June 2008 Newsletter

IS IT ANY GOOD?

There can be a strong desire, especially for the novice writer, to want to have someone validate what we have written as soon as possible, even to tell us if we are, in fact, a writer! (I have been asked this so many times, with looks of pleading desperation). What an enormous amount of power to assign to someone else.

I have a friend who is a very successful Century City lawyer. I’ll call him Arthur. In the seventies Arthur was not only a successful young lawyer, he was also an up and coming novelist. Time Magazine had just named him one of the ten brightest new stars in fiction. He had published three novels in fairly quick succession to some acclaim.

On an international flight he scribbled down twenty pages of what he hoped to be the beginning of his fourth novel. He got home, thrilled at what he had written and showed it to his wife. Her response was lukewarm, not positive. (To be honest, I can’t remember exactly what her response was, because I only remember his.

He never wrote again.

The artist’s path is littered with the towering potential of unfinished manuscripts. My point is that we are all incredibly fragile and insecure, and sometimes we can objectify the act of creation, meaning that we think that some people are born artists while most of us are just kidding ourselves. We wonder which camp we fall into, and our deepest fear is that we are the ‘fools’, and that we will be mocked, or that our lives will be wasted pursuing an endeavor that will reap little result.

I think at some point the writer needs to stop measuring his passion and surrender to his purpose. I believe that when we direct our focus to simply telling the story, great things start to happen. The thrill of creation must be its own reward.

Expecting too much too soon can be very hard on the individual attempting to create. It is for this reason that we must develop a self-validating mechanism as well as a certain amount of objectivity to our work, in order that we can answer these two questions for ourselves before sending our work into the world.

1. Have I said all I wanted to say?
2. Have I done it as artfully as possible?

When you have satisfied these two criteria for yourself, then you can send it out for feedback from soneone who hopefully understands the process of storytelling and can give you constructive criticism.

You see, something powerful happens when we complete our work. The vessel closes and we become ready for criticism. We have come to understand what we have written, and we are no longer in that vulnerable daydream state. We have been ruthless with our pen. We have developed an objectivity by looking at our story for areas that are unspecific, that don’t ring true. In short, we have made ourselves ready for the next step. We now look forward to criticism, not because we want to know if we are really a writer, but because we crave fresh eyes in order that our story may live as a full creation.

Our job as storytellers is to ‘track the beats in a belieavable way that lead to a transformation’. Is is possible that our story is simply a document that illustrates what we have come to understand? Seen this way, our stories are simply a by-product of our own spiritual growth.

One last thing. I don’t think my friend Arthur ever decided to quit writing. I don’t think it works like that. Perhaps he began to doubt his story. Perhaps this doubt led to distraction, (I happen to know it did – last year we spoke briefly and he told me that he had recently split from his fifth wife), and then finally to procrastination.

I wonder sometimes if Arthur will ever finish his fourth book. Probably not, though in my heart I know that Arthur is, and will always be a writer. He just hasn’t been writing lately.