May 2008 Newsletter

THE REWRITE

In a thrilling display of solidarity, the 90-Day Novelists finished their first drafts a couple of weeks ago and have begun their rewrites. The first draft was about diving into the unknown, invoking the muse, and writing from our right brains. This next step, the rewrite, is about switching gears. Basically, it is about becoming still, listening more deeply, so that we can get even more specific. What follows are some thoughts that I hope may shed some light for any of you currently engaged in the rewrite process.

Writing a story is a setup. We are asking ourselves to solve a problem that is impossible to solve. At least in our minds. You’ve probably noticed if you go to a lot of movies or read a lot of books that at some point in the story, the hero experiences despair, a dark night of the soul. This is a rite of passage. Because it is through the dark night of the soul that we are introduced to our true nature. Nature is beautiful, but it is also brutal, insofar as we are confronted with the stark fact that we have no say in the matter. Nature trumps everything. We are all going to die, whether we like it or not.
Many first-time novelists write their coming-of-age story. I think about this term, and I realize that it doesn’t mean becoming a man or woman in the traditional sense. It means becoming the age that we are. The dark night of the soul in a coming-of-age story can feel like the death of our child. It isn’t. It is the death of our youth, of our childish expectation of how things ought to be. It is crucial for the writer to make the shift from the personal to the universal, and become more interested in the ‘nature’ of the problem, than what he ‘perceives’ to be the problem.
Waking up is not necessarily a pleasant experience. When we wake up, we are confronted by a world around us that does not operate the way we would wish. It is at this moment that we are presented with a choice. We can scream and yell and rail against the injustices done to us, the unfairness of this unfair world. We can stomp our feet and retreat into the endless myriad of survival strategies that sustained us in act 2; force of will, manipulation, pleading and bargaining, hoping against hope, dishonesty, self-sabotage, blaming, playing along, closing our hearts and not trusting… (what have I missed?)
Or… we can make a new choice. We can allow our hearts to break. We can be truly brave, which is not indifference or some idea of compassion. It means living with our true nature and accepting this world as it is. And it is from this perspective, when we are more interested in our nature than in our problems that we are able to see the problem for what it really is… an opportunity for our hearts to open, an opportunity for us to reframe what we thought the problem was, an opportunity to perhaps even have a sense of humor about the reality of our situation. It is through this experience of our hearts opening that we are transformed. And it is through this transformation that our world is altered and what we had once hoped for but had seemed impossible, now has a chance to live.

Which leads me to my next thought. Shame. This seems to be coming up a little bit in this process of being a channel for the story that wants to be told through us.

Shame is impossible to solve because it is a double bind. The double bind is this: The writer sets out to tell a story about this character, ie; himself, with the intention of showing the reader how how he overcame his childhood trauma, or some particular pattern or belief that became an obstacle in his desire to fulfill some purpose. And as he starts to examine it, and get more specific, he realizes, holy God, I haven’t overcome shit! And then he feels ashamed. He feels like a fraud. He realizes that these terribly broken people who raised him really just did the best that they could and he feels like a miserable ungrateful little brat who ‘just can’t get his act together’.
This is not a particularly kind situation to put himself in.
And then, if he is really resourceful, he tells himself that he just needs to try harder and hack away at his story for another couple of weeks, or months, or decades, just so that he can say he gave it his best, just so that he can determine unequivocally that he is, in fact, a fundamentally ungrateful and flawed human being.
So, here is the problem.
There was nothing to overcome! There was nothing to figure out! The victim in the first act does not overcome reality. The victim accepts the reality of his situation, and in accepting this (which is his dark night of the soul), he is introduced to his nature. All stories are, at heart, existential, in that the hero needs to meet himself. He needs to become connected to his true self, that place that is primal, free of guilt and expectations, free of belonging to a tribe. It is ONLY from this place that he can make choices that don’t create obstacles for himself (see obstacles listed above).

NATURE
There is no shame in nature. There is only curiosity. We have been so indoctrinated to believe that we are unsafe, that we believe it even when we actually are safe.
When we are connected to our true nature, we are safe, in that we can operate from a place of understanding, and are no longer quite so susceptible to the patterns, ideas and beliefs that had been ruling us before.
The power of story is in its ability to ‘track the beats of a particular problem in a believable way that lead to a transformation’.
When we are connected to the truth, we are connected to the fact that our basic nature is love. This is why, as Steven Pressfield says in The War of Art, that the true artist is humble.
We live in a culture that is so frightened of being creative, and when a person does choose to be creative, it only pisses people off. It is threatening. And so, of course, shame and self-doubt are an inevitable part of this process. When these obstacles arise, we are presented with a choice. We can either succumb, or we can become gently curious, and investigate the nature of our experience. It is through this ongoing process that we are lead to the deeper (and often very simple) truths of our story.
When we write from a place of humble curiosity, we are able to tap into the wildness, the madness, the vastness of human experience, and it is through this willingness to be curious that we are able to reframe our hero’s experience in a way that restores him to his rightful place.
I wish you all the best in May,
Your fellow writer,
Al