Support For an Authentic Writing Practice, Profession, & Community

        

 

RAP #2: BEING HONEST, BEING AUTHENTIC

 A few years ago, Scott Russell Sanders traveled with his wife to visit her dying father at a nursing home.  Here's how he begins the essay, "The Force of Spirit":

My wife's father is dying, and I can think of little else, because I love him and I love my wife.  Once or twice a week, Ruth and I drive the forty miles of winding roads to visit him in the nursing home.  Along the way we pass fields bursting with new corn, stands of trees heavy with fresh leaves, pastures deep in grass.  In that long grass the lambs and calves and colts hunt for tender shoots to nibble and for the wet nipples of their mothers to suck.  The meadows are thick with flowers, and butterflies waft over the blossoms like petals torn loose by wind.  The spring this year was lavish, free of late frosts, well soaked with rain, and now in early June the Indiana countryside is all juiced up.

Sanders describes the odd juxtaposition of the teeming, animate outdoors with the solemn sounds inside the car--his wife knitting a sweater, a tape of a concert of Mozart's Requiem in which his wife recently sang. After his wife quietly mentions an article about a biologist's recent surmising that the flow of electrons in oxygen distinguish live matter from dead matter, Sanders describes a series of sudden sensations:

All at once my whole body feels like an implausible contraption, and my skin barely contains the storm of electrons.

What I feel is not exactly panic, because I'm spared for the moment the chill of knowing I will die.  What I feel right now is amazement that anything lives, fly or hawk, virus or man.  I stare at the radiant fields and woods flowing past our windows, and they seem far-fetched, outrageous.  Why all those leaves waving?  Why all those juicy stems thrusting at the sky?  Why those silky black wings of crows slicing the air?  And why am I set moving through this luminous world, only to feel such grief when some patch of woods falls before the saw, when a farm vanishes beneath the pavement of a shopping mall or a valley beneath a reservoir, when a man withers in a nursing home bed?

Sanders drops us into a scene--a scene richly and honestly layered with death and life thrust right up against one another.  Images not only draw us in; every one of them resonates with the essay's theme--"The Force of Spirit."  Then he leads us into his quest, the questions that drive him to write this essay in the first place, questions about which we are invited to wonder with him.

The other day when I took a walk, I spotted about forty yards away a groundhog by my pond--these underground animals an endless, inexplicable source of my fascination.  She stood as still as stump on her hind feet trying to sense, more than likely, tremors along the ground from my feet to hers or perhaps my scent carried by the spring breeze.  I tried to follow her, but the furry waddler had a large head start and ducked down among some stones into one of her many holes before I could figure out which one.  I quietly stepped out across the meadow beside the pond and sat a few feet from the three holes she has dug as if she might peek out her head and say, “Hi. Here I am.  Want to see my living room?” 

I’m drawn to groundhog's utter stillness that helps them hear and feel vibrations from far away, to their seasonal industriousness and ability to shift soil and stone and so make connections beneath the surface, their ability to dwell well and comfortably and long in the dark where light never visits.  In the dark, they are at home. 

Maybe I’m wanting to learn from them, to learn more about being still, about connecting in the dark, about moving into the dark that I might find some truths.  Some truths buried deep down that are not necessarily ugly or embarrassing or shameful or traumatic.  The truths in some sense may not even be necessarily personal or at least not private.  But there may be some truths nonetheless. 

So I'm wondering, how do you burrow into your story and stay honest? 

Some definitions of honest:  simple, plain, frank, genuine, real. Being honest stems from being honorable. And honesty: a straightforwardness and fairness of conduct.  It’s kin to integrity.  To be whole.

Perhaps we can ask ourselves, to whom or to what must we primarily be honest?  For starters, I’d suggest your self.  Your honesty begins with your authenticity.  And the word “authenticity” stems from the word “authentes,”  one who acts upon his or her own authority.  The problem, though, and it’s a big problem, is that many of us often don’t even know who the author of our own authority is.  Within my own internal Congress, many voices compete for power and control over my volition, my will, and my imagination. 

So find ways to quiet the Congress.  Remember how to breathe.  Long and smooth like a seamless breeze as if you need do nothing but let that breeze move in and out of you with joy.  Move with mindfulness to quiet the congress, to slow down the brain waves.  Five minutes.  Ten minutes a morning heed the very physical sheath that inhabits and is part and parcel of your intellect, your embodied imagination, your emotions. Meditate for four minutes. Squeeze your thumbs. Find that groundhog stillness that lets you sense remote tremors and sounds just as Sanders sensed in his whole body and heart and intellect.  Upon occasion, let your ears work more than your eyes. The more internal organs of the ears are more receptive and perhaps more readily accessible to the heart.  (A sort of Kabbalah-like observation, after all, is that “ear” resides in the center of “heart”).  So find a way to imagine your throat opening like a chute so your thoughts can drop down from your busy attic-skull into the warmer living room of your heart.  And listen: 

“What am I writing for?”  “Why has this subject seized me?”
”Why am I drawn to this subject?  Why am I following it?  What is this subject asking me to face?”

“What do I think I already know about this subject--whether this subject is myself, my father, a person for a profile, rocket science, an experience, a groundhog?  What do I expect to discover?  Am I open to discovering something completely different, seemingly opposite than my expectations?  If not, why not?”

After you’ve written a few drafts or for a few hours, you might ask yourself, “Am I avoiding anything?  Are there aspects of writing nonfiction I avoid because I think I’m no good at it or for other reasons?  Do I over-rely on scenes, on analysis, on exposition, on dialogue?”

You quest, you draft, as I suggested last week, image by image, scene by scene. 

But lay out those scenes with care. Lay out those scenes as Sanders does his opening scene like stones for your potential readers to follow you. And after you’ve drafted and drafted, be willing to hone. Hone, which is a kind of stone, a kind of whetstone.  To be honest, you must be willing to hone. To be willing to craft the scenes that will resonate both with your intention and your integrity as well as with your potential readers.  Truth, and honesty, is in the details and in getting the details as right as you can.  And when you hone those scenes, you indeed do create whetstones, scenes that goad us, your readers, that whet our appetite for more, for the next one, so that soon one scene feeds into the next.

You don’t, like my coy groundhog friend, dodge your readers and sneak back down into your own hole where the sun never shines; instead, you invite us into your underground world created by your sheer will, spirit, memory, intellect, capacity for wonder, imagination, hands, and, perhaps above all, generosity.

As you shape your real story scene by scene, you then begin to move from image to idea--the movement of a sacred voice (subject for Rap #3).