The contemplative wolf

I've been having an interesting interchange with David Morley on his blog (and thanks to Nik at WriteWords for pointing me there in the first place). If you scroll down past the dead Chatterton and a very alive and gorgeous wolf, you'll see that David's post 'The Creative Writing Industry' or The Company of Wolves is about creative writing teaching. In it, he makes the distinction between learning to write creatively, which can be fun, and becoming a writer, which is a much scarier and wilder thing. You can't teach that wildness, but you can teach the craft which shapes and expresses it.

People sometimes say, 'Oh, I couldn't be a writer, I haven't done anything,' and though the implication is complimentary, I can't say I've done much of the kind of thing they mean either, wild or tame. (Mind you, it makes a change from the ones who say they've always wanted to write a novel, they just never get a chance to sit down.) But undeniably you have to have experienced something, and be conscious that you have, before you can be a writer. And after you've learnt to write that, you have to learn to write things you haven't experienced in such a way that readers could believe you have. In fact, much of writing is a process of finding out what you don't know, and writing your way inside it till you do.

But if acquiring experience, turning not-knowing into knowing, is much of being a writer, is there a place or time for staying with the not-knowing? The term 'negative capability', which crops up, sounds like management jargon for not having profits to spend, or a physiotherapist's way of describing a child who can't ride a bike. But actually it was coined by Keats. As embodied in Shakespeare, Keats said, negative capability is, 'when a man [sic] is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.' For Keats this extends into accepting artistic beauty as truth without any further analysis, which is perhaps an easier principle for a lyric poet than a novelist: what we do has to be too firmly anchored in the facts and reason of human interaction.

But this idea of staying with not-knowing continues to - well - stay with me. I can feel it moving across to show itself in all sorts of other states: the pure 'being' you seek in meditation; the abstraction of great instrumental music; the picture in the exhibition which seems to makes your mind melt till you're nothing but eyes; the moment when the sobbing child tells its woe, and you don't produce a solution or a sweet or a reason why it's not so bad, but just hold them quietly.

I don't know how these map onto writing, except that in writing I hate cold-bloodedly thinking something out. Cudgelling my brains into producing a reasonable answer is the opposite of such 'being' states. And the process I love most - or I would, except that I hardly know it's happening when it is - is what psychologists call 'flow' and writers 'the zone'. Its purest form happens in free-writing, once you're through the ten-minute boredom barrier, but even in the more self-conscious business of shaping a novel, it's still a magical state of fluency: a-reasonable, un-analytical, the true creative state. From somewhere unknown comes something new and always strange. Wild, if you like.

And that writing, I find, needs the least revising. New, and strange, yes, but absolutely right for the scene and the story and the novel as a whole. And often, even when it's written, I don't know why it's so right: why this word, voice, metaphor, rhythm, sound, and not the other possibilities. Maybe a literary critic could tell me, but for now I'll stay with this state of complete rightness: it just is.

Comments

[Nik]

True and very interesting reading. I wonder how that would affect the old 'write what you know' advice so often given. (And I'm still not convinced it was me who gave you the heads-up. Hope I'm not stealing anyone's thunder...)

Nik.

[Emma]

I think it does affect it, but then I've never believed in 'write what you know' anyway. You need to make what you don't know into something that you do (at least for the purposes of the novel) know.

[Nik]

Exactly. It's more a - write what you'll know when you've finished researching and learning about it, I think.