Storytellersunplugged

Sarah Monette

This month, let’s not talk about my book (although it does, btw, look like I’m going to meet my deadline after all). Instead, let’s go all meta and think about the ways we think about writing.

Homo sapiens sapiens is a peculiar species in more ways than one, but one of our most endearing quirks is our ability to think about our own thought processes. We can do something; we can think about doing something; and we can think about thinking about doing something. It’s fantastic!

And since 90%-99% of the writing process takes place in the mind anyway, it’s inevitably something that is both frustrating and intensely rewarding to think about.

One of the first things I learned when I began reading books about creative writing (and even more so when I began hanging out with other writers) is that no two people understand their creativity in the same way. (This goes for other endeavors, too, not just writing; I’m sticking with what I know, but I’m not meaning to imply that writers have a corner on this particular market.) And the second thing I learned was that not all ways of thinking about creativity work for all people.

One person’s muse, in other words, is another person’s poison.

This inconvenient fact does not mean that anyone is “doing it wrong.” The only way to tell if you’re “doing it wrong” is if you’re not writing. It doesn’t matter whose advice you follow or don’t follow, no matter how insistently a given guru may tell you that their way is the only way that will bring success. What matters is whether your creative process is actually, you know, processing. The rest is just bells and whistles.

It can be tremendously helpful, however, to get a feel for which ways of thinking about writing work for you, and which don’t. Natalie Goldberg, for instance, does not work for me. I tried–my creative writing teacher in high school was a true acolyte of Natalie Goldberg and worshipped whole-heartedly at her altar–and I tried, and finally I admitted, This isn’t me. This isn’t how I understand what I do.

The world was conspicuous by its failure to end.

So I thought–over the course of a decade or so, and obviously, I’m still thinking–about how I think about writing. And I’ve learned a lot, both about myself and my writing process. And about how I think about writing.

And the insight has been valuable because there are points in the writing process where you need to be able to pull back to the meta level, to be able to look at what you’re doing, not from inside the maze, where it’s stifling and humid and there are mosquitos the size of sparrows, but from the observation tower in the middle, where you can see how the paths wind and twist, and where the dead-ends are, and how to get to the center from where you are.

As for example, writer’s block.

Writer’s block probably deserves an essay all its own, but my point here is that my success rate in dealing with it went up dramatically when I stopped looking at it from inside the maze, as a boulder sunk immovably in the middle of my way, and looked at it instead from outside the maze, where it resolves quite differently.

For me (and remember, everyone’s creativity works differently, so this may or may not work for you), the key to undoing writer’s block was shifting my focus from the immediate (What happens next? Where are they going? What do they want?) to the meta (Why am I stuck?). Because if I give myself enough time to work out the answer to Why am I stuck? it shows me how to get unstuck, and the answer may or may not have anything to do with the scene I’m currently stuck in. The reasons for my stuckness may be a wrong turn I took five scenes back.

So that’s the first thing I know about how I think about writing. I need the meta level.

The second thing I know is something you will have observed in the preceding paragraphs: I think in metaphors. Lots of writers do. And the important thing here is that you have to choose your own metaphors. You have to go with what works, not with what pleases you. Anne Lamott, in Bird by Bird, talks about listening to your broccoli as a metaphor for paying attention to your subconscious. I love this metaphor, but it does not work for me. Possibly because I don’t like broccoli. But more because my metaphors tend to be metaphors of struggle–like trying to find my way through a maze. Or getting lost in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Great Grimpen Mire. I think of the process Lamott describes as “listening to your broccoli” more as a siege. The parts of my mind that are not “I,” that don’t have direct access to language and don’t have the benefits of all this self-reflection, have to beat down the walls to get “me” to listen to them. Sometimes, of course, the besieged is helping the besiegers, trying to pry the boards out of the windows and so on, but still. All my metaphors are metaphors of struggle; many of them are metaphors of violence.

And trying to deny that–trying to scrub my thought processes and tie bows on them so they’re fit to meet the neighbors–results in nothing. The literal kind of nothing, in which no work gets done and my processes stagnate and I become a misery to my husband and cats.

That’s the most important thing in all this thinking about thinking. You have to be honest with yourself.

Because if you don’t, who will?