A Writer's Space

by Eric Maisel

  What if I was willing to add my real thoughts? I know, for instance, that this man is an Orthodox Jew and that he and his children are returning from temple. I know this because I grew up as a non-observant Jew in Brooklyn and because I know every nuance of what “going to temple” and what “coming home from temple” looks like. I know, for instance, that they are coming back from temple and not going, though I don’t know how I know that. Is it because of the time of day, something in their look, something in their attitude? I couldn’t tell you—but I know.

  What about the important person who is not there—his wife and their mother? I could leave her out of my description and hope that you noticed her absence—but would you notice? I certainly want you to notice. I want to make sure that you don’t miss the fact that she is absent, since I want to provoke you into thinking what her absence might mean. Of course, it might mean anything. She and her husband might be divorced. She might be shopping. She might be preparing lunch. But it also might mean—and this is the thought I want you to entertain—that she isn’t all that welcome at temple.

  Then there is the matter of how they are approaching. They are hurrying, and “hurrying” is its own kind of loaded word. Children sometimes hurry to school or to catch a bus but their natural way is not to hurry. They only hurry when they feel compelled to hurry. Therefore to say that they are hurrying after their father is to suggest that they are under some compulsion. I would hope that by my identifying their passage as “hurrying,” you sense that their Sabbath is not a joy but marching orders. That’s what I’d like you to get if I describe them as hurrying.

  I can leave things out; I can put things in; but in every instance I am saying something. Once you realize that there is no such thing as innocent describing, you will begin to feel liberated. There may be real trees in nature but there are no real trees appearing in artists’ drawings, paintings, sculptures, or photographs. An artist can photograph a forest when a cloud is passing and make it sinister. He can wait for the cloud to blow by and present us with a happy little forest. The very attempt at artistic neutrality is itself a blatant position. Try describing the bombing of Hiroshima as an interesting example of atomic physics and see if you aren’t making a statement! There is no artistic neutrality—forget about it.

  I am suggesting that you make bolder, more honest choices. There is no such thing as neutrality: say what you intend to say. If you wanted to write a history of Paris, for instance, would you feel compelled to start at the beginning? That is no more the truth of the matter than starting yesterday. All historical records are subjective, pointed constructions. Ninety-nine percent must be left out and whatever is left in is not the truth but a point of view. The question is not “What is the real history of Paris?” but rather “What is your intention?”

  You could start with the Parisii, those Celtic folk, settling by the Seine on the Ile de la Cité in 300 B.C. and starting a little fishing village; or with Caesar invading Gaul in 52 B.C., renaming the fishing village Lutetia, and watching it overflow onto the Left Bank; or with King Clovis and his Frankish followers, who defeat the Romans in 486 and rename Lutetia Paris; or with Charlemagne; or with the Black Death; or with the Hundred Years’ War. Is any one of these the “true” starting place?

  What about its intellectual history? The University of Paris is established in 1215 and the Sorbonne in 1253 but it takes another 500 years before we see the movement to establish the supremacy of the individual known as the Enlightenment. Claude Helvé-tius writes the free-thinking Essays on the Mind, it is condemned as godless by the Pope and the Parlement of Paris and publicly burned, and it becomes the most widely read book of its time. Diderot continues the project of compiling a comprehensive alphabetical treatment of human knowledge, the encyclopedia. Which part of this is the truth about Paris?

  Fast-forward 200 years to the Paris of the structuralists and the postmodernists. Wielding the sharp sword of deconstruction, they make projects such as those of Diderot and the Encyclope-dists seem ridiculous. In a mere two centuries we have moved from “the possibility of knowing everything” to “the impossibility of knowing anything.” That is a fascinating historical thread— but no more true or false than the thread of Parisian massacres highlighted, for instance, by St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1572, when Catherine de Médicis ordered 3,000 Protestants executed.

  Writing is interpretation. You are obliged to offer yours. If you want to say nothing, offend no one, tell a happy little tale, and otherwise act the innocent, that choice is available to you. Just remember that even then you are saying something and that we are watching.

  LESSON 26

  You can play it safe or you can speak your mind. Why venture into the public space of readers and audiences if your goal is to keep your real thoughts private? If you are bothering to write, say what you mean.

  To Do

  1. Make a list of the issues you are willing to shed some blood over. Read your list over. Are you writing about any of these? If not, why not?

  2. Get a soapbox and set it up in the middle of your living room. See what it feels like to stand on a soapbox and say what’s on your mind. Does it feel dangerous? Do you feel ridiculous? Acknowledge your feelings but do not stop speaking.

  3. Put that soapbox in a public place. Do that literally; or do it by saying something in writing.

  4. Say what you mean. The long silence will come soon enough.

  CHAPTER 27

  Standing Up

  Angelina Grimké, the daughter of an aristocratic, slave-holding Southern family, became, as a matter of conscience, an abolitionist. Publicly championing the unpopular abolitionist cause constituted an act of engagement and an example of conscience in action. In 1835, Angelina converted her older sister Sarah to the abolitionist cause and together they became the first women to speak in public for the black slave and, later, for women’s rights. They became founding activists in a pair of vital movements.

  As activists, they persuaded their mother to give them the slaves who constituted their share of the family estate, whom they immediately freed. In part as a testament to their Quaker faith, they began speaking and lecturing in New York and New England against slavery, speaking engagements that included Angelina’s three effective appearances before the Massachusetts legislative committee on antislavery petitions in 1838.

  In addition, Sarah wrote, among other nonfiction pieces, An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States (1836), urging abolition, and Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1837). Angelina wrote An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (1836). Standing up for abolition equaled engagement; speaking out made them activists; but quietly sitting and dealing with the challenges that attend to writing an effective nonfiction piece amounted to something else. Creating something that could move a listener constituted an act of engaged creativity. This is a primary way that a writer can stand up for what she believes, by filling public spaces with her creative efforts.

  A songwriter, when he attends a rally, is engaged. If he helps organize the rally, he is an activist. But when he composes a song for the cause, that composing is an act of engaged creativity. It is an act that requires that he make use of his talents, skills, mind, heart, hands, and personal presence in ways that are different from—not better than or more courageous than, but different from—the way he uses himself when he signs a petition, writes a check, or builds a barricade. In exactly the same sense, a physician who travels to Africa without pay to provide medical services for the indigent poor is engaged and an activist; but if, upon arriving, she discovers that she must invent new procedures because of conditions on the ground, that need demands that she engage the creative part of her nature, the part that innovates and dreams up new combinations. Both the protest song and the new procedure are acts of engaged creativity, that is, creative effort in ethical service.

  Engagement is conscience in action and engaged creativity is creative effort in ethical service. A writer can do h
is part in the struggle to keep civilization afloat in two different ways: as a person and in his art. As a person, there are organizations to join and movements to support. He can also turn over a portion of his time to making art with an overt social and political bent, as, for instance, Richard Dawkins did when he wrote The God Delusion or Michael Isikoff and David Corn did when they wrote Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of Iraq. That is a real option.

  “Engagement” is not a new word or a new idea and “the engaged artist” is a well-known designation in existential literature. Both “engaged creativity” and “the engaged artist” are useful phrases and we should begin to use them—and live them— more. An “engaged artist” is someone whose body of work is political and who perhaps is always political. This is admirable but it may not be the way you want to live your life. “Engaged creativity,” by contrast, only requires that you spend a percentage of your time on sociopolitical writing. Maybe you write one kind of novel most of the time but every so often you try your hand at a Brave New World or an Animal Farm.

  We need our writers to bring their best efforts to the struggle against the reactionary forces that, wherever and whenever they can, tyrannize others. We need our writers to create iconic work that speaks the truth and that provides us with a powerful shorthand way of thinking and speaking—a shorthand such as “Kafkaesque” and “Orwellian.” We need these things more every day. Most writers do not want to do this work as their only work or as their primary work, but perhaps they can commit to being engaged part-time. Can you?

  The domestic and worldwide forces lined up against reason and justice are considerably more powerful, more ruthless, and more single-minded than we are. They have slogans and enforcers: we seem always to have only ourselves. Because we seem only to have ourselves, we feel exhausted and defeated even before we begin. How can I, a lone individual, make a dent? We feel past absurdity, past irony, past despair, and find ourselves disempowered and equal only to watching television. And yet it is exactly where we find ourselves that we must make our significance.

  I invite you onto the path of at least occasional “engaged creativity.” There is a public space for you to inhabit as a writer, one where you add your voice to the voices of others and defend with your pen those principles you deem important. We need you there, in that public space, despite the risks to your livelihood, your friendships, and your place in society that you invite by going public.

  LESSON 27

  Pepper public spaces with some engaged writing in which you stand up for what you believe. You can still be charming; you can still be amusing; you can still be witty. Just be sure to stand up.

  To Do

  1. Take a risk in your writing, any kind of risk, so as to begin to acquire the habit of risk-taking as a writer. Remember that when you take a risk it is likely to feel risky! Learn to deal with the anxiety and fear that standing up provokes.

  2. Pick an issue—illiteracy, intolerance, exploitation, the proliferation of nuclear weapons—and create a piece of fiction or nonfiction that is at once beautiful and polemical. Try your hand at marrying art and conviction.

  3. Think about how you are holding the words “private” and “public.” Are you intending to remain private even after your work goes public? Or are you ready to inhabit public spaces such as radio studios and lecture platforms?

  4. Stand up. We need you.

  CHAPTER 28

  On Not Being Quite So Nice

  It isn’t so easy to write what’s on our mind and let people in on our thoughts. We fear reprisals; we fear looking bad; we fear having to defend what we’ve said. It isn’t so easy to write what’s on our mind even if we are just writing in our journal: there is much that we are keeping hidden from ourselves and our natural frankness is defeated by our defensiveness. The result of this self-censorship is that what we write is milder, more indirect, and less authentic than it would be if we had internal and external permission to speak.

  John, a nonfiction writer, explained: “I’ve learned to be conciliatory rather than confrontational. It’s a pretty good skill set that has served me well, but it has also limited me. I have always been a welcome member on any committee or board because, as one person once said, ‘It is nice to have sanity represented.’ I have often been the steadfast presence in the midst of political strife during my university career, helping to provide a container and sense of safety for others to be strident. I do not, however, like the word ‘nice.’ I think it stands for No Inner Core Evident. I do not think I am nice, nor do I want to be.”

  John’s distinction is a useful one: you can be steadfast, conciliatory, compassionate, sensible, sane, and all the rest; at the same time you can have convictions, stand up for principles, reveal your warts, and express your moral outrage. The main thing is that you obtain internal permission to speak and do not fear “going public” with your innermost thoughts. Once you’ve obtained that permission, you can maintain mindful self-monitoring and decide what you want to reveal and when you want to reveal it.

  Marcia, a poet, explained: “I know all about being nice. It would be so easy for me to remain invisible and write nice poems and read them to nice people at nice poetry readings. That is the norm. Earlier this year a friend of mine wrote a beautiful, passionate poem expressing her outrage about the Iraq war.Before she read this poem at a peace day event, she showed it to the event organizers and to her writing group, who collectively edited every ounce of passion out of it (we wouldn’t want to offend the donors now, would we, or anybody else, for that matter). Compared to the original version, the poem she read at the event was dead.”

  We all experience internal and external pressure to “let the difficult stuff go.” For instance, no one in my family wanted me to pursue a novel I was writing about moving Israel. The book’s premise was that Israel, in order to survive, needed to be moved lock, stock, and bagel to a safer location, and the book’s hero attempts that quixotic feat. The villains were Jews, Christians, Muslims, capitalists, patriots. . . . I aimed to excoriate everyone. In fact, I wrote the novel, but I made sure, by my terseness and indifferent handling of plot, that it could never be published. Just as happy as my family to see it rejected, I put it safely away in the storage shed.

  We do not want to let fear stop us from writing what needs to be written and we don’t want to write an ostensibly brave thing in such a way that we guarantee that it is not publishable. Nor do we want to blithely make all of our warts public.

  Commenting on this last, Rachel, a novelist, explained, “I’m troubled by the relentless me-me-me-ism of much current writing. We seem to have an obsession with being able to say absolutely anything that’s on our minds, no matter how hurtful it may be to others. I recall a nicely written, tragic autobiography about a woman who was badly treated as a child by her adoptive mother. The writing was electrifying and the story caused my jaw to drop, but I felt uncomfortable and like a voyeur for reading it.”

  What a balancing act we are obliged to manage, balancing our need to speak with issues of privacy, decency, and the rights of others! How much should we tell about our family, our neighbors, or our bosses? How many of our own warts should we reveal, and to what purpose? In The Creativity Book, for instance, I wanted to make the point that unless we’re willing to reveal ourselves we probably won’t do our deepest writing. I chose to reveal that I’d had a period during my Army days when I shoplifted clothes from the PX and gave the loot away to my fellow grunts. It was a fascinating process trying to decide what to reveal: I discovered that I could reveal only what I could reveal and not a single blemish more.

  Often we fail to say what’s on our mind because we fear that we won’t be able to control ourselves once we create an opening for the truth to escape. A fear of “saying too much” and “going too far” is a significant part of why we censor ourselves. Then the question becomes, is the fear justified? Shouldn’t we try as an exercise to say some of the things that we’re feel
ing, to see if we actually lose control or, just as likely, modulate and moderate our revelations just perfectly? I propose that exercise to you right now. Write about something that you’ve previously censored out of your writing.

  LESSON 28

  We all censor ourselves. Think carefully about whether you want to draw a different line in the sand and reveal more of your truth in your writing.

  To Do

  1. Sit down to write your current piece or your next piece. As you begin, try to notice whether a part of you is already beginning to censor your efforts. Does your censor occupy a certain “space” in your psyche? What if you opened the back door of your psychic space and shooed him or her out. Does that seem possible?

  2. Instead of shooing your censor out the door, try the following trick. Send him or her out for soft drinks and potato chips. As soon as your censor leaves, start writing!

  3. Decide that when you sit down at your writing desk, you will speak with passion and power and let the chips fall where they may.

  4. Keep making the effort to tell your truth.

  CHAPTER 29

  Two Weeks in Italy

  In the first section on physical space we chatted about adding public spaces to your primary writing space: adding a café, a park bench in the sun, your train ride into the city each morning, your train ride home. Some of these places, such as your local café, you visit on purpose so as to write. In others, you simply find yourself there, and to get your writing done you have to do it right there. When you write in either place, you honor your pledge not to let self-consciousness prevent you from writing.