Writer Without a Story: The End of Something
A man and a woman, or whatever combination you like, are sitting sipping mochas in the sleekest café in town. A conversation is in progress:
“My mother – “
“My father –“
“My ex-husband – “
“My ex-wife – “
“My childhood – “
“That’s so weird! My childhood too!”
“And those people I work with – “
“I know what you mean.”
“This is so great! We’ve been sitting here for fifteen minutes and I feel like I know you.”
“I feel that too.”
This is known as making a connection. We sit knee to knee and validate each other’s stories. Each other’s myths, projections, illusions. And so we make a pact. We vow to love, honor, and cherish each other’s stories until we find a more rapt audience.
This is what I don’t want to do anymore. It’s particularly relevant for me at this point because I’m starting to date after a long marriage. Very fine people, too. I’m still playing the game, loving to swap stories, and more than ever, loving to listen.
You can’t banish your stories. We carry them – no, they carry us – through life. And maybe “I won’t settle for guarding the stories” is an additional story. But you can at least notice.
Notice how you can love someone whose story doesn’t fit yours. You can love them just for having a story, no matter what it is. And love them for starting to leave the story behind despite how long they’ve sheltered it. Together you might watch your stories pass through your minds, watch them jump from mind to mind, and smilingly wave to them as they move across the screen and into the wings.
What would a relationship look like if it wasn't based on the partners' validating each other's stories? Maybe two people listening closely to reality. Maybe deep silence.
One of the things I learned at the School was that I can love people without regard to how much I think they resemble or complement me. During partner work, I deliberately tried to find people I wouldn’t have chosen at first sight, people much older or younger than me, people I considered too beautiful or too plain, gays and lesbians, and people I had disliked at first sight for one shallow reason or another. Not only did I in every case find them to be wonderfully interesting and to make as much connection with me as anyone else did, but in many cases I found that the less like mine their life experiences had been the more I warmed to their souls, and in a strange way, the more I identified with them. I was finding what was underneath and what was constant. (I should make clear that I’m not ordinarily an opposites-attract kind of person. The people I’m attracted to, either sexually as friends, have been the ones I’ve felt were most like me.) They were me in other costumes.
There was a brief moment of remorse, even horror, in this: the remorse of seeing that all the things I disliked about others were projections of what I feared or disliked in myself. The horror of seeing that many of the people I had been friends with or fought with throughout my life had been hallucinations. The remorse was quickly drowned by joy – a novel experience in itself.
Yes, to spout a cliché, I found my joy at the School. For the past three weeks I’ve been going around grinning to myself, smiling at strangers, saying the extra thank you, carrying on the conversation for an extra moment, and importantly, doing the thing I want to: doing what my first impulse tells me, not overriding it with a second impulse.
There are beautiful parts of yourself you’ve kept hidden all your life simply because other people, who were hiding things of their own, belittled yours. Or only because you imagined they did. It wasn’t so bad for the things you knew you were hiding; they were a secret treasure, a glowing jewel in a cave, which you could retreat to and sit near for light and warmth. But some you hadn’t known were there at all, till you stumbled over them in the dark.
As you find them, the insincerity leaves your voice. Maybe because deep in the cave, the things you stumble into hurt more.
I’m a writer. If I don’t have stories, what can I write? If I don’t want to sustain others’ stories or my own, what characters can I write about? Who would I be if my writing weren’t a theater for the drama of grandiosity versus shame: How good is it, is it good enough, will they accept it, it’s great! I’m great!, it’s too good for them, oh no I was fooling myself and it’s terrible.…
Those characters of mine: just projections of me, a decades-long exercise in self-therapy of the most inefficient sort. Had I ever really created a character or a story? What would happen if I renounced the ratchety, whining machinery of “creative writing,” if I renounced characterization, the endless round of reincarnation of my culture’s types? What if I just waited for something to arise from the dark well?
As Katie says, Who knows? But here: as my characters become more unlike me, they need me more. If I’m writing a disguised version of myself, or a composite of two people I know, I’m not creating anything that doesn’t already exist more fully in real life. But if I’m truly creating a character, someone entirely new, then that person only exists in me. I am his birthplace, his native soil; I’m the only one who can bring him to life. Whether he ever makes it into the outside world or not, he exists as long as he’s in here. I watch him pass across the stage, and we wave, and he thanks me for the only life he’ll ever have. And I thank him for helping me be more people than I ever knew.
“My mother – “
“My father –“
“My ex-husband – “
“My ex-wife – “
“My childhood – “
“That’s so weird! My childhood too!”
“And those people I work with – “
“I know what you mean.”
“This is so great! We’ve been sitting here for fifteen minutes and I feel like I know you.”
“I feel that too.”
This is known as making a connection. We sit knee to knee and validate each other’s stories. Each other’s myths, projections, illusions. And so we make a pact. We vow to love, honor, and cherish each other’s stories until we find a more rapt audience.
This is what I don’t want to do anymore. It’s particularly relevant for me at this point because I’m starting to date after a long marriage. Very fine people, too. I’m still playing the game, loving to swap stories, and more than ever, loving to listen.
You can’t banish your stories. We carry them – no, they carry us – through life. And maybe “I won’t settle for guarding the stories” is an additional story. But you can at least notice.
Notice how you can love someone whose story doesn’t fit yours. You can love them just for having a story, no matter what it is. And love them for starting to leave the story behind despite how long they’ve sheltered it. Together you might watch your stories pass through your minds, watch them jump from mind to mind, and smilingly wave to them as they move across the screen and into the wings.
What would a relationship look like if it wasn't based on the partners' validating each other's stories? Maybe two people listening closely to reality. Maybe deep silence.
One of the things I learned at the School was that I can love people without regard to how much I think they resemble or complement me. During partner work, I deliberately tried to find people I wouldn’t have chosen at first sight, people much older or younger than me, people I considered too beautiful or too plain, gays and lesbians, and people I had disliked at first sight for one shallow reason or another. Not only did I in every case find them to be wonderfully interesting and to make as much connection with me as anyone else did, but in many cases I found that the less like mine their life experiences had been the more I warmed to their souls, and in a strange way, the more I identified with them. I was finding what was underneath and what was constant. (I should make clear that I’m not ordinarily an opposites-attract kind of person. The people I’m attracted to, either sexually as friends, have been the ones I’ve felt were most like me.) They were me in other costumes.
There was a brief moment of remorse, even horror, in this: the remorse of seeing that all the things I disliked about others were projections of what I feared or disliked in myself. The horror of seeing that many of the people I had been friends with or fought with throughout my life had been hallucinations. The remorse was quickly drowned by joy – a novel experience in itself.
Yes, to spout a cliché, I found my joy at the School. For the past three weeks I’ve been going around grinning to myself, smiling at strangers, saying the extra thank you, carrying on the conversation for an extra moment, and importantly, doing the thing I want to: doing what my first impulse tells me, not overriding it with a second impulse.
There are beautiful parts of yourself you’ve kept hidden all your life simply because other people, who were hiding things of their own, belittled yours. Or only because you imagined they did. It wasn’t so bad for the things you knew you were hiding; they were a secret treasure, a glowing jewel in a cave, which you could retreat to and sit near for light and warmth. But some you hadn’t known were there at all, till you stumbled over them in the dark.
As you find them, the insincerity leaves your voice. Maybe because deep in the cave, the things you stumble into hurt more.
I’m a writer. If I don’t have stories, what can I write? If I don’t want to sustain others’ stories or my own, what characters can I write about? Who would I be if my writing weren’t a theater for the drama of grandiosity versus shame: How good is it, is it good enough, will they accept it, it’s great! I’m great!, it’s too good for them, oh no I was fooling myself and it’s terrible.…
Those characters of mine: just projections of me, a decades-long exercise in self-therapy of the most inefficient sort. Had I ever really created a character or a story? What would happen if I renounced the ratchety, whining machinery of “creative writing,” if I renounced characterization, the endless round of reincarnation of my culture’s types? What if I just waited for something to arise from the dark well?
As Katie says, Who knows? But here: as my characters become more unlike me, they need me more. If I’m writing a disguised version of myself, or a composite of two people I know, I’m not creating anything that doesn’t already exist more fully in real life. But if I’m truly creating a character, someone entirely new, then that person only exists in me. I am his birthplace, his native soil; I’m the only one who can bring him to life. Whether he ever makes it into the outside world or not, he exists as long as he’s in here. I watch him pass across the stage, and we wave, and he thanks me for the only life he’ll ever have. And I thank him for helping me be more people than I ever knew.
posted by Richard Lawrence Cohen at 2:22 PM
18 Comments:
Excellent! You really cover the experience of meeting someone "new" with clarity...and falling in love - with our own stories as told by someone else. I enjoyed hearing how you purposefully sat with people that were challenging for you. My first school I purposefully changed seats but not to work with someone - just to get a feel for the whole room. What came to me was that I was not being self challenging so much as I was trying to get a "feel" for the room - much as I did in my very large family - my MO was to "case the whole joint" to create an illusion of safety. Oh the games that are played. After doing this for nine days I got a real sense of how much work it was for me to "feel safe" and how in the end I never really did. I had the unrealistic expectation that I could get to know all 300 people intimately. HA! Well, in my child's mind that was how I believed it would/could keep me safe. Katie said something toward the end of the school that shifted it for me... she said the whole world is here to support you. I really got that to be true... and especially if they criticize or seem harsh or an enemy. I really got how they are the best of the best. Put a whole new slant on life for me.
Your plight reminds me of another artist’s motivation that is described in Brenda Ueland’s classic book, “If You Want To Write” (highly recommended by me and by her friend, the poet Carl Sandburg).
She said, “If you read the letters of the painter Van Gogh you will see what his creative impulse was. It was just this: he loved something--the sky, say. He loved human beings. He wanted to show human beings how beautiful the sky was. So he painted it for them. And that was all there was to it.”
In these posts you demonstrate a similar caring for humans and a similar desire to share with them that which you find most valuable.
My bet is that the writing that comes from your sincere generosity will be in far greater demand than anything you could manufacture in pursuit of either literary correctness or commercial success.
Thanks, Mikaelah, for contributing your experiences from the School. It's stirring to find out how many different things were learned by different people, and all of it useful for everyone.
And John, thanks for insights and encouragement. I hope you're right!
I hear ya, bro. Tonight I went out with a man whose background could not have been less like my upwardly striving, pseudo=intellectual New York Jewish one...someone who could not be less my "type" in any way. I found this fellow, high school graduate, one of nine children of a single mother, with auto mechanic's shredded fingernails and a missing front tooth, to be adorable, intelligent, handsome, kind. Yes, there was "connection" - we thoroughly enjoyed our burritos, we had both been enchanted by the island of Nassau, Bahamas—he, recently, I more than 20 years ago—and had shed tears upon leaving it. Maybe we'll never see each other again; that would be okay. Maybe we will; that would be fine too. What amazes me is that I watched myself at various times this evening trying to find a problem being out on a date with him and I couldn't find a single one. Who stole Carol S. tonight and replaced her with this one?!
I have heard that every author's first work is autobiographical. I've also heard that every author's every work is autobiographical. Does your conjecture support that? Do writers (unless they have attended a "school") tend to project only themselves into the pages of their stories? Are antagonists and villians nothing more than film negatives of the heroes?
Carol: Thank you for that wonderful anecdote. Who stole Carole S. indeed? And maybe there's a reward with all questions asked.
Winston: I've always thought that everything a writer wrote was autobiographical. So my answer to all your questions would be Yes. I don't think that can overturned, but for me personally it might be broadened. At least it might be interesting to try something different.
Wow. Though not yet a published-for-$ writer, I too am wondering about writing. The Work (nor any other come-to-Jesus Inner Eucatastrophe) hasn't short-cut my experience of my imagination; it's as off-the-wall run-for-the-border as ever. It has just become marginally easier to notice when it is no longer at play but dead-serious claiming to be a licensed cartographer, and has wrestled the steering wheel away. Without warning we're bumping down a rutted route leaving the highway that wends through the happier landscape bordering Reality. Not much satisfying creativity there IMO, just a broken-down combine overturned in the drying corn-stalks. And maybe a broken axle.
My thought is that "the drama of grandiosity versus shame" is a promising framework as topic, as observation rather than capitulation. If I ever master the comic novel, I'm stealing it. What a trajectory for a character! Hope you get there first.
BTW, just for fun, the title to the last post on the semi-retired blog references one of Katie's ultimate "curses": caught up in painful thoughts without inquiry, and in that familiar self-obsessed preoccupation, the penalty, and it's more costly than we may know, is to miss the moment.
Noooooo.......!
Thanks, Dilys. The drama of grandiosity versus shame is the furthest thing from copyrightable; I seem to remember it in Gilgamesh.
Funny, you make the rutted road seem more attractive to me than the highway. I've always been like that.
Very thought-provoking stuff, Richard. If I haven't been commenting much lately it's not for lack of reading, but for lack of an ability to relate to your particular life-dilemmas. But as you imply, a silent response is not necessarily an insensitive one! And here you touch on something I think most of us have encountered - the narcissism of much that passes for love. So, thanks for writing.
Hey Dave, thanks for reading, and there's no reason one person's life issues should be the same as another's. As I mentioned in this post, that makes your mind especially interesting from my standpoint.
The best so far since you got back, I think. I'm writing this before getting tangled up in the comments thread - new approach!
Thanks for your thoughtful posts on "The Work." They've made me think, too.
I'm so glad I stumbled upon your blog,
I love Byron Katie and her Work.
I have especially enjoyed reading your personal accounts and insights.
I would love to attend the School at some point, but I found a certain satisfaction living vicariously through your words.
I'm so glad I stumbled upon your blog,
I love Byron Katie and her Work.
I have especially enjoyed reading your personal accounts and insights.
I would love to attend the School at some point, but I found a certain satisfaction living vicariously through your words.
Thanks again to all. Healingroom, it's great to hear from you, and if my descriptions reinforced the appeal of The Work for you, I've been successful. If you haven't already, check out the many free activities and downloads on Katie's website, thework.com.
Loved this post, insightful and honest. I came to some of the same conclusions.
Isn't it wonderful that the passage of time teaches us so much about ourselves?
Thank you, May, and thanks for the comment on the earlier post too. And I'm glad your comments led me to your blog. Yes, it feels good to understand more about life, if indeed that is what we're doing. If we were only immortal. (Are we?)
Well, I have no idea if there is life after death: let's wait and see!
I wrote that because some of my blogger friends have dark thoughts about getting older, especially those around fifty years of age. I hope that it won't be as terrible. At times I wish that I was retired and could live a quiet life of contemplation. I envy my parents who, in ther late sixties, seem to have more energies than I do.
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