  Poetry
This week: Growing Up Into a Writer Edited by: Fyn  
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If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that. ~~Stephen King
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.~~Ernest Hemingway
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do…Try to be better than yourself.~ ~John Steinbeck
The writer is an explorer. Every step is an advance into a new land.~~Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I am a writer. Not the best. (by far) Not the worst. I've learned much and still have far to go. I know this. That is why the biggest treat for me is when I can attend a writing class or take part in contests or challenges that challenge me as a writer. I always learn something new that I will be able to apply, if not immediately, then at some point in the future. This is what we, as writers, do. We practice our craft. We try new things, find new ways to express ourselves, and do so in the effort to communicate a thought, feeling or emotion. There is no one set way to do this, there are, indeed, many avenues to accomplish this. Trying a variety of ways can only make one excel as a writer. More, having the willingness to try differing paths, can only make us better, cause us to stretch our boundaries and learn new techniques, methods and possibilities.
I no longer have patience for misguided muses who complain constraints impede their authorial growth. Writing is a process. No way round it.
Once, long ago, I rebelled against those wiser than I, certain that I knew more than they. I didn’t. Forms stifled me. Being forced to fit
my thoughts to parameters someone else set stole the very breath from my lungs, squeezed the juices out into bloody puddles to lie rancid on the floor of my psyche. Pantoums, sestinas, sonnets sent fear levels into overload: my mind refused to wrap itself around required elements of meter, rhyme and verse.
Yet, I had no choice: the almighty grade reared its ugly head, teeth gnashing, to leer and taunt. My teacher suggested, far more gently than she might have, that all the potential in the world becomes, (her word, not mine) stifled when boundaries aren’t pushed, when we cease to be open minded, when we chose to fail by becoming constrained and/or trapped by our own thought processes.
We, as writers, poets, cannot write within a bubble. To be a writer we must be read. And read by those who have the depth and knowledge to feed the beast within rather than pander to it. Constructive criticism feeds the soul, the heart, regardless if it be a yay or nay. Not every effort, every exercise, births a stellar result. It doesn't need to. What is vital is that we learn, we stretch, we venture into the uncomfortable.
It is not, she said, a matter, purely, of ‘my way works for me.’ When we refuse to continue to learn we box ourselves into a coffin, in effect,our writing dies a slow, unread, unheard death.
That day was a wake-up call, a bugle blasting a reveille to get out of my rutted bed and fear not to embrace that odd sestina. Now, it is my favored form. I tear my hair out every time. I fight the words, the phrasings. I find the metaphors and then I defeat the form.
Metaphors. True poetry is rooted in them. Regardless if we write about a landscape, a paper bag, a failed pot roast or deceit or whirling dervishes, framing a poem within one scenario does not negate writing (on a deeper level) about something else entirely.
That was a lesson I needed to learn. I remind myself of that every time I write anything. How can I push myself? How can I push my reader? Am I communicating all that I intend to?
All the potential in the world is worthless if we don’t avail ourselves of possibilities.
I saw a post recently where a writer felt stifled and constrained by a prompt driven contest. She had broken free of her box and was more concerned with flying free than any idea of anything constraining her muse. There are always constraints upon us whether or not we look to see them, acknowledge them or sometimes, ignore them. The point is, trying new things with writing can only enhance our skill. We may not choose to employ a specific concept all the time, but having it in our arsenal of possibilities only gives us that much more ammunition when we set out to write anything! More, to read that any writer thinks that they cannot learn, that they'd be a poor student because they already know more than any one else strikes me as self-defeating. Of course, I think that all writers should be continually honing their craft. To imply that they don't need to learn anything more or new sets a terrible example. Even award winning authors, winners of Pulitzers or Nobel prizes are aware that there is more they can learn. Life gives us experience. By the sheer act of living for half a century or more, we gain insights unavailable to us in our younger years. Why? Because, hopefully, we learn as we live. We continue to grow on numerous levels.
The woodcarver envisioning a box from a split black-walnut log still is constrained by skill and grain, by tools and imagination, by time and energy. He learns to read the type of wood it is, to listen to what the piece of wood can be, to find the grains and manipulate it so it becomes. The painter needs to play with light and hue, to combine brush stroke with dimension, to evoke that blank space into water, lip or glint of eye. A sailor needs to play with wind, wave, current and sail. A parent learns to weigh need against want, temper against stubbornness, one wail from another. There simply is no point in which we know everything. We can't. We don't. Life is a process, as is writing.
Suffocation is not an option. It is a choice, whether through a fear of not succeeding or not wanting badly enough or a refusal to grow. It is a giving up, a giving in to an insecurity. Not the opposite. When I hear or read of a writer not willing to try new things, ideas, concepts, it is disappointing and it tells me that that writer will never be all that they are capable of. That makes me sad.
Much of this I’ve learned the old fashioned way: by trying and doing. By being determined not to fail. By getting my butt kicked by many a teacher and by being a teacher myself. I've learned so much from my children and grandchildren, from students, from other authors, by those more versed in what-ever-it-may-be than I.
At one point in my twenties, I once likened poetry to being trapped in a narrow cavern, when the walls closed in and I could go neither forward nor back. I was utterly helpless, my flashlight died. Locked in darkness so black that the lights I saw when I squeezed my eyes shut seemed blinding. Panic overwhelmed shutting down cohesive thought. I was forced to calm myself and breathe, To figure outa way out of an untenable situation. The alternative was unacceptable. Writing is still a bit like that, for to me, writing is the very air I inhale. Cut me; I bleed ink. I can’t not write. So I do what I need to do to push the boundaries while conforming to the required or the necessary.
Society restrains us all – retrains- for it places demands, constraints. Rules exist for reasons…Actions, consequences in writing, in life. In one form or another: there are always constraints of one kind or another hiding around corners to pounce and maul, lingering in darkened shadows to chew and feed, vulturing above us, ready to descend and devour.
Writers must be visionary. Revisionists beyond the pale. Always in search, always a seeking for the perfect word or phase. Eager to amend. Willing to follow when the poem takes the lead and the writer can merely transcribe words to paper. There is no keeping track or count of changes made: it doesn’t matter. The true writer, while keeping prior versions, knows that revision only brings the vision into focus.
Poets must be open to constructive criticism. That second or third pair of eyes, that extra mind can offer us much as to whether or not we are succeeding to convey the thoughts. Being told something is good, or great, being told that someone likes a poem without the whys and wherefores of the why is useless. We need to know how it touched them, how it evoked that emotion. That why is exceedingly important. As writers, we need to know, learn and understand the thought process of our readers. We need to know how to differentiate between the vapid acceptance or the informed opinion and give the correct amount of credit to each. Lemmings follow along and leap off the cliff to their destruction. We need to encourage our readers to articulate what about a piece touched them ... or didn't. And why. This is how we grow. So often the simple change of a word opens a new level, a new depth to a poem. Some writers merely write on the surface. Some readers only read for the surface. Other writers learn to write with multiple layers and some readers learn to be able to delve down through the layers to glean a deeper purpose. The layers where metaphor and symbolism reign giving both reader and writer greater insight into the thoughts and emotions expressed/read.
There's a reason any creative writing student takes classes to learn about various uses of metaphor. There are reasons we learn about symbolism and how it is employed throughout a piece or novel. How it changes or evolves. How it is used to expand upon a thought, add layers and ultimately, giving the reader a better understanding of the author's vision. There are reasons that the advice is there that writers must read. And, be well read.
We 'know' in Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis that Gregor couldn't actually become a cockroach. But the metaphor works on numerous levels. The symbolism translates to life in a way that departs from the worker-bee or busy ant. Symbolism is used to enhance the allusion to some 'other thing' and thereby creates an illusion which drives a point home. In Ironweed, by William Kennedy, the author uses 'homelessness' as an allegory for the importance of home, uses various 'deaths' to define living. In The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, the fog is an obscuring element, one that lets us see, just barely, but without all the information we need to 'see clearly.' The 'darkness' of the title is expressed in varying ways and pervades the entire novel to show the reader the many ways a life is lived in that darkness. As the river is traveled in darkess (an absence of light) and fog, surrounded by dark behaviors, and with the steamer fighting the current to get deeper into Africa, the darkness metaphor expands and contracts around the reader. Who could have thought that a cockroach could be a learning instrument? Or that a river could have so many possible permutations, being able to reflect so much of one life or another depending upon its use, surroundings, characters and authorial determination? But it does, and can. Just another reason why we, as writers, need to open ourselves and always, always continue learning new things.
Writing is a craft, an adventure. No wordsmith worth his salt ever skipped the apprentice phase. We all write to an audience. Not to ourselves. (Unless we never, ever, expect another person to see it. Whether it be judge or teacher, a favored reader or faceless entity, it is to them we aim our words, our voice, our heart.
Rules, mores, judgements. They simply are. No getting around it. The wise one learns to make them work. The wise one never fails to continue to learn. In that, there is no place to whine. Or cry foul. In that, there is success. In that, there is triumph. This is what we, as writers, poets, and artists, aim towards. Writing is something writers need to do. Always. A poet is always seeking that illusive word that will complete a thought. Finding that combination of sounds that will, in the end, say something new, in a fresh way and communicate it to everyone else. We are collectors of words, of observations, of nuance, of moments that we can use to translate whatever point we are attempting to make. To not avail ourselves of opportunity is to shut down thought, to close off emotion and to confine ourselves to a small, dark hole. A hole with no sunlight, no air to breathe or no room to stretch ourselves.
Never be reluctant to try something new with your writing. Never fear to go out on that limb. Why you try something new, you may, indeed fail. You learn from that (if you choose to) and try again. We practice. No one is a wordsmith overnight. Anything worth doing takes practice and growth or there would be no challenge. Everything we write needn't be stellar. Everything we write will not be. That is okay. It is how we learn to get better. And bottom line, isn't that what we all want? |
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Monty  comments: I think I get a lot of my ideas looking back, Great N/L
DRSmith  writes: Interesting. IF I look behind, it's all I see is: "behind", whereby I usually end up denting the back of my skull, however pliable the wooden fibers may be. Have a nice coming year.
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Poetry: January 27, 2016 Issue [#7449]
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