Reading My Mind Through The Words of Others

{Photo credit: D Sharon Pruitt}

Dylan Thomas said, “The blank page is where I read my mind.” Additionally, as writers—and, indeed, as people—we can learn and grow a great deal by reading the minds of others. In the forthcoming months on this blog, I will be posting about a few books that have taught me a great deal.

From The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, I have learned that a story can be as short as a paragraph, yet still feel complete and connect with the reader in a deep, visceral way. Davis’s piece “The Sock” is one of the most emotionally stunning stories I have read, even though it is only two pages long. Part of what makes it so affecting is that the crux of the piece hinges on a description of a sock—something so ordinary and even a bit distasteful. Who wants to read a vivid description of a smelly, sweaty sock? Yet this is precisely what gives the sock its power as an object: it is so utterly personal, like underwear but without the sexual connotation. The main character is a divorced woman and the sock is used to characterize her ex-husband. Even more poignantly, the sock provides a glimpse into their relationship, as the woman remembers the countless times she had picked up her husband’s socks in all their years together. The juxtaposition is striking; she intimately knows how he takes off his socks while reading in bed (she describes his feet resting together “like two halves of fruit”) and yet now they are living separate lives, and he is married to a different woman.

In this story and others, I like that Davis doesn’t spell everything out for the reader; questions about her characters linger afterward. Often after finishing one of her stories, I immediately want to go back and read the story again. Even months after reading "The Sock," the main character has stayed with me. In my experience, the best stories are like that; they stick with you long after the book has been closed and put back on the shelf. 

Other stories that have stayed with me are those in the beautiful book a picture is worth…(Arch Street Press). The words of these sixteen young adults are incredibly poignant, honest, and filled with raw emotion. I am most struck by their mature insights and deep reflections on their lives, both the joyful and painful memories.

Betania captures the mingling of excitement and frustration that comes with artistic expression: “Just a couple of days ago, a professor from New York came and she taught photography and how to tell stories through pictures. … [She] got the school to provide us with cameras and she took my classmates and me out to our community to capture pictures. I loved the program and you really get to see that anything can be picture-perfect and everything is beautiful in its own little way. It made me see my community differently and I appreciate her for that. I didn’t like my pictures; at the moment that I captured the photos I thought they were amazing but then when I saw everyone else’s, I lost all hope in my pictures” (pg. 95). I think every artist has felt that sinking tug towards “the comparison trap”—you feel delighted with your work initially, but then at some point your internal critic takes over and suddenly it seems that everyone in the world is more artistically gifted than you are. I wish I could tell Betania: your photographs are perfect because they were created by the one-and-only you! 

Ashley’s story of resilience and strength is incredibly moving. She describes cutting the word “crazy” into her arm after being bullied in school and being made to feel like an outcast. She describes moving from town to town, school to school, and battling depression: “I was simply a shell in my own life: looking pleasant on the outside but empty inside. All I wanted was for someone to come up to me and tell me that they knew exactly what I was going through and how I felt. I wanted them to tell me that they had a solution, but that didn’t happen. Why didn’t anybody just ask me how I was or how I felt?” (pg. 24). A common theme that runs through many stories in the book is a yearning for care and compassion. In this way, the book expands into not simply narratives about what it is like to be a young person in the world today, but rather what is means to be human. For this is a crucial aspect of our common humanity: wanting to be loved and seen and heard and understood.

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Eventually, Ashley manages to reach out for help and begins to make more connections at school. She writes she has “come to realize that things always get better. Everyone has to go through hard times, some harder than others, but in time cloudy skies will clear away.”

 Hope for the writer, and hope for the reader, too.

Our Collective Humanity in the Individual Details of Our Lives

A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from a friend. We email back and forth frequently, to stay in touch and up-to-date on each other’s lives. This friend was trekking through a problem at work, and wrote a very insightful explanation of the issue: what he was struggling with, why this was difficult for him, and the potential solutions he planned to employ.

In my email response, I mentioned how impressed I was with the way he put his feelings and motives into words. I think many people would be able to relate to this, I wrote.

I was surprised when he dismissed my compliment. Oh, he replied, it wasn’t meant for other people. I was just writing about myself. He seemed to think that, because he was telling a story about his own life, his thoughts, feelings, ideas and insights would not be resonant or relatable for other people.

To me, this could not be further from the truth! Details from our own individual lives are, I believe, where we find our collective humanity. However, I think many, many of us fall into the same trap of self-dismissal as my friend did, at one time or another.

As a fiction writer, I have learned a counterintuitive principle: if you want readers to care about your characters, you might think to make your characters “everyone”—more vague, and less clearly defined, so that everyone can relate to them. But instead, the exact opposite holds true. The more detailed you are about specific, unique experiences, the more readers see themselves reflected in your characters. It is the stories that connect us; stories that make us care. As Joseph Campbell writes in his book The Power of Myth, stories have the unique purpose of passing down myths through the generations. There are common themes found in stories, from all societies, races, religions, time periods—threads that link us together as human beings.
 
In Lera Auerbach’s luminous book Excess of Being, published by Arch Street Press, this idea of details connecting us and getting to the heart of our common humanity is illuminated beautifully through her finely wrought prose. A Russian-American artist, this is Auerbach's first book in English, and she uses aphorisms to tell her story and examine her life. I found myself wanting to underline nearly every line on each page; this is a book bursting at the seams with honest beauty and wisdom. I found hope even in Auerbach's moments of darkness and irony, because I saw myself and my own experiences--my doubts, my fears, my frustrations--reflected in hers.

Not a single word is wasted. This is a book that begs to be read slowly, savored, and read again.

Here are some of my favorite aphorisms from Excess of Being:

"If you have a flaw -- make it part of your legacy."

"Music happens within. A performer allows others to hear what is already sounding."

"Finally
I listen to the other silence--
the one that wells up
from within.
Finally, I'm listening."

Back to my friend. Oh, he had written, it wasn’t meant for other people. I was just writing about myself.

I replied to him that writing about yourself, and for yourself, is the best kind of writing. Writing about something that matters to you or helps you in some way ensures that it will matter to someone else and help someone else.

We Are All "Creative People"

Occasionally when I tell someone that I am a fiction writer, a stunned expression crosses their face -- as if I confessed that my day job is being a Superhero.

"Oh, I could never do that," they say. "I could never make up stories out of thin air. I'm not that creative."

However, if there's one thing I've learned from teaching writing to people of all ages for the past eight years, it's that everyone is indeed creative. Some of us just might have more trouble accessing our creative selves. And others might not recognize their own creativity, even if they use it all the time.

We all possess imagination; we all solve problems; we all daydream. Sure, the problems I solve at work often revolve around fictional characters in made-up situations. But I don't think there is much difference between a fictional character's problem (for example, trying to solve a crime before the murderer strikes again!) and a real-life workplace problem (such as trying to put together a business strategy the client will love, in time for a big meeting with the team.) I think we use the same problem-solving, creative muscles to do both tasks. I guess a main difference is that as a fiction writer, I create both the problems AND the solutions! (And believe me, sometimes I manage to create real doozies for myself and then have to try to wrangle my characters free...) ;)

A real-life problem I am trying to fight is these boxes many people drop down around themselves, labeled as "not creative." It makes my heart ache every time someone tells me they could never be a writer, because they are "not creative enough." It's not true! Don't believe it!

This is a serious matter. Because to accept that limiting, false belief -- to hunker down into that "non-creative" box -- is to turn away from your inherent gifts as a human being.

In his ground-breaking book Genership 1.0: Beyond Leadership Toward Liberating the Creative Soul, leadership guru and business expert David Castro approaches creativity and leadership in an entirely new way. He transforms the way we think of organizations, communities, and "progress" in general. He writes:

"What if our most critical human goal, the most fundamental human activity, is not to know or to understand, but rather to create, to generate? What would it mean if at the heart of human nature we discovered not reason, not rationality, not the capacity to grasp the world in the mind, but rather the capacity to imagine and invent that world?"
(pg. 3)

In Genership 1.0, David Castro explores exciting, freeing new definitions of leadership in the 21st Century. He coins a new term -- "genership" -- defined as: "The capacity to create with others; the community practice of creating." What would this approach mean for our businesses? Our schools? Our politics? He guides the reader into a new way of thinking about leadership that transcends limitations.

To me, this book is not only about being a leader in a business sense; it applies to our personal lives too. It inspires you to reflect on how you see yourself and how you live your everyday life. Here are some questions I jotted down:

• What world do I want to create and invent? 
• How can I take the steps to get there?
• What does it mean to come together and lead as a team?
• What can I generate, for myself and for others? 

I want to close with a poem that Castro quotes in his Preface, from Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and
try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms
and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.
Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you
because you would not be able to live them. And the
point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will find them gradually, without noticing it,
and live along some distant day into the answer.

Maybe leadership -- or knowledge, or adulthood, or teaching -- is not about "having all the answers" but rather about helping others to learn to embrace life's uncertainties. Maybe true wisdom means cultivating an insatiable curiosity.

Here's to living the questions.