Art From the Heart – Getting Out of the Way of Your Own Writing

There is a persistent idea in the West of the artist (not just we writers but artists of all types) as tortured creatures, pulling art out of ourselves in the way hara-kiri warriors once ripped out their own entrails. The unbearable weight of dragging art out in this way inevitably takes its toll and thus we have the tradition, particularly but not exclusively in this country, of writers and heavy drinking.

Write while you’re drunk,” said Hemingway, “Edit sober.”

There isn’t space in this blog to explore how we came by this notion. Suffice it to say that there is a better paradigm and it is one Carl Jung introduced many decades ago, but one whose time, I think, has come: If you remember in James Cameron’s film. “Avatar,” the Na’vi people possess these wonderful ponytails that hook into what they call The Tree of Souls.

For Jung, every human is born with this kind of a connection to the amassed experience of mankind, or what he called “The Collective Unconscious.” What distinguishes the artist is that he or she is particularly adept at channeling it.

I think that through the ages musicians have recognized this model of creativity better than their literary counterparts.

Paul McCartney claims he dreamed the melody for “Yesterday,” the most recorded song in history, and it took him a while to allow himself to claim it.

James Taylor describes songwriting as a “Mysterious and uncontrolled process.”

On the literary side, Amy Tan describes the creative process as “a synchronicity of mysterious forces.” Every author has experienced this state of writing bliss, of feeling in the hands of unseen forces. Hence we have the historical notion of “the muse.”

So, if this pool of knowledge and human experience is there available to all and particularly to the artist, how do we access it? Given that we do not live on the planet Pandora and most of us don’t have magical ponytails, how do we go about connecting ourselves to this field?

First of all we have to see that we are an integral part of the field in the first place and not separate from it. Everything we need to know or write down is already contained within us. I think the key here is listening, deep listening.

In our culture we are bombarded all the time with sense stimuli and so we have learned to surface-listen, just as we surface see and surface evaluate. What is lacking is stillness. To get to the still point, you have to let go of the reins, and when things go quiet, put your ear to the ground. It is the art of listening that is missing in the sufferer of writer’s block, not a lack of skill.

On this model, if you’re facing writer’s block, you’re simply standing in your own shadow. What you have to do is to step around, face the sun and not block it. What should flow out is what Joyce called, “The uncreated conscience of my race.”

That sounds very heady, something you might find high up on the shelves in the literary section of your independent bookseller. But it need not look like that at all.

Let me give you a couple of examples of recent writers who I think have done this:

When JK Rowling was sitting in that dingy little café in Edinburgh Scotland passing the time by writing down what must have seemed at the time this whacky story of muggles and wizards, she had no notion at all of what this story was going to amount to. What she was channeling, whether or not she knew it, was a response to the age-old Christian fear of the pagan.

But the pagan is rich and diverse with a particularly open-mind to that element we humans value as “magic.” It could only be suppressed for so long, and so this silly story about wizards and speaking hats and flying cars went on to sell 450 million copies in 73 languages?

And then there’s The Da Vinci Code. In 2000 Dan Brown published a book entitled “Angels and Demons,” which in all its aspects was similar to his future best seller, but which lacked that Vesuvius of a topic: The Sacred Feminine (another feature of our religious sensibility stifled by the church.) Angels and Demons sold under ten thousand copies; Da Vinci Code has gone on to become one of the best selling books of all time, selling 81 million copies in 44 languages.

The creative act is a question of tapping into a collective field of knowledge, and one that does not lie, as any totalitarian state has realized when it has banned art, particularly books. If we have any doubt that such a field can exist, then take a look into the virtual reality of the world wide web.

As a human being and particularly as an artist, you are connected to something much bigger than yourself. In the parlance of my teenage daughter, you are the Iphone, but not the internet.

Don’t beat yourself up over your art – there is no use shaking the phone when it isn’t receiving service, no more does shaking yourself when you can’t think what to write. Just wait a while, listen deeply until you are re-connected. More precisely, get out of the way of yourself. Or again as my teenage daughter would put it – get over yourself

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers