Where Good Ideas Come From

 

Open to What the World Will Give

I sit down to write this blog post.  Just a few hundred words–no big deal. So why does it feel like such a big deal. Why put it off for so long?  It’s not the work of writing that stops me, but the fear that I won’t have anything worthwhile to say.  This is not false modesty or insecurity.  Well, okay, maybe it is.  Although I’ve spent a lifetime getting excited about ideas and concepts, I am not always sure that other people will share my enthusiasms.

But it isn’t just that.  I’m also afraid of not having enough of the answers.  Whatever my good intentions, however closely I’ve read the research, I may have missed something important.  There’s a sort of all-or-nothing approach to it.  I will either have the right answer or I won’t, and I’d better be very sure of myself before saying anything, or expecting anyone else to spend time reading it.  What if I don’t know enough?

Fortunately, I find unexpected help from one of my favorite writers, William Stafford.  Stafford was, among other things, a prolific writer who held the position that is now known as the Poet Laureate.  He was also a well-respected professor at Lewis and Clark College, where I studied English.  (Sadly, he retired just months before I started my freshman year.)  This is a man who was well-prepared, wise, and who unambiguously had something to share.

Stafford’s assistance comes while I am re-reading one of my favorite books about him, called Early Morning: Remembering My Father, written by his son, Kim.  Kim Stafford, also a writer and a teacher at Lewis and Clark, wrote the book as a study of the writing life, drawing on the work and lived example of his father, and incorporating his own insightful observations.  In one chapter, Kim talks about their different styles of teaching.  Kim said he felt a responsibility to have a body of good information to share with his students, while his father chose to “interview” his students to draw the information out of them.  And then I come across a passage, right there on page 158, that exactly describes my fear:

“When I began to teach, I felt tugged in two directions.  Should I have answers for my students like my professors; or should I have questions … like my father? Sometimes in class I would feel drunk with insight.  Sentences spilled forth from my reading, my pondering, my pure invention.  But when I finished we all dwelt in the trance of ‘so what?’  So what if all these ideas were important to me?  What questions would require the students to help me?  But if questions were all I had, was I cheating my students?”

Kim Stafford goes on to conclude that his father’s teaching style and writing practice both relied the same approach of open receptivity.  He shares a quotation from one of his father’s books, Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer’s Vocation.

“A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.  That is, he does not draw on a reservoir; instead, he engages in an activity that brings to him a whole succession of unforeseen stories, poems, essays, plays, laws, philosophies, religions, or–but wait!

Back in school, from the first when I began to try to write things, I felt this richness. One thing would lead to another; the world would give and give.”

I am calmed and inspired by these words.  They teach me not only that it is okay to write, to have an opinion before I have all the answers, but that writing is necessary for me to find the answers.  By being open-hearted and receptive to the process, I may arrive at understanding by writing my way toward it.

So, for today, I am open to this possibility.  I will set aside my misgivings and publish this post.  I will wait to see what the world will give.

Rules and Red Pens

I have a friend named Sean Lannin who is a very talented guy.  He’s a good business person, excellent basketball player, and makes a mean batch of chocolate chip cookies, but in all the years I’ve known him, we’ve never talked about writing.  That changed recently.  Sean had been reading and thinking about writing, and reminded me that for a lot of people the challenge of writing is really, really scary.  Worry rises up about “getting it wrong,” breaking some sacred rule of grammar, or invoking the wrath and the red pens of English teachers everywhere.  He started wondering what makes it so difficult for many people to start writing, especially about themselves.  Here’s what he came up with:  Rules.

What did he mean by that?  He answered his own question with a story.  Actually, he called it an “anecdote,” but it is a story, and it gets right to the heart the issue. With his permission, I’ve copied his story here:

My father was a Warrant Officer in the Army, training to fly helicopters.  The circuit included Alabama, Georgia, Texas, and Pensacola, but we probably lived in other states as well.  I lived in Germany, and Thailand, and Vietnam, all of these DOD schools.  In 2nd grade I left my family in Thailand and move to Bellevue, Washington to live with my Grandparents.  ”The schools were better.”

I did not attend much high school, preferring instead to spend my time in a basketball gym shooting baskets or sneaking off campus for some sort of mischief.  When I took a junior college creative writing class it was clear that I did not know an adverb from a noun, an independent clause from those more dependent, and then there was the dangling participle thingies.

I did not write much after that class–too many rules.  It was clear that moving from state to state, country to country, and from DOD to public school left a gap in my education.

I minored in English Literature.  With a double Major in Accounting and Finance I was the only student in the English department with short hair wearing button-downed shirts. The assignment was to write a paper on Othello.  Everyone in the class received their papers back with their grades, except me.  “I need to see you after class, Sean,” the professor said.

I knocked on the office door, went inside, sat in a straight-backed chair in the cramped office filled with books and papers.  “I need to see your notes! Where did you get your sources?”

It was one of the longest weekends of my life, waiting for judgment on whether I committed Plagiarism.  I had done nothing wrong. Surely he would know this.  What if?

“This is one of the best papers I have ever received from a student in more than 20 years of teaching,” he told me on Monday.  “You are a very gifted writer!” A+

I learned to like writing…

I love Sean’s story for lots of reasons, not the least of which is that it aptly illustrates several key ideas.

Stories teach. I have known Sean for more than ten years, but there were things about him I didn’t know until I read this story.  In the 331 words it took to write this piece, he was able to teach me things about who he is that I hadn’t learned in ten years of conversations.

Stories are a shortcut to meaning. I could have written pages and pages about why rules aren’t the most important part of writing.  In fact, I have written pages and pages on the subject, and probably will again.  But Sean was able to make the point quickly, efficiently, and in way that is easier to remember because he put it in a story.

Ideas matter, not rules. This was, in fact, WHY he felt compelled to write this story, and what he probably most wants you to take away from it.  After years of feeling like the rules of grammar or writing pushed him away, Sean was able to push back, and he wanted to encourage other to do the same thing.  He had a point he wanted to make and THIS is what is central his writing, not sentence structure or spelling or grammar.  The ideas come first; the message is primary.  All the other stuff is just a set of tools that help polish your ideas after you know what you want to say.  You can always find people or software to help you edit or shape your writing.  But only you know what you are trying to say.  Start there.

One of my favorite books of all time about writing is Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott.  I think one of the reasons I love it so much is that she addresses this very issue.  A major emphasis of the book is breaking down the terror and high expectations most of us bring to the writing process.  I recommend it if you are at all interested in writing.  Actually, even if you don’t care about writing, you should read it if for no other reason than it is funny and entertaining.  But it’s also completely accurate.  Contrary to most people’s expectations–or at least mine–even gifted writers don’t sit down to the page and spout perfect prose at will.

If I may vastly oversimplify her message, Lamott has two basic suggestions to get people writing.  The first piece of advice is to give yourself  Small Assignments.  All the worry about subject-verb agreement and split infinitives is really just a smoke screen for the basic fact that most of us try to take on assignments that are too big.  We get overwhelmed and stop.  The solution is to give ourselves smaller assignments.  Don’t write the entire essay.  Just write a paragraph.  Or a sentence.  Or an outline.  Just give yourself a small enough task that you can complete it in a 15 or 20 minute period.  Call your writing an anecdote, like my friend Sean did.  Enough of these small, micro-bits of writing will add up to something you can work with later.  It won’t look like much at first, like when you dump a bunch of puzzle pieces on a table before you start putting it together.  But you must have some pieces to start with.  Only when you have enough pieces available will you be able to see how they fit.

And Lamott’s second piece of advice?   Be willing to write Shitty First Drafts. I’m quoting the chapter title here.  Seriously.  Look it up.  Because in order to write something that turns out to be good, to say exactly what you want it to say, you have to be willing to write a lot of sentences that are just really, really terrible.  One of my favorite paragraphs in all of Bird by Bird is this:

People tend to look at successful writers . . . and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they have to tell; that they take a few breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter.  But this is just the fantasy of the unitiated.  I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident.  Not one of them writes elegant first drafts.  All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much.

I can’t tell you how many times I have thought of this paragraph when my writing is going badly, when I would be mortified if anyone else actually read what I had written.  I remind myself that a shitty first draft is the first essential step to writing something that works better, so I might as well  get on with it.

So that’s it.  With the help of Sean and Anne Lamott, these are my “rules” if I have any.  No Red Pens. Small Assignments. Shitty First Drafts.  Start there, and see how far they take you.