Please welcome Laraine Herring.
I’ve
tried many different ways to help my writing students become more comfortable
with the essential writer’s quality of vulnerability. They want so badly to
“get it” quickly, to be masters of their work, commanders of their ships. They
don’t want to screw things up. Feel exposed. I understand. I do, but I have to
somehow convince them that not only is it OK—it’s essential—to not know everything all at once.
Writers
must spend many hours, days, and months in a space of not-knowing. It’s human nature to want to squirm away from this
place. Not knowing makes us feel vulnerable and that can create tension. But
our work’s deepest heart is revealed to us slowly, through committed practice
and patience.
One
semester, my beautiful, normally mild-mannered students turned vicious when
speaking about their own works-in-progress. It was as if a tiny evil creature
slipped out of their mouths wielding Wolverine-like knives to cut down
everything in its path before it had a chance to grow. Where did this venom
come from? And what purpose might it serve if we could look underneath it? What
lives within the bully?
This
class used words like drivel, failure,
garbage, crap, ridiculous, absurd, and on and on to describe their early
drafts. Mind you, they did not speak about their classmates’ work in those
terms. They reserved those labels for their own still-wriggling drafts, treating
themselves and their own creations worse than they would ever dream of treating
another’s work. At first, I pointed out what they were doing, but that didn't
stop the behavior, so I tried an experiment
I went
to the dollar store and bought a bushel of brightly colored stuffed hanging
monkeys.I brought the monkeys into class and gave one to each student. “This monkey
is your writing,” I said. “It’s your early draft. It’s your beautiful
creation.” They looked at me like I was crazy, but I was used to that. “Go
ahead,” I continued. “Say mean things to it. Tell it it’s worthless. Stupid.
Drivel. It’ll never amount to a decent monkey.” And they would try, but of
course they’d end up laughing because they were fully grown adults being asked
to yell at neon stuffed monkeys. It was absurd. Right?
I’d hold
their monkeys’ heads, pressing down on the forehead to make the monkey look sad
when they yelled at it. The class started to understand what they were doing.
They were destroying something precious with their words. Something new.
Something still in the process of becoming.
No one
is so intentionally mean that they’ll slice down new creatures on purpose. They
didn’t realize the effects of their language on their creative process and
their writing lives. They didn’t know what unconscious damage they were doing
to their own growth as artists.
When my
students could personify their work -- which I encouraged them to refer to as
‘baby story monkeys’ to help reinforce the vulnerability of this new
relationship -- they could begin to enter into a more mature place with the
work. They could begin to allow it to be what it is as it moves toward becoming what it would be. I see what you’re saying–I think
it’s the verb tense that was off. Personification of the draft allowed them to
understand that early drafts and final drafts cannot exist within the same
form. As long as they judged their work from its first breath, the work could
never trust them enough to take the necessary risks involved in evolving into
its future.
Becoming is a fragile thing. We
have to hold our work gently so we don’t snuff out its life.
There’s
an insidious type of arrogance that most of us carry to some degree that
erroneously convinces us that we are the one who is perfect, who will never make
that mistake. That arrogance also sneaks in masquerading as negative self-talk.
If it can convince us we’re not good enough in the beginning, then we’ll be
able to avoid the risks necessary to grow.
However this
arrogance manifests in a writer, underneath it lives fear. Fear of not being
able to write the story that comes to us. Fear of not having the discipline or
persistence or patience to finish. Fear of what might be possible. Fear of the
amount of work involved. Fear of being seen. Of speaking a truth. Of being
human. If we can cut down something before it has a chance to mature, then we
can assure ourselves, through the magic of the self-fulfilling prophecy, that
we’ll never have to deal with what could have been. Strike first. Assume the
power position and eliminate uncertainty.
Eliminate vulnerability. Eliminate mystery. Three elements, as it turns
out, which are non-negotiable in the creative process.
Avoid
meeting them and you avoid everything.
Note from Lisa: You can join Laraine on
February 28 for a deep-dive virtual (and affordable) retreat: Your Story’s Inner Genius. Early registration ends January
31; registration closes February 21. Laraine also teaches annually at The Kripalu Institute for Yoga and
Health, works as a premium consultant with Tracking Wonder and is the founder and Head Monkey of Fierce
Monkey Tribe.
All images courtesy Laraine Herring.
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