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For Creative Writing Students: Starting to Write
Stop whatever else you are doing. Close your email application and Facebook, turn off the background music, silence your cell phone. Put it all away. Do it now. I’ll wait.
Sit in silence, without distraction, and read this post. Silence the part of you that makes false claims about the utility of background music or the necessity of leaving your cell phone turned on. Silence the part of you that wants to argue with me, right now, about my unreasonableness, the part of you that makes claims for this or that distraction. Still the monkey mind that never shuts up, never stops talking, never ceases inventing new ways to jostle, cajole, argue. Stop arguing and listen: the voice of a writer can only be found within silence.
Silence.
Start with that. Stay within it. Allow it to grow around you, to blossom, to disclose the images and words that inhabit the landscape of your inner life. Don’t control it, or direct the flow of that nascent energy. Sit, and read, and watch yourself.
Forget that you are enrolled in a course in Creative Writing. This fact is irrelevant to the creative process. It is a curiosity. A writer finds and follows the creative voice. The means by which this happens, the structure in which it unfolds, the particulars of the path: these are secondary and inconsequential. A writer follows the path, whenever it appears and wherever it leads.
A writer does not invent or create the writing. Instead, the act of authentic writing leads the writer. Accordingly, the task of the writer is to find — within — the stream, thread, and path of creative energy. Writing inhabits its own life, is its own animal, is a being struggling to be free of the cages we build around it. Don’t take my word for it. Find the cage, find the animal.
Listen.
Stop arguing. Your arguments, like mine, only serve to strengthen the cage. The animal of the creative is not swayed by our smartness, our wit, our experiences. It does not care how many books we have read or how many fancy words we know. It is not interested in our expertise and the many ways in which we layer our insecurities one over the other.
The animal of the creative wanders the landscape of gods and heroes. The animal has seen things we no longer remember. The animal is what we once were but have chosen to cage as a means of protecting ourselves from the vastness of what we cannot grasp, the depths into which we no longer dare to gaze.
The creative animal is primordial, eternal, wise beyond our knowing. It has been waiting for us, all this time. Listen to what it has to say.
Write.
Allow the creative animal to write for you one good word, or sentence, or paragraph. Don’t mess up the writing. It is difficult to say what this means, this messing up. Perhaps you are cool, or smart, or — like me — erudite. Forget all that crap. It is meaningless. Write honestly. Let the creative animal speak through you.
If, as you write, you start to worry about what people might think of your writing, you may as well not start. Give it up now, before you waste any more time. Or tell the part of you that wants to be a rabbit rather than a wolf to shut the hell up.
Write something. Don’t worry about what genre it is. Genres have no meaning. Writing — all writing — is, at heart, an extended negotiation with the creative animal. That animal is partly you, yes; but is also not you, is wholly an emissary of that mystery we run from and slide toward.
And the animal is — for the most part — silent. Do not forget this. Words are not the creative, cannot be the creative, will never be the creative. They are echoes. Treat them as such. Find the source of those echoes.
Find the cage. Find the animal.
An Evening of Illumination and Renewal
Update: This event is now full.
Please join us for an evening of creativity, play, and meditation on December 15 at Kwantlen’s Surrey campus. This celebration will focus on the tasks of finding illumination in the heart of winter. How do we discover creativity, mindfulness, and purposeful activity in the season of shadows? What tasks are required of each of us, so that we find illumination and renewal in ourselves and our communities? How can we explore this together, in the spirit of play, fun, and devotion?
Join Ross Laird, Elizabeth Laird, and Marina Ma for this experiential evening of renewal. All are welcome (enrollment is limited). Please RSVP to Ross.
7:30pm — 10:00pm, Tuesday December 15.
Kwantlen Polytechnic University.
Surrey Campus, Conference Centre (Room G1205A).
Convocation Address for Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Faculty of Humanities
There is a crossroads, and a gate, in all the old tales. On one side lies the known, the practiced, the familiar. And on the far side, unseen and unimagined, lies the Other: the one we left behind, who has been waiting all this time. That threshold is a holy place; it does not decay, nor can it be thwarted, nor can it be lost within the tangle of grooved and meandering ways. The crossroads remains, and is protected. The air is still, and warm. Drops of morning moisture lie upon the tips of slender grasses. A sound comes from the far side of the gate; the soft warbling, perhaps, of a stream in the near distance. You reach for that gate — we all do. It might be opened with a small and gentle push.
And on the other side one finds the ancient gods, the ones we have forgotten. They exist now only as dreams, as figments, as fragments of tales buried by the heedless weight of time. But it is from them that we learned to write, to sing, to measure, to craft the world into the shape of our own image. We left them behind long ago; but in all the myths, they were our first teachers.
In the oldest Egyptian tombs and temples, in rooms festooned with hieroglyphs, in texts that lay undeciphered for five thousand years, one may read of an ancient god who is the bringer of knowledge and of illumination. He is the mythological ancestor of the many guides and mentors who populate the tales of every culture. He is the original storyteller, the inventor of writing, the trickster and wayfinder. His name is Thoth. The Greeks called him Hermes. He illuminates the labyrinths, the lost and switchbacking tunnels, and he is keeper of that great and hidden ancient library that adventurers still seek but have not found.
It is Hermes — whose many titles include the bringer of dreams, the watcher by night, the thief at the gates — who so often appears, at the crossroads, as both guide and protector. He knows the paths to hidden things, is the patron of knowledge, and is capable of traveling through the underworld unscathed. He is the border-crosser, the wanderer, whom the ancient texts describe as the “master of spells and words of power, the voice of truth.” The wayfinder knows all the subterranean passageways. His symbol is the ibis bird, or the crane, whose beak is like the crescent moon, bright in the dark sky.
By whatever name he is called — Thoth, Hermes, Merlin, Gandalf, Yoda — his presence stretches far back. As long as we have told tales he occupies a central place within them, helping and healing. He stands at the gate, and watches by night, and wanders, and guides the heart home. He is the truth-teller. […]
Learning Communities 1100
Learning Communities 1100
Kwantlen Polytechnic University
Langley campus, room 2580