Writing is like love
Aug. 27th, 2014 11:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vcmwWriting is like love. For me, at least. I don't know about other people.
We never do know about other people, not really, and that's part of the point, isn't it? There has to be something to cross that divide, and words are one of the few things we've got.
Plato (I have this secondhand, via Anne Carson's Eros, the Bittersweet) worried about the effect writing would have on love. All those love letters being written, wooing impressionable young men who would read the letters over and over again and be moved by the written love on the pages, out of all proportion to the changeable love in their lives. I've destroyed love letters, fearing to read them over and over again. I've kept love letters, even after the relationships they were written in had ended. I've had drawers full of letters, never sent, each letter full of the messy drafts of love. I can understand why Plato worried.
"Sent your soul like a message in a bottle to me, and it was my rebirth / so we know we're all right" - Indigo Girls, Virginia Woolf
Messages in bottles are part of the point, in writing and in love. There are things I want to say to people, things that the very act of speech changes. I was alone as a kid, reading books, and learned things from them that I could never have learned from a friend sitting beside me. Things I couldn't have learned from a friend speaking, because I would have had to question the particular motives of that friend, in that moment, in ways I wouldn't question the personal anonymity of text. Speech is an action. Writing is an action. Reading is an action. And the message can't be extricated from the medium.
For me, metaphors stick because they give me a frame that is more functional, more effective for handling ideas. Writing is a kind of love. Writing about love, but also just writing. Writing in a journal as self-love. Writing a story for a reader as a gift, an act of love. And the whole process of writing as parallel to the cultural rituals and hesitancies of love.
I learn prose craft for the same reasons that, before a date or lunch with an old friend, I think about my clothes, my hair, the place we'll choose to meet. Sometimes wearing a plain t-shirt and loose jeans is the perfect outfit for meeting a friend who doesn't like to think about appearances - as comfortable as invisible prose, clear short sentences. Some friends like to comment on jewelry, new shoes, like the sense of an occasion, so I dress up - like showing off the perfectly chosen word, the story written using period-appropriate vocabulary. Craft shows the effort and concern, the attention to detail, the desire to show that this encounter is a special one, one I value. Craft is like setting places at the table for a holiday meal, like bringing flowers. Craft, like presentation, is a matter of taste, a matter of appropriateness to the setting.
I learn story structure (as much as I can, I struggle with this in love and in writing) because the forms matter. The forms matter in observance, in abeyance, whether kept or broken. The form of a one-hour call, on a weekend, to an old friend, has certain patterns. Opening: "it's been so long, it's so good to talk to you." Act 1 "how have you been?" Act 2, "This is how I've been." Act 3, a synthesis of the details from two lives, woven together, showing new opportunities, reaffirming a bond, highlighting changes. Conclusion: "It was so good to catch up, we should talk again soon." A fairy tale opens "it was or it was not, if it hadn't happened, it wouldn't be told" or "Once upon a time." A hero is introduced, or a trickster. Challenges are met, puzzles solved. It ends with "And they lived happily ever after" or "and if they haven't died yet, they're living still."
The form of a short story or a novel is not so different from the social forms of love. A date, like a call, like a story, has its own forms. Calls, dates, short stories can break from their forms, but that, too, is an action rich with meaning, complicated with love. A call to an old friend that opens with "I needed to talk to someone." Structure tells friends and lovers that they are safe, gives them space to share their love, gives them ritual to charge with meaning. Breaking structure draws attention to the open wound, to spaces that must be bridged, reformed. A broken structure might give space for a new kind of story. It's a risk, a romantic gesture that may or may not pay off. "We've been friends forever, but I have this feeling, and maybe it's that something's wrong, or maybe it's not, but should we talk?" or "I love you, I know we've been friends. I don't know if this will work out, but I love you." or, sometimes, "I'm not sure I love you anymore."
When I hear writers and readers say, of one book, "I don't know why they liked it, it wasn't as well crafted as this other book, it wasn't as well structured, its plot was full of holes," I think "well, but they loved it." That other reader liked that other book better because they loved it. Craft shows care, structure gives safety, but care and safety can't buy or force love. The best outfit in the world, perfectly selected, and the best date ever, chosen to please every taste of the person I'm meeting, can't make them love me. Or someone says of a short story, "it wasn't really a story, it was just a chunk of the lives of those characters," and I think... well, not every date is a first date. Sometimes I love somebody and I just love them. I want to be with them whether they brushed their hair or put on clean clothes or just rolled out of bed and ran with mismatched socks to the coffee shop to catch up. I see them and I'm happy.
I've fallen in love with stories, with phrases. Held them to my heart, clutched them in dark moments, leaned on them like a friend's shoulder. Abstractly I know that actual writers wrote the words, but it's not the writer I'm in love with. It's the story, the words, that I love. My relationship is with the text, and with the story I created for myself around the text. Dorothy Parker wrote "gas smells awful / you might as well live," but it's Resume I love, not Dorothy Parker. Spinoza in one particular translation said that "love for the absolute and eternal thing fills the mind with a joy entirely devoid of sadness," and it's those words that filled me with joy over and over again, not Spinoza, who had been dead hundreds of years and probably meant something very different than what I carried away. Wilhelmina Baird (a pen name) wrote a character called Cassandra and another called Swordfish, put a door between them, and had Cassandra tell Sword to open up the door or she'd kick it down. "He knows I can't," Cassandra thought, "but he knows I'll try real hard." And I wanted to be on both sides of that door and to watch it open between two people who loved each other, and it had nothing at all to do with me or with Joyce Hutchinson (the name on that copyright page).
If I want to tell a friend I love them I can pick up the phone, mail a care package, invite them to dinner. Sit on a porch next to them and just listen about nothing much, when I know they're hurting. A story or a poem isn't like a care package, exactly, but it isn't unlike a care package either. Writing is a chance to say "I love you" back, not just to a particular friend, but into that space where empty bottles and seashells wait, a waiting space charged between teller and tale, tale and listener. I think of Theodore Sturgeon's short stories where aliens sent messages in bottles across space to find listeners as lonely as they had been, of James Tiptree, Jr. writing about walking home through time, about flying across space in order to find someone who could listen and know you. For me stories in general, and science fiction and fantasy stories in specific, have been talking to me about love and connection my whole life. I want to answer.
I want to learn to write, and I want to be a writer, because I want to learn to say "I love you" back.
Abstractly I know that I won't necessarily ever write anything that anyone falls in love with. I know it in the same sort of way that I know that going on dates doesn't mean I will find someone to love. But the effort and the worry and the failure seem worthwhile because I see writing as a kind of love, and love seems worthwhile. So I study craft, and structure, and I try to send stories out on their awkward dates with readers and magazines, because I am so happy to have received love, and I want to love in return. Foolishly, awkwardly, with my heart in my hands.
"And I fall down / I can't win / with my heart in my hands again." ...and you will know us by the trail of dead, Heart in the Hand of the Matter
We never do know about other people, not really, and that's part of the point, isn't it? There has to be something to cross that divide, and words are one of the few things we've got.
Plato (I have this secondhand, via Anne Carson's Eros, the Bittersweet) worried about the effect writing would have on love. All those love letters being written, wooing impressionable young men who would read the letters over and over again and be moved by the written love on the pages, out of all proportion to the changeable love in their lives. I've destroyed love letters, fearing to read them over and over again. I've kept love letters, even after the relationships they were written in had ended. I've had drawers full of letters, never sent, each letter full of the messy drafts of love. I can understand why Plato worried.
"Sent your soul like a message in a bottle to me, and it was my rebirth / so we know we're all right" - Indigo Girls, Virginia Woolf
Messages in bottles are part of the point, in writing and in love. There are things I want to say to people, things that the very act of speech changes. I was alone as a kid, reading books, and learned things from them that I could never have learned from a friend sitting beside me. Things I couldn't have learned from a friend speaking, because I would have had to question the particular motives of that friend, in that moment, in ways I wouldn't question the personal anonymity of text. Speech is an action. Writing is an action. Reading is an action. And the message can't be extricated from the medium.
For me, metaphors stick because they give me a frame that is more functional, more effective for handling ideas. Writing is a kind of love. Writing about love, but also just writing. Writing in a journal as self-love. Writing a story for a reader as a gift, an act of love. And the whole process of writing as parallel to the cultural rituals and hesitancies of love.
I learn prose craft for the same reasons that, before a date or lunch with an old friend, I think about my clothes, my hair, the place we'll choose to meet. Sometimes wearing a plain t-shirt and loose jeans is the perfect outfit for meeting a friend who doesn't like to think about appearances - as comfortable as invisible prose, clear short sentences. Some friends like to comment on jewelry, new shoes, like the sense of an occasion, so I dress up - like showing off the perfectly chosen word, the story written using period-appropriate vocabulary. Craft shows the effort and concern, the attention to detail, the desire to show that this encounter is a special one, one I value. Craft is like setting places at the table for a holiday meal, like bringing flowers. Craft, like presentation, is a matter of taste, a matter of appropriateness to the setting.
I learn story structure (as much as I can, I struggle with this in love and in writing) because the forms matter. The forms matter in observance, in abeyance, whether kept or broken. The form of a one-hour call, on a weekend, to an old friend, has certain patterns. Opening: "it's been so long, it's so good to talk to you." Act 1 "how have you been?" Act 2, "This is how I've been." Act 3, a synthesis of the details from two lives, woven together, showing new opportunities, reaffirming a bond, highlighting changes. Conclusion: "It was so good to catch up, we should talk again soon." A fairy tale opens "it was or it was not, if it hadn't happened, it wouldn't be told" or "Once upon a time." A hero is introduced, or a trickster. Challenges are met, puzzles solved. It ends with "And they lived happily ever after" or "and if they haven't died yet, they're living still."
The form of a short story or a novel is not so different from the social forms of love. A date, like a call, like a story, has its own forms. Calls, dates, short stories can break from their forms, but that, too, is an action rich with meaning, complicated with love. A call to an old friend that opens with "I needed to talk to someone." Structure tells friends and lovers that they are safe, gives them space to share their love, gives them ritual to charge with meaning. Breaking structure draws attention to the open wound, to spaces that must be bridged, reformed. A broken structure might give space for a new kind of story. It's a risk, a romantic gesture that may or may not pay off. "We've been friends forever, but I have this feeling, and maybe it's that something's wrong, or maybe it's not, but should we talk?" or "I love you, I know we've been friends. I don't know if this will work out, but I love you." or, sometimes, "I'm not sure I love you anymore."
When I hear writers and readers say, of one book, "I don't know why they liked it, it wasn't as well crafted as this other book, it wasn't as well structured, its plot was full of holes," I think "well, but they loved it." That other reader liked that other book better because they loved it. Craft shows care, structure gives safety, but care and safety can't buy or force love. The best outfit in the world, perfectly selected, and the best date ever, chosen to please every taste of the person I'm meeting, can't make them love me. Or someone says of a short story, "it wasn't really a story, it was just a chunk of the lives of those characters," and I think... well, not every date is a first date. Sometimes I love somebody and I just love them. I want to be with them whether they brushed their hair or put on clean clothes or just rolled out of bed and ran with mismatched socks to the coffee shop to catch up. I see them and I'm happy.
I've fallen in love with stories, with phrases. Held them to my heart, clutched them in dark moments, leaned on them like a friend's shoulder. Abstractly I know that actual writers wrote the words, but it's not the writer I'm in love with. It's the story, the words, that I love. My relationship is with the text, and with the story I created for myself around the text. Dorothy Parker wrote "gas smells awful / you might as well live," but it's Resume I love, not Dorothy Parker. Spinoza in one particular translation said that "love for the absolute and eternal thing fills the mind with a joy entirely devoid of sadness," and it's those words that filled me with joy over and over again, not Spinoza, who had been dead hundreds of years and probably meant something very different than what I carried away. Wilhelmina Baird (a pen name) wrote a character called Cassandra and another called Swordfish, put a door between them, and had Cassandra tell Sword to open up the door or she'd kick it down. "He knows I can't," Cassandra thought, "but he knows I'll try real hard." And I wanted to be on both sides of that door and to watch it open between two people who loved each other, and it had nothing at all to do with me or with Joyce Hutchinson (the name on that copyright page).
If I want to tell a friend I love them I can pick up the phone, mail a care package, invite them to dinner. Sit on a porch next to them and just listen about nothing much, when I know they're hurting. A story or a poem isn't like a care package, exactly, but it isn't unlike a care package either. Writing is a chance to say "I love you" back, not just to a particular friend, but into that space where empty bottles and seashells wait, a waiting space charged between teller and tale, tale and listener. I think of Theodore Sturgeon's short stories where aliens sent messages in bottles across space to find listeners as lonely as they had been, of James Tiptree, Jr. writing about walking home through time, about flying across space in order to find someone who could listen and know you. For me stories in general, and science fiction and fantasy stories in specific, have been talking to me about love and connection my whole life. I want to answer.
I want to learn to write, and I want to be a writer, because I want to learn to say "I love you" back.
Abstractly I know that I won't necessarily ever write anything that anyone falls in love with. I know it in the same sort of way that I know that going on dates doesn't mean I will find someone to love. But the effort and the worry and the failure seem worthwhile because I see writing as a kind of love, and love seems worthwhile. So I study craft, and structure, and I try to send stories out on their awkward dates with readers and magazines, because I am so happy to have received love, and I want to love in return. Foolishly, awkwardly, with my heart in my hands.
"And I fall down / I can't win / with my heart in my hands again." ...and you will know us by the trail of dead, Heart in the Hand of the Matter
