The Writer's Museum, Edinburgh, Scotland

There is a lovely little museum along the Royal Mile just below the Castle in Edinburgh containing exhibits, pictures, writings, and a little bit of multi-media presentation of the lives of Robert Burns (1759-1796), Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), and Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894). Tucked in to Lady Stair's House, built in 1622 for an Edinburgh merchant, one has to search a bit to find this tiny resource. It is a bookstore, gift shop, and educational center, all at once.

The house's structure is charming, and exactly what writers love; it is 'romantic' in the sense that there is a narrow circular stone staircase connecting the three floors, which is low enough that you will have to watch your head as you go up and down. On the main floor, you walk through a number of rooms with the personal effects of Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott on display. The bottom floor contains photographs and writings of my personal favorite Scottish author, Robert Louis Stevenson, whose "Land of Counterpane" written when he was a sickly young man, forced to stay in bed due to his ongoing ill health, has always charmed me. Take a look at A Child's Garden of Verses. I spent many, many hours reading those poems.

When I was quite young, I read Scott's "Lorna Doone," a classic novel about daring and adventure in the moors of Scotland: Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor (Oxford World's Classics). I have long loved Robert Burns' poetry; he is renowned for writing the lyrics to Auld Lang Syne, amongst many others. See The Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Burns if you have any interest in his writings.

On display are many items, including the swordstick used by Robert Burns while working as an Excise Officer, and the writing desk from his house. Also on display are Scott's chess set, a rocking horse he played with as a boy, and his dining table from 39 Castle Street. The printing press upon which Scott's "Waverley" novels were printed is included, as is Robert Louis Stevenson's fishing rod, pipe, riding boots and hat he wore while living in Samoa.

Outside the museum is Maker's Court, celebrating the achievements of a few Scottish writers you might otherwise never have heard of through quotes from these writers.  Here is my favorite of the stones set into the pavement outside the museum:

Try to imagine a world in which writing is not difficult...

... and is not characterized by the metaphor of agonism. To say "writing is a struggle" or "writing is difficult" implies that writing is, of necessity, something we fight with. Writing is something we pursue, rather than something we allow to come to us. When we write, then, we are active; not writing feels wrong, and we judge ourselves as being "bad," or not being writers at all if we're not  applying pen to the proverbial paper. In other words, it's not okay, in a paradigm of action, to wait, to sit, to think, to let the thought percolate to the surface.

If instead we could revision writing as organic, where the impetus to write wells up from within, as a more gentle response to inspiration, I think a few things would change. For one thing, we would not experience writer's block as it is currently thought of. I have taught seminars where the question I asked students is, "how does this block serve you? what is the writing block trying to tell you?" because usually, there are very good reasons why you're not writing. Writer's block is not what we think it is a lot of the time; in fact, it's often our mind's way of protecting us against going into a subject we're not ready to handle. Writer's block might also be a response to pain, fear, boredom, loss of interest in the subject... any number of things stimulate writer's block. However, most people get frustrated, because they're not "supposed" to experience a block. It's not how writing is "supposed" to work.

Everyone who wants to write, also wants the writing to flow smoothly, but that is unrealistic. We often feel forced or compelled to write when we really don't feel like it--sometimes for a deadline, but too often because we believe that's what's expected of us as writers. It somehow feels like failure to sit, thinking, doodling, or daydreaming. We feel like we're getting nothing done. In a different paradigm, however, this would be allowed. It would be all part of the organic flow of writing, to stare off into space, if that was what would clear your mind to allow the next new thought to emerge.

There is research that indicates that allowing the brain to rest, instead of aggressively pursuing the next thought or the next sentence, increases access to creativity. However, the most important place to begin is not with neurological research, but with acceptance that when we approach writing, we have learned to think of our relationship to writing and creativity as something we should expect will not be easy. We believe it will be difficult, and unfortunately, our adherence to that belief system is part of why it is difficult--because we see words as something we must struggle with to "get right." If instead we saw the word coming to us, and allowed words to permeate our consciousness, we could let the words gather and build momentum, until we had enough to start writing.

It's a different way of thinking about writing, and it's certainly a less invasive or painful approach. I liken it to the Japanese water catchers you see in traditional gardens; rainwater is allowed to collect at one end of a bamboo pole, in a hole or cup carved for this purpose. When enough rainwater gathers, it tips the pole down, until the rainwater falls into a stone bowl. Only when the rainwater is heavy enough can the pole tip; so too should we wait for enough thoughts, words, and inspiration to collect before we write.

I prefer this metaphor. It's a much gentler way to treat yourself when you're writing. You'll notice that the rainwater never struggles to collect; it's a natural process. No one says to the bamboo "you haven't collected enough rainwater." No one accuses the rainwater of slacking off. No one says to the rain clouds "you're not working hard enough to fill up that fountain." This way of thinking about an organic process would sound absurd, because you accept that nature works in its own time. Then why can't we, when we write? Learning how to wait for the right time is the essence of this approach.

The Myth of the Lone Genius

Think about this as it relates to what you believe is true about writing:

If interpersonal skills and sensitivity to others is valued in some cultures, in America, the individual’s ability to overcome adversity on one’s own and emerge successful against competitors is considered a virtue. Combine this idealized image with the “modern view of creativity [which] has venerated the artist or genius as a cultural hero,” and it is understandable “why the popular image of the lone genius or solitary artist is romanticized” (1). The creative individual is worshiped when she has “forged something new and original by struggling against and rising above the limiting, stultifying forces of the conforming masses” (2). Most importantly, the achievement of this struggle represents a mythic role for the individual, a role that is ‘larger than life,’ which further separates the Self from the Other, especially when the Self is exalted and the Other is made up of ‘the conforming masses.’ Creativity becomes “hyper-individualistic” in this model, which, as researchers Montuori and Purser discuss, must be understood within a sociohistorical context of creativity studies that delineate the development, over time, of the exaltation of the supreme agency of the individual, and the rise of the notion of Authorship. The Author might be dead in theory, but in practice he is very much alive, as I will discuss.

Montuori and Purser trace the historical development of concepts of creativity and who is therefore sanctioned to be considered an Author. Central to constructions of creativity are definitions of self and world; the concept of an autonomous self, for example, does not become part of the definition of creativity until quite recently. Stating that “[c]reativity is, among other things, the function of a judgment made by people, and these judgments are influenced by trends, traditions, and the social, political, economic, and aesthetic perspectives of their time and place,” (3) the researchers contextualize individual creative expression in the West. During the ‘mimetic’ or theocentric phase when early medieval artists did not often sign their work, the self was subsumed and sacrificed to the “greater whole or God”; the mimetic period is associated today with collectivist societies “where art serves as propaganda and the state takes the role of deity” (4). In contrast, creativity as poiesis—to make anew—is a recent Western cultural invention. It is during this Modern period that the self emerges as an autonomous, creative individual. The notion of originality also emerges during this period, when “artistic creation is idealized as the paradigm for the achievement of self-discovery, self-expression, and self-definition” (5). A perceived need for originality and innovation requires the creative person to “disengage him- or herself from the environment. The resulting psychic isolation, along with what are perceived to be the “deviant” “schizoid” behaviors of the creative person, is romanticized or even seen as being synonymous with genius” (6).

In America, the ‘cult of the individual’ is threatened by collaboration, and is even more threatened, ironically, by the dissension found in the postmodern notion of the group ‘mind,’ whose agency seems amorphous and chaotic. Collaboration subsumes the supremacy of the individual, which threatens the individual’s idealized subject position of authority and autonomy. In America, a society in which the “self is socially constructed to believe it is not socially constructed,” (7) the individual is always at risk of being demythologized. Even when the romantic myth of the lone genius is resisted by those who believe that writing is an act of social construction, the society referred to has been enculturated to believe that ‘real’ writers do not rely on one another for inspiration, and that ‘real’ writing takes place in isolation. A correlative of this belief is that writers can be studied in a laboratory setting, a belief that further reifies the isolation from society the writer inherits. Further, to say a piece of writing is created as a process of dynamic verbal, intellectual and emotional exchange amongst one’s peers or classmates does not remove the writer from the influence of myth. The power of myth lies in human willingness to acknowledge its illogic and to believe it anyway, because the myth reinforces a value system so deeply embedded as to be unmoved by mere logic or persuasive research.

The myth of the isolated writer is seductive, even in the face of experience. Professor of English Linda Brodkey, for example, who acknowledges that her life as a writer functions because she is overtly connected to others, still finds it necessary to “exorcise the image of the writer-writes alone” which she identifies as a modernist construct “where the metaphor of solitude is reiterated as the themes of alienation in modern art and atomism in modern science” (8). The modernist ‘scene of writing’ is a narrative of inescapable isolation and alienation, “the “fact” of life that modern novels set out to articulate” (9). In this scene of writing, the writer functions solely as an amaneuensis: “in such a freeze frame, the writer is a writing machine, as effectively cut off from writing as from society” (10). Brodkey questions the “unexamined assumption that this and only this moment counts as writing” (11). And yet, the romantic contradiction at war with the logical outcome of extreme alienation, nihilism, reinscribes the individualism of the writer. At the same time that the writer is alone, he is fully an individual, observing, not participating. Romanticism will not permit the writer’s nihilism to erase the writer’s identity, which is fundamentally exploratory, revolutionary, masculine in expression, especially when it reifies the agonism of ancient Athens.

Quotes 1-7: Montuori, Alfonso, and Purser, Ronald E. “Deconstructing the Lone Genius Myth: Toward a Contextual View of Creativity,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 35:3, Summer 1995. 69-112.
Quotes 8-11: Brodkey, Linda. “Modernism and the Scene(s) of Writing,” College English, 49:4, 396-418.

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Significant Others: Creativity & Intimate Partnership

Significant Others speaks to my previous post about writers who find a partner and work together collaboratively. Now, it has to be said that the focus of this book is on what were often tumultuous working and personal relationships between two artists or writers, who nonetheless inspired each other throughout the course of their lives. Ideally, the creative partnership will not be quite so tumultuous, but this book focuses on partners who were also intimately, physically involved, a reality that often makes a true mess of what would otherwise have been a good working relationship.

Some of these partnerships were so famous that movies have been made about them: Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett, whose complicated on-again/off-again love affair spanned decades, and lasted until "Dash" died; Anais Nin and Henry Miller, another tempestuous romantic relationship that caused each of them tremendous anguish, even as it prodded them to works of searingly personal self-analysis; Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, whose relationship was turned into a movie not that long ago, called, simply, "Pollock." Another famous, and famously analysed relationship, was the love affair between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. Vita thought of Virginia as the first person who had shown her writing any attention, and it was in this relationship, of friendship, camaraderie, and passion, that Vita's writing blossomed.

This is not to say that the only viable writing partnership is one that has sex as a prerequisite. The authors of this collection of essays have chosen to focus on this particular kind of relationship to illuminate the inherent sexism of the expectation most creative couples have, or had at the time, that the woman would inhabit the role of "muse," and that the man would benefit from her influence. The underlying truth about these relationships, however, is that they broke through the often demeaning mythologies about the role, purpose, and relative unimportance of women's work. In this way, this collection of essays is very much a feminist discussion of class and gender roles, in that it analyses myths and realities about creative women who often initially sacrificed their own abilities so that their male counterparts could create freely, and only later in life learned to value their own work more highly.

This book has a moral to it, it seems to me, for it encourages women to produce their own work, take themselves seriously, and turn to others not for approval, but for reinforcement that the desire to create is not only socially acceptable, but also worthwhile and necessary. Women often think we live 'post' feminism, but the desire to create still often seems selfish. We question our need for self-expression and creativity, and stop ourselves from producing the very artistic endeavor that would make us happy and fulfill us. The women discussed in these creative partnerships might have lived in the previous century, but many of the boundaries and restrictions they lived with, we continue to impose on ourselves, and it's time to break out of those self-imposed limitations.

The Collaborative Writer: My new website, under development

My entire career, I have focused on teaching the benefits of writing collaboratively. For one thing, it breaks us out of the mold of thinking that we must write alone; this is an image of the writer forced on us by myths told about writers, and it's one that contradicts the reality of how writers actually work. Writers throughout history have written collaboratively, usually in small groups, some of which have later become famous. These include the Inklings of Oxford, which counted among its members two famous children's and fantasy writers, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien; the Bloomsbury group, comprised of writers Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey; painters Duncan Grant and Virginia's sister, Vanessa Bell, married to the critic Clive Bell, who was also a member. On the continent, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and other expatriate American writers flocked to Gertrude Stein's Paris salon to discuss politics, writing, and their various love affairs.

Lest you think that only fiction writers and artists seek out each other's company for inspiration, Rene Descartes regularly joined his fellow mathematicians and scientists for philosophical discussions in which he did something important for his writing process: he brainstormed ideas with like-minded thinkers of his era. What the collaborative writing group has in common is that they approach their own individual writing tasks in one of a few ways, any one of which is highly productive for the individual as well as the group. One way is to create a group dedicated to following rules of membership, with a specific agenda, like the Inklings did. Each member was expected to bring a piece of writing to the group, and read from it. This way the members could discuss the piece, critique it, and learn from the others' writing. The second way a collaborative group operates, generally, is that they inspire discussion and thought, not necessarily by focusing on the person's writing, but simply by discussing whatever is current. Inspiration for the writing is fed through a kind of 'cross-pollination,' where, for example with the Bloomsbury group, or Gertrude Stein's salon, many different types of people fed each other's creativity and inspiration through discussion.

The key to success in the collaborative writing experience is that each writer eventually found a partner to work with. For some, this person became their "muse," as happened with Anais Nin and Henry Miller, who fought and parted repeatedly, as did Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway had a productive relationship, albeit a competitive one, but it can easily be argued that Hemingway's relationships were always competitive if the subject was writing. J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis were friends and a constant source of inspiration, competition, and irritation to one another. However, in each case, the relationship was strengthened through their ongoing reliance on the other to provide fodder for thought, the prodding that another person can bring, the sense of healthy, or even occasionally excessive competitiveness, and the knowledge that, no matter what, someone cares about your writing.

It is in this spirit that I am developing an online resource for writers, with the hopes of helping writers find a like-minded partner with whom to work, share, and inspire one another. Unlike critique groups, your partner is intended to provide you with support, interest, and sharing of your goals and hopes for your writing. Critique groups can be unnecessarily harsh and non-supportive. Instead, the goal here is to find someone to work with--ideally, a friend who is also a writer. This idea is under development, and since it's only just begun, it is in the early tinkering stages.

More about Collaborativewriter.com as the concept gels. The domain name is paid for, and the initial designs for the site are being created; concepts are fomenting in my brain. I am looking for online resources to link to and advertise with. If you come across this post, and you're at all interested in knowing more about this idea, please let me know at collaborativewriter@gmail.com. My hope, ultimately, is to create a website that helps writers find one another for support, inspiration, and friendship. If you're currently writing alone in your proverbial garret, or you're in a snarky critique group that isn't giving you the support you'd hoped for, collaborativewriter.com is being created as a place to go on the net where you can connect with a writing partner.

In real life, I work with a writing partner. We throw ideas back and forth, we brainstorm, we talk about different methods of approach to a writing problem; I read him my stuff, he reads me his stuff... it's not a critique session, and that's the point. We're not in competition and we're not looking for a quick fix like many critique groups are, when they're focused on what's wrong with your writing. Instead, we inspire each other and give each other ideas. I would like all writers, from beginning to multiply-published, to have access to that kind of interaction. Writer's groups, whether you are a seasoned professional or are brand new, are often difficult to get to on your schedule, and you might find yourself intimidated or annoyed for a lot of reasons. If you aren't writing as fast as others, you end up reading more than writing; sometimes, people in your group are distracting or irritating. Many people are just simply uncomfortable in a group. That's not what you're looking for, is it? You're looking for that one person, maybe two, with whom you can have an inspiring discussion about your writing, and you can help them with theirs in turn. That's the experience collaborativewriter.com is going to aim for.

Jane Austen fans: Take this quiz

In the midst of being serious and writing exclusively about serious subjects, I have come across this charming website, and I thought, well, there have to be Jane Austen enthusiasts who would like to see this:

http://www.strangegirl.com/emma/quiz.php

Please don't take this too seriously, of course, and have fun with it!

Metaphors We Live By, Part One: Writing as Agonism

Aside from being a seminal work, Metaphors We Live By (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, 1980), and its core concept, that we create beliefs about ourselves from the language we use, informs the central argument I am trying to convey about writing. We have inherited the trope of agonism from the Western Philosophical tradition; this one underlying belief controls how we think about writing. Before I explain further, let me point out the one metaphor we have typically been taught to believe about writing: that it is a "struggle." This is how writing is almost invariably characterised. Conversely, other cultures, notably Chinese and Japanese, use different, less violent metaphors, to describe acts of creativity. I will discuss these differences further, but for the moment, I want to focus on the ways in which we create our own reality about writing via the language we use to characterise our experience of it.

For many, metaphor is a poetic device, but in rhetorical analysis, metaphor is a linguistic tool, used to convey analogy. When we deconstruct that analogy, we find a less well-understood 'hidden' realm of meaning. This in no way implies that the meaning is conveyed 'unconsciously,' in the psychological sense, but that it is not used overtly, and is therefore not transparent. Meaning that is not transparent goes undiscussed, and because of that, typically contains tremendous emotive power over the reader, because you are being, in effect, manipulated by the underlying social values a word connotes.

In the case of the history of writing, our inheritance about writing is based on Ancient Greek sociocultural and sociopolitical values. We in the West have long believed in the Greek principle of democracy and the notion that the culture of pre-Hellenistic Greeks represents a Golden Era of philosophical and political accomplishment, and so we tend to see the Greeks as inherently good and noble people. However, we forget too much when we elide Ancient Greek cultural values with their divergent, and much more blood-thirsty, political values. In truth, theirs was a culture undergirded, and undermined, in my opinion, by their insistence on agonism as the arbiter of any outcome. For every philosopher who valued 'sophrosune,' the way of temperance, there was the man who lived a life in almost constant contest with his fellow Athenians. If you read the Greeks, especially in the original and not in translation, you find that these were a people almost obsessed with besting their opponent.

Agonism, therefore, informed their political ethos. Winning an argument became a paramount goal; writing the best speech, based on its quality, was insufficient. What was important was persuading the demos to do what you said. Agonism lay at the heart of the political instability and volatility of Greek city-states, which is why they were constantly at war with one another. Their Olympic games were intended to impress surrounding areas in Greece with the power and strength of its athletes, a fitting analogy for the assumed power and strength of Greek warriors, who were expected to be braver and stronger than mere mortals could reasonably attain.

Within the ethos the Greeks left to us lies the seed of what we think we know about writing, which is based on their belief in the importance of besting an opponent, as well as the importance of being better than anyone else. This elitism lay at the core of what it meant to be an Athenian. Athenian philosophers such as Isocrates, Plato, and Aristotle all discussed what made a piece of writing "good," and in prior posts, I mentioned the essentialised notion that a piece of writing is only good if it is divinely inspired.

These philosophers all believed, to a greater or lesser extent, that it was not possible for 'mere' humans to write well without divine assistance. We have inherited the belief that labor is insufficient to make writing 'good'; that writing is difficult because we are always struggling against human limitation, and that only through outside help can we hope to overcome these difficulties. There is a fundamental flaw in this way of thinking, of course, and I intend to discuss the limitations of perceiving writing as a struggle.