{"id":458,"date":"2014-01-06T16:22:40","date_gmt":"2014-01-06T21:52:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/?p=458"},"modified":"2014-06-01T20:18:47","modified_gmt":"2014-06-02T01:48:47","slug":"where-does-writing-come-from","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/where-does-writing-come-from\/","title":{"rendered":"Where does writing come from? (part 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Angelica<\/a>

Angelica Kauffmann (1741-1807), The Artist in the Character of Design Listening to the Inspiration of Poetry. The painter is at left.<\/p><\/div>\n

I\u2019ve been mulling over some journal entries by Flannery O\u2019Connor, written in 1946\u201347, when she was twenty-one and a student at the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop. The entries show her struggling with the tension between her ambition to be a successful writer and her desire, as a devout Catholic, to think about God \u201call the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth\u2019s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. \u2026 what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by this shadow that is nothing. \u2026<\/p>\n

What I am asking for is really very ridiculous\u2026 at present I am a cheese, make me a mystic, immediately. (New Yorker<\/i>, 9\/15\/2013)<\/i><\/p>\n

She wants success but she\u2019s also afraid it will give her a swelled head, which will get in the way of being able \u201cto love God all the way.\u201d So she keeps reminding herself of things that will keep the shadow from growing.<\/p>\n

When she produces a story after a dry period, O\u2019Connor notes that it wasn\u2019t really she who wrote it. \u201cDon\u2019t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story\u2014just like the typewriter was mine.\u201d Then she begs him to make the story a \u201csound,\u201d good one because she doesn\u2019t know how to do that herself.<\/p>\n

Some time later, she cycles back into discouragement. \u201cIf I ever do get to be a fine writer, it will not be because I am a fine writer but because God has given me credit for a few of the things He kindly wrote for me. Right at present this does not seem to be His policy. I can\u2019t write a thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

I am not a mystic, much less a Catholic or even a Christian, but this strikes a chord for me. If you disregard the specifics of her terminology, she is simply talking about where the inspiration to write something comes from. In my experience, that\u2019s a mystery: the ultimate source isn’t one’s self and isn’t under one’s control. (I felt this most purely with my own two books, which I wrote from the greatest depths I was capable of. But even in collaborations, when I\u2019m setting out other people\u2019s ideas, I often find solutions to problems of structure or expression arising in intuitive leaps out of \u201cnowhere\u201d\u2014not quite the same, but close enough.)<\/p>\n

In the early stages of conceptualizing my first book, The Women Outside<\/a><\/i>, I remember sitting on my knees on the floor and suddenly having a sense of a column of energy\u2014or something\u2014streaming upward from my head and mingling with some larger entity \u201cout there.\u201d Or maybe the energy from out there was coming down into me. It\u2019s been so long I don\u2019t recall. But the feeling that I was connecting to something larger than myself was clear. It never happened again, but as I worked on this and my other book, Slaying the Mermaid<\/a>, <\/i>I felt quite distinctly that they were coming through<\/i> me from somewhere else, entering in the region of my solar plexus, then traveling upward to where my brain could operate on them.<\/p>\n

I wouldn\u2019t call that larger something God, but there are other options: the collective unconscious, universal mind, nondual awareness, the unconditioned, \u00a0Buddha-mind, rigpa, consciousness with a capital C\u2026 and those are just from traditions I know something about.<\/p>\n

\"Poussin_Inspiration_of_the_poet_Louvre\"<\/a>

Nicolas Poussin, The Inspiration of the Poet (1630). A poet writes under the inspiration of Apollo, who is accompanied by a muse and two cherubs.<\/p><\/div>\n

It’s quite literally inspiration<\/i>, which comes from a Greek word meaning God-breathed<\/i> and a Latin word meaning blow into<\/i>. That is, a divine being is breathing something into you. The ancients spoke of the muses, O\u2019Connor speaks of God. I don\u2019t know what to speak of, but I know what it feels like.<\/p>\n

And I agree with O\u2019Connor that it\u2019s good not to get a swelled head, but rather to remember the mystery.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been mulling over some journal entries by Flannery O\u2019Connor, written in 1946\u201347, when she was twenty-one and a student at the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop. The entries show her struggling with the tension between her ambition to be a successful writer and her desire, as a devout Catholic, to think about God \u201call the time.\u201d You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth\u2019s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. \u2026 what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it[…]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":460,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,34,22,1,4],"tags":[70,72,126,73,71,123],"class_list":["post-458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-buddhism","category-creativity","category-inspiration","category-uncategorized","category-writing","tag-angelica-kauffmann","tag-flannery-oconnor","tag-inspiration","tag-mysticism","tag-nicolas-poussin","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=458"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":609,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458\/revisions\/609"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}