A zine about the chasms between research and writing and writing and publishing. Available to download in today’s newsletter.
The Four Energies
When reading Jane Friedman’s newsletter, I came across this great bit by writer Bill O’Hanlon, from his book, Becoming A Published Therapist:
In my view, there are four main energies you can tap into when you write your book. The main writing energy you discover may be just one or you may find that you have a combination of more than one of these energies that fuels your writing endeavors. The four energies are Blissed, Blessed, Pissed, and Dissed. The first two represent the positive energies; the last two, the “negative.”
The energies are split between “what you love and what upsets you”:
- “Blissed” energy comes from what you’re on fire for and can’t stop doing.
- “Blessed” means you’ve been gifted something that you feel compelled to share.
- “Pissed” means you’re pissed off or angry about something.
- “Dissed” means you feel “dissatisfied or disrespected.”
O’Hanlon goes on to say many of his early books were “written from a combination of pissed and blissed.”
(I can relate: much of my work comes from being a combination of angry and curious.)
O’Hanlon’s point is that ideas aren’t enough, you need energy to see you through a creative project, and if you can identify that energy and where it comes from, it can help your work.
An act of perpetual self-authorization
“Nothing in your education has taught you that what you notice is important,” writes Verlyn Klinkenborg in Several Short Sentences About Writing.
But everything you notice is important.
Let me say that a different way:
If you notice something, it’s because it’s important.
But what you notice depends on what you allow yourself to notice,
And that depends on what you feel authorized, permitted to notice
In a world where we’re trained to disregard our perceptions.Who’s going to give you the authority to feel that what you notice is important?
It will have to be you.
The authority you feel has a great deal to do with how you write, and what you write,
With your ability to pay attention to the shape and meaning of your own thoughts
And the value of your own perceptions.Being a writer is an act of perpetual self-authorization.
No matter who you are.
Only you can authorize yourself….
No one else can authorize you.
No one.
“This doesn’t happen overnight,” he writes. So how does one begin?
Start by learning to recognize what interests you.
Most people have been taught that what they notice doesn’t matter,
So they never learn how to notice,
Not even what interests them.
Or they assume that the world has been completely pre-noticed,
Already sifted and sorted and categorized
By everyone else, by people with real authority.
And so they write about pre-authorized subjects in pre-authorized language.
I have copied this passage out several times now, because it’s one of the best things I’ve ever read about giving yourself permission to write, to draw, to do anything creative.
Here is a nice, long interview with Klinkenborg in which he discusses the book’s origin and his teaching.
“What I do now is essentially help students escape from their education,” he says.
They’re taught that what they notice is not important. That the things they pay attention to really don’t matter, because they’re going to be taught how to handle what other people notice, what other people have written, what other people would have said. Well, what if you say to a student, “No actually, what you notice is important and it’s important because you noticed it.” What if you pay attention to the pattern of the way you notice the world around you? What if you pay attention to the perceptions that you have and the character of them, and trust their validity?
I cannot recommend the book enough. One of my favorite reads of the year.
Don’t be afraid to disappear
I didn’t catch the Emmys last night, but I was moved by this acceptance speech from Michaela Coel, creator of I May Destroy You:
“Write the tale that scares you. That makes you feel uncertain. That isn’t comfortable. I dare you. In a world that entices us to browse through the lives of others to help us better determine how we feel about ourselves, and to in turn feel the need to be constantly visible — for visibility these days seems to somehow equate to success — don’t be afraid to disappear from it, from us, for a while and see what comes to you in the silence.”
(Silence is a space for something to happen. And it is unpredictable! It takes courage to disconnect, not just to get over FOMO, but to get over the fear of what you might discover about yourself when writing.)
For those who didn’t win anything or who weren’t even nominated, there’s Yeats’ “To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing”:
Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who were it proved he lies
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors’ eyes;
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.
Back to the bliss station to make the next thing…
Reading like a bird of prey
William James said that our stream of consciousness, “like a bird’s life, seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.”
I wonder if our reading life — that is, for those of us who read to write — isn’t like a bird’s life, too.
Swoops and perches.
“Like most writers, I don’t educate myself sequentially,” says the poet Gary Snyder, “but more like a hawk or eagle always circling and finding things that might have been overlooked.”
In Emerson: Mind on Fire, Robert Richardson writes that Ralph Waldo Emerson read “like a hawk sliding on the wind over a marsh, alert for what he could use.” Emerson read to “nourish and to stimulate his own thought.”
“The glance reveals what the gaze obscures,” Emerson wrote. “Somewhere the author has hidden his message. Find it, and skip the paragraphs that do not talk to you.”
So the reader/writer hunts like a hawk or an eagle, but then, after we devour books, we must be like the owl: “Keep only what is useful. Regurgitate the rest.”
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