Workbook: Memos & Dispatches on Writing - Softcover

Heighton, Steven

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1550229370 ISBN 13: 9781550229370

Publisher: ECW Press, 2011

Synopsis

Since selections first appeared in the New Quarterly and the National Post as part of "The Afterword," Steven Heighton's memos and dispatches to himself -- a writer's pointed, cutting take on his own work and the work of writing -- have been tweeted and retweeted, discussed and tacked to bulletin boards everywhere. Coalesced, completed, and collected here for the first time, a wholly new kind of book has emerged, one that's as much about creative process as it is about created product, at once about living life and the writing life.

"I stick to a form that bluntly admits its own limitation and partiality and makes a virtue of both things," Heighton writes in his foreword, "a form that lodges no claim to encyclopedic completeness, balance, or conclusive truth. At times, this form (I'm going to call it the memo) is a hybrid of the epigram and the précis, or of the aphorism and the abstract, the maxim and the debater's initial be-it-resolved. At other times it's a meditation in the Aurelian sense, a dispatch-to-self that aspires to address other selves -- readers -- as well."

It's in these very aspirations, reaching both back into and forward in time -- and, ultimately, outside of the pages of the book itself -- that Heighton offers perhaps the freshest, most provocative picture of what it means to create the literature of the modern world.

About this title

About the Author

Steven Heighton's most recent books are the novel Every Lost Country (May 2010) and the poetry collection Patient Frame (April 2010). He is also the author of the novel Afterlands, which appeared in six countries, was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, and was a "best of year" selection in ten publications in Canada, the USA, and the UK. The book has recently been optioned for film. He has also published The Shadow Boxer--a Canadian bestseller and a Publishers Weekly Book of the Year for 2002--which appeared in five countries. He lives with his family in Kingston, Ontario.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Work Book

Memos & Dispatches on Writing

By Steven Heighton, Michael Holmes

ECW PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Steven Heighton
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-55022-937-0

CHAPTER 1

GIVEN TO INSPIRATION

I am not bored at the moment, though it might be better if I were. Boredom might mean I was lagging and loafing my way slowly toward a fresh jag of creative work, creative excitement—a poem, a story, the opening lines of a novel, lines that might lead anywhere, into the expectant offing, off the edge of the storyboard into a sandbox as vast as the Sahara. (I chose writing because I saw no reason that adults should ever cease to play.) Instead I'm expending another day as a compliant, efficient functionary—earnest secretary to my own little career. (If you'll excuse me, another email just blipped into view. I'm going to have to click and skim over, so I can glean that small, fleeting fix of satisfaction that comes from purging the inbox. A sense of accomplishment!—the ensuing narcotic calm!—that deeply licit, Lutheran drug our time-ridden culture starts pushing on us in kindergarten, or even sooner.)

* * *

I'm afraid that boredom, at least of a certain kind, may be disappearing from the world. And this potential truancy has me worried, partly for the sake of my daughter and her generation, but also—how unsurprising—for myself. Myself and other writers. I mean, the minute I get bored now I check my email. There's often something new there—maybe something rewarding, a note from a friend, some news from my publisher. And if there's nothing there, there's the internet. For almost all of my writer friends it's the same: like me, they constantly, casually lateralize into the digital realm. Some of them also have cable TV (I don't), so if email, YouTube and other web excursions fail to gratify, they can surf a tsunami of channels. Or else play video games. Whatever. The issue here is screen media. The issue is that staring into space—in that musing, semi-bored state that can precede or help produce creative activity—is impossible when you keep interposing a screen between your seeing mind and the space beyond. The idea is to stare at nothing—to let nothingness permeate your field of vision, so the externally unstimulated mind revs down, begins to brood and muse and dream.

What a live screen presents is the opposite of nothing. The info and interactivity it proffers can be vital, instructive, entertaining, usefully subversive and other good things, but they also keep the mind in a state of hyperstimulation. All the neurological and anecdotal evidence backs up this claim.

The twenty-first century brain may be verging on the neural equivalent of adrenal collapse.

* * *

Just as an hour of boredom—of being at loose ends and staring into space—can serve as precursor to a child's next spate of creative work/play ("work," I write, because a young child's profession is to play), so an adult's month of brooding can open into a year of purposeful creativity.

* * *

Boredom is the laboratory where new enthusiasms ready themselves, beakers and test tubes bubbling quietly over Bunsen flames no larger than pilot lights, spectral figures in lab coats moving among them, speaking in hushed voices. Not one of these figures has the bored dreamer's own face—the face the dreamer wears during the day.

* * *

Sign on the wall of a corporate poobah in a Heinrich Böll story—a man who has a treadmill installed under his desk so he can both exercise and generate power for his office while he signs forms, dictates, and answers the phone:

IT'S A CRIME TO SLEEP.

What he really means is that it's a crime to dream.

* * *

Boredom is a hibernation, or aestivation, a remission from conscious thought and mental din, a vacancy that starts to fill with microdreams that the dreamer never actually sees as she gazes into space and the dreams elapse on a deeper level, the way unseen fish—not those splashy gold koi on the surface, auditioning, greedy and garish—move in the depths of a pool on which small, suggestive ripples now and then flex: impulses rising to the waking mind in the form of insights, structures, germinal phrases, or mots justes.

* * *

I suspect Emily Dickinson was often bored. Bored and staring. And out of her boredom, lines erupted, openings like "My life had stood—a loaded gun" and "Safe in their alabaster chambers" and "Exaltation is the going / Of an inland soul to sea" ... Lines that poke holes in the tenuous facade between our public being and the world's true, ecstatic reality. Or say instead that after boredom had done its work, her dreaming mind—the nightmind—could reach through the wall into that richer place and grasp new thoughts in the form of those lines. The daymind, the wakeful will, always on the make, as conscious and calculating as a grifter, is too busy and practical to receive weird, metamorphic couplets like the one uttered by Dickinson's dead speaker who "died for Beauty": "Until the Moss had reached our lips— / And covered up—our names—"

* * *

When you're musing with the nightmind you have no name, no needy ego. You're an anonymous stenographer transcribing words from some higher or deeper self.

* * *

Boredom, yes, as in those moments when the eyes stare without itinerary—when the brain's hard drive revolves at low rpm, uncoupled from regimen, responsibility, the whole Logistical Life that becomes one's life in the middle years, what Hinduism calls the Householder Phase, to do to do to do to do to do. But now alpha waves are lapping at the shore of the mind as you depart the secretarial for the sacramental realm.

* * *

Flannery O'Connor, ill with the lupus that would kill her, worked at her typewriter for two hours each morning, when her energy was at its least feeble, then spent the rest of the day in a rocking chair on the front porch of her house, doing nothing, she said, but staring.

* * *

Don't just do something, sit there.

* * *

Boredom, even of this potentially creative sort, can be experienced as distressing and oppressive partly because the ego, that notorious control freak, feels itself losing control and wants it back. Keep purging that inbox! Keep scratching items off the domestic roster! Advance your agenda. Improve yourself. Perfect and provide, provide, provide. At the end of the day you'll feel you've accomplished, achieved, earned the reward of rest, television, alcohol, sex, sleep, though of course it's a crime to sleep, to sleep too much, to dream and pay attention to dreams. And so the ego, which hates being forgotten, barges back into consciousness, urging you to do something useful.

* * *

(It's the Buddhist teacher and writer Thich Nhat Hahn who says instead, "Don't just do something, sit there." A small act of subversion in a society that has no use for stillness, silence, inward vision—that extols speed, productivity, the manic pursuit of things that by their nature can never be caught and retained.)

* * *

The ego is as out of place in the sacramental zone as a commercial PR rep would be in the workshop of a woman I know—a woman who hand-sews the bindings of the poetry books she prints on a linotype machine, simply out of a desire to make something beautiful, enduring, and good.

* * *

Finding the words—or receiving the words, let's say—is a matter of jumpstarting the quiet machinery of dreams while in a fully waking state. A feat more easily described than done.

* * *

Here's one thing I notice about the ideas that come out of daydream or nightdream: they work, they always work. They might not lead to Hamlet, but they work. As for the lines of poetry that come, they're right, sufficient unto themselves, in no need of editing. In fact, they seem pre-edited and polished—as if the relaxed mind has done the necessary work and then, when the moment is ripe, has issued the lines to the dreamer like a fait accompli. "I know I am in a dark place because I / cannot swallow, & the wasps / are weaving hives / into the dead eyes / of the streetlamps." These lines of my own are not great, but they are poetry, possessing poetry's surprise and bizarre aptness and rhythmic/acoustical unity. I'll wager that most people who read them will see that they're nightwork, not daywork, and that editing them would risk introducing foreign material—the material of the daytime will—to lines that have a nocturnal, oneiric integrity. I have a number of lines and poems like this, but not nearly enough. I wish they'd arrive more often, such things, delivered by overnight courier, calling for no editorial surgery, no weeks or months of revision. I can't speak for all writers, but I speak for some of us when I say that we might do more if we could learn to try less, to relax the mind so as to render it vulnerable to inspiration.

* * *

The corollary: that the daymind is always running interference, censoring, editing, talking over the whisperings and vesperings of something deeper; that if we could sedate the surface chatter, the nightmind could issue its pre-edited offerings more often.

Some of those offerings might not only be poetry, but also key insights into how to change our lives.

* * *

Who was the Person from Porlock, anyway? You remember that obtrusive, anonymous figure who rapped, Coleridge tells us, on the door of the poet's residence while he was writing down lines that had come to him in a dream (probably laudanum-induced) from which he'd just awakened. "Kubla Khan." Some have suggested that the Person was simply Coleridge's invented excuse for not being able to bring the poem—which starts so famously, "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree"—to an equally sublime conclusion.

I think the Person from Porlock is nothing but the daymind, the willful, meddling, obstructively conscious brain, returning to full wakefulness and seizing back control. It raps its officious fist on the door of the imagination and scatters the dusts of a dream that until then had been using the poet as a sort of Dictaphone.

In a wireless world, where the daymind is never allowed to doze off, digital stimulation and busyness amount to a rapping so chronic it grows inaudible, unnoticed.

* * *

Don't get me wrong. No one finishes a novel or even a book of poems without a hefty contribution from the daymind—specifically the will, overseen by the hungry ego. (Who could finish a 400-page novel without some ego hunger?) Inspiration and good lines can only take a writer so far. Still, in the end, writing that's all sweat and disciplined desire for achievement, a story lacking inner vision, a poem untouched by the nudgings of the nightmind, these have no deep resonance or aesthetic staying power. We have to remember how to invite and receive the words and insights we can't force to mind. We have to relearn how to muse, drowse and stare into blankness, adrift, dormant, even bored, especially now when our various screens are always present—firewalls raised between us and the reality of dreams.

CHAPTER 2

MEMOS TO A YOUNGER SELF

To be relayed back through time to a writer starting out

1. Interest is never enough. If it doesn't haunt you, you'll never write it well. What haunts and obsesses you into writing may, with luck and labour, interest your readers. What merely interests you is sure to bore them.

2. Let failure be your workshop. See it for what it is: the world walking you through a tough but necessary semester, free of tuition.

3. Embrace oblivion. The sooner you quit fretting about your current status and the long shot of posterity, the sooner you'll write something that matters—while actually enjoying the effort, at least some of the time.

4. Allow yourself to enjoy it. Squash the temptation to accentuate, poeticize, or wallow in the difficulties of the writing life, which are probably not much worse than the particular difficulties of other professions and trades. Take a tradesman's practical approach to your development: quietly apprentice yourself to language and the craft, then start filling up your toolbox, item by item, year by year.

5. Ignore Lord Byron, who wrote that "We of the craft are all crazy." He was largely right, of course; ignore him anyway. To romanticize the Writer as pursued by Furies, enthused by Muses, beset by demons—this is nothing but professional self-importance and self-pity. Writers have no monopoly on poverty, humiliation, self-doubt, or aggressive inner demons. Close your door and get on with it.

6. Momentum and enthusiasm can mean pretty much the same thing. When working on a longer project, ruthlessly guard and prolong the momentum.

7. In writing, as in life, "personality" is not character. Never try to be cute, to be winning, to audition for the reader.

8. Never try to be cool. A writer afraid of seeming square will never write anything truly cool. The purest definition of cool, after all, is not caring what people think.

9. Stand on the side of artifice—of worked and earned, elaborated form. Life gives us enough of life. We approach art for something different: more distilled, catalyzed, charged, and signifying.

10. Avoid earnestness and solemnity—those Upper Canadian birthrights—by cultivating a grown-up, crap-detecting irony. But don't always use it. Irony is effective only in balance with other modes. Much current discourse renders itself void and dead by the ceaseless, indiscriminate use of irony.

11. Don't be afraid to be earnest either, if the work demands it. [see 8, above]

12. Stop straining to be "original" and, with luck and applied time, it just might happen.

13. You can only write authentically within the bounds of your own sensibility, but you can read and appreciate far beyond them. To develop a broad and generous vision, you've got to.

14. You don't "graduate" from poetry to short stories, or get promoted from stories to the novel. The only graduation is to better writing.

15. Careerist writers don't have friends, only allies. This is reason enough not to be careerist.

16. Careerist writers don't confront and relish challenges, they crash into obstacles, which they naturally resent and fear. This is reason enough not to be careerist.

17. There can be just one final arbiter of your work. Refuse to appoint anyone else as your judge and appraiser, executioner, potential approver—the one reader, fellow-writer, critic, editor, or publisher whose acceptance of your work will stand as an ultimate verification, a proof of arrival, relieving you of that impostor-feeling every artist knows (a feeling that simply shows your aesthetic conscience is still active). Resign yourself to the road, there's no arrival. There's no map either, come to think of it, but the sun is rising and the radio is on.

CHAPTER 3

MEMOS TO A WRITER A DECADE DEEP IN THE WORK

1. Could anyone else have written this thing? If Yes, start again.

2. Novelty is nothing more than a fresh combining.

3. If nothing is new under the sun, nothing is old either. Time cycles back. The ode, the epithalamion, the epistolary novel—all can be made fresh again in the right hands.

4. In the long run, curiosity and stamina trump talent.

5. What makes a period of intense creativity a joy: the wayit integrates an adult's productive powers with the playful oblivion of a child.

6. Since your deepest preoccupations are the same in everybook you write, there may be a single, elusive title that could be applied to all your books.

6b. Trying to locate that title is to learn a great deal (maybe too much, in fact) about your writing and your mind.

7. Don't feel discouraged when you find yourself falling out with your earlier work. Dissatisfaction is the price of improvement.

8. Improvement is not just a matter of amassing technique. Coming through a hard time, transcending a grief or an addiction—these can clarify and deepen your vision while also improving your prose style by teaching you to focus on the significant and to exclude mere filigree.

9. Be wary of the "respectability" that comes with even modest success. The respectable lose their yen for transcendence and grow obsessed with fortressing a social position—two changes that contaminate the creative source-waters.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Work Book by Steven Heighton, Michael Holmes. Copyright © 2011 Steven Heighton. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: ECW Press
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1550229370
• ISBN 13: 9781550229370
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 72