to come in, with all of their baggage, and stay for a while. The other commands the reader’s attention and downplays the importance of what they have to bring to the table.

  What is the writer’s responsibility to the reader’s freedom? Should a story latch onto a reader’s consciousness and take it along for the ride, or merely offer suggestions for the reader to run with? When I write, I feel what I’m writing with my whole body. I enter the character, and I look around to see what’s there, what feels natural. And I can’t do that without taking my surroundings and all of my baggage with me. It’s reciprocal, and I don’t know if I could separate myself from if I tried. I think the trick is to let myself feel what I need to feel when I write, but not try to control what the reader feels, not demand that the reader feels what I feel.

  Of course, how a writer achieves that is another question. I’ll save that for another day.
  Posted in Essays | 3 Comments | Tagged reading, tolkien, writing

• Sacramental Imagining Part 1

  Posted at 8:49 am by michellejoelle, on October 28, 2013

  I started this essay after meditating on my preference for writing and reading in environments that are beautiful, natural, majestic, cozy, and old – environments that have texture and history and meaning unto themselves, which smell like old books or pine needles in the rain, with light filtered through stained glass, or a large window overlooking trees or a stream.  There’s likely a significant amount of hygge involved.  Somewhere along the way, I found myself once again returning to the topic of a writer’s responsibility to a reader, and so I’ve decided to break this essay into two parts.  In this first part, I focus on my experience of writing as it is rooted in my physical surroundings.  In part two, I turn my attention to the potential consequences of experiencing writing in this way.

  Part 1: The Writer

  I’m not sure why it has taken me so long to realize this, but I most often get inspired to write at the most inconvenient times.  When I’m at a conference, listening to papers in an historic classroom.  When I’m wandering around on cobblestone streets in a beautiful city.  When I’m hiking by a waterfall in the woods.  When I’m waiting for a train on a rainy day and world feels sad and beautiful.  When I’m out with friends and I’ve just had a fascinating conversation and everything feels just right.  These are the moments when I feel most like writing, and am least prepared to do so.  When I’m at a desk, during work hours, and have all the time in the world, just about nothing comes to mind.

  And it’s always inconvenient, because I like my outdoors environment to be as rustic and un-manicured as possible, and my indoors time to be antique and historic, or else personalized and full of memories.  In short, I like to be in a space that is storied and rich with texture, as opposed to a clean and simple new space meant to limit overstimulation and distraction in favor of efficiency.  I like old things, artful messiness, overgrown gardens, and untouched landscapes.  I like the ruins of an old dock strewn over a tumult of rocks better than white sandy beaches, ancient and outdated libraries with cavernous halls better than sound proof study rooms, and an old chair with too many blankets by a drafty window than a temperature-controlled room with an ergonomic seat.  I read better, and I write better.  Ideas and images come to me here better than when I’m set up properly in a clean or conventional space.

  These are just my personal aesthetic preferences, but realizing how this attunement to my physical environment affects my literary imagination raises some questions about place and imagination that go beyond just my taste.  Reading and writing is supposedly an interior function, allowing us to see with our mind’s eye something utterly different than what is immediately around us.  We’re supposed to soar over our environment to another place by the sheer power of our imagination, guided by words which call ideas to mind that are foreign to our experience and make them ours, pushing aside our present thoughts, feelings, and sensations.  The power of words is supposed to be that they can make us forget who we are and where we are such that we can transcend reality as it is.

  But more and more I discover that my experience of reading and writing is greatly elevated when I am in a place that has something more to offer me than merely what I “need”.  I don’t know if the quality of what I produce improves, but it certainly feels better to me.  I will sacrifice comfort for ambiance because the beauty of a rich environment has a dual function for me: it somehow grounds me in my bodily experience, yet untethers my imagination and sets me free.  While I know that for many this aesthetic experience is not necessary, I think that it adds something an author couldn’t create through pure contemplation.

  For me, writing and reading are best when they are bodily experiences.  The transcendence seems not to be over and out of the body and its present surroundings, but indelibly linked to them.  The transcendence, for me, is not just bodily – it’s sacramental.  The smell of old books and the haze of stained glass windows in the vastness of an old hall do more than make for a pleasant background: they call to my subconscious attention a host of emotions, memories, and influences that seep wordlessly into my imagination, coloring what I see with my mind’s eye, adding depth and richness to my train of thought.  It adds texture to the main voice in my head, which seems like it should succeed best when it drowns all that out, but instead does better when it stands as the tip of an iceberg of sensory experience.  This added texture allows the images to get traction – if they were smooth and clear they would glide right by, merely imparting a fleeting glimpse of a story rather than gripping us utterly and pulling us in, as words are meant to.  As stories are meant to, when you read them, and as I’m finding, when I write them as well.  Underneath the story is, if I’m doing my job right, an unspoken wellspring of unwritten feelings and thoughts and questions and hopes and images.

  Check back next week for part two, where i will explore the reader’s side of the equation.

  Posted in Essays | 0 Comments | Tagged hygge, nature, writing

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