A Writers' Spirit: Risk and return with language

Language has value. It has been the source of most things of value in my life, and I lean hard on it to help me make meaning and memories and to give something of value to the world.

Language is a vehicle that conveys meaning from a source to an audience. It’s part of a circulatory system; we send it out and we anticipate a response. Most of the pain I’ve known in my life has come from a breakdown of that circulatory system—that river. My “I love you” has been unreturned; my “Goodbye” served as a terminus for the flow; my inability to say “Goodbye” left me parched and wanting.

I have several defined roles in the world, outside of home and family, and these all have language as their core. I teach composition to college students. I do freelance writing and editing for all kinds of people, literary and otherwise. I blog, obviously. And I score standardized writing tests. 

I love language; it’s the most stalwart, constant thing in my life. And I get along with it. Most of the time, it pretty much does what I ask it to, and in return, I frequently set aside time to do what it tells me to do. Sometimes I just have to trust it, but when I do—when I’m wise—it comes bearing gifts. I can read what I’ve written and find surprises inside—beauty in its structures, meaning beneath its surface.

But I don’t think you have to love language for it to operate in this holy way—part mirror, part gazing globe, part oracle.

The fact is, we all lean on the sacred staff of language sometimes. We take a knee, a ring pinched between our fingers; we stand up to be counted or to testify. We sing or we pray or we ask for a raise. We breathe simple syllables toward a baby. We whisper goodbye into the whorls of an ear. 

Sometimes words are just what we need. We’ve all seen the struggle of a couple’s friend to offer the perfect wedding toast, or of a son or daughter who has one shot to sum up the life of a loved one in a eulogy. There are songs common to these occasions, and some are chosen for their words—their perfect words, it seems to the chooser. I know few people of a Christian faith who don’t respond on a cellular level to the lyrics of “Amazing Grace,” and that’s true for me, too, even though I have some deep theological issues with the song. (“Wretch?” Nah. Not me.)

I think of language as a means of exchange, almost exactly like money, an enduring poetic topic for me. Money holds steady unless we pass it along through investment or, to a lesser extent, through banking, which offers interest payments. We see ourselves as depleting money through spending it, but really, we get products or services we desire, and that’s just the money in a different form. The most useless thing we can do with money is keep it in our pocket, where it doesn’t work for us and it doesn’t grow.

Language is like that. We have to risk it for return—and writers take this risk all the time. But you don’t have to be a writer to understand risk and return. Put yourself in high school; just try to procure that prom date without language. You could avoid the risk, but that means staying home in your sweat pants on the big night. A proposal (or a response to it) is a function of language. So is an interview. These are the risks most of us come to know.

I always remind myself that being a writer—having an intimate relationship with language—gives me power that some just don’t have. I’m fortunate in that way, but I remind myself that all power is to be used with generosity and love. I’m not one to mock a misspelling on a menu, for instance, because I’m a terrible cook, and I take pleasure and relief from the fact that someone else has a handle on it. I know many writers who glory in others’ errors. I am not above a good laugh at a goof—spelling “tap” with two Ps, say—when the error goes hand in hand with a larger ugliness or evil. I don’t think this tendency speaks well of me, though. An intentionally or carelessly false accusation is an evil act; mockery of the spelling of the accusation is a wrong.

When I teach students, I have no trouble approaching language with love. Their best attempts aren’t always successful, but there is always success in them somewhere. It’s an honor to help them get insight into their words and find a better way to arrange them.

When I edit, I channel the writer and try to help the work to reflect the writer even better. Grammar and mechanics take a back seat to voice sometimes in a creative work, and when I correct these errors, I find a new way to say the words with the same personality shining through.

When I score standardized tests, I focus on rewarding the good instead of penalizing the bad. These, in fact, are the instructions under which I operate—one of the only kindnesses in the whole endeavor.

In the past week, I’ve witnessed a situation that has hurt a lot of people who love words as much as I do. The closure of a press has left several books abandoned before ever being published, and others orphaned with the prospect of being out of print at the end of the year. Everyone who was involved with the press on either side—writer or editor—is feeling real pain.

I wonder what words, if any, can help the wordsmiths? I think they need to be gentle, humble ones. Risk doesn’t always pay off, but there is much grace in the effort.

Risk-taking in writing

One of my most treasured Facebook friends—Susan is her name—recently paid me a nice compliment disguised as a suggestion for a blog post. I treasured the compliment—but the suggestion also stuck with me, and I’ve been noodling over it for a few days now.

Susan writes, “Would love to read a blog about how you came/come to take such risks with your own poems, Karen. You make it seem easy. Do you ever deal with an inner critic that tries to muzzle you?”

I need to take a moment to savor a gorgeous buzzy verb—“muzzle.” But then the question remains. How do we allow ourselves to take risks when we are in the habit of shutting ourselves down when we step out of line?

If you’re like me, you don’t have a lot of writing time, and the time you spend in front of the page has to count. A whole day’s writing time can be squandered on writing in the wrong direction—writing what doesn’t work in an attempt to get to what does.

Sometimes we don’t know we have a booger on our finger until we flick it. Sometimes we write with a lot of curiosity and enthusiasm, only to find that what goes on the page amounts only to prewriting—an enumeration, maybe, of all the ways not to approach a writing task.

Were I teaching a composition class, I’d dismiss this as part of the process—I’d say that writing around the topic helps us to locate its coordinates, pinpoint it in time and space. That’s the kind of bullshit thing I say all the time—but it’s only bullshit because it’s so very vexing. I don’t say a lot of things truer than this. A whole lot of time is sometimes required to think about a subject, and sometimes that thinking happens, messily, on the page. Thinking can be kind of ugly, and not the least bit literary in its raw form.

But Susan isn’t talking about that, exactly—she’s talking about an inner censor that tries to shut down the things that might appear foolish, that might expose us too much, that might embarrass. And I do have that critic in me. She saves me from humiliation from time to time, but I suspect my critic also keeps real brilliance from happening on the page.

When I was younger—like, up until last week, the last time I tried to compose anything other than a blog post—I used to write a line of poetry, then read it and feel absolutely suffused with shame and humiliation. I would, in those olden days, write a line and then sit with it, and then I’d scratch it out—completely obliterate it, so that no one (and I am typically the only one in the room) could see it. I wouldn’t just scratch thick horizontal lines, through; I’d scrawl little star shapes on top, so no one would be able to make out any of the actual lines or curves of the letters I’d written.

Ah, youth. It must be noted, though, that poetry deals, frequently, with the psyche—with the images of dreams, and with the ideations of the deepest self. I don’t really want anyone poking around in my dream journal—that stuff’s embarrassing—and likewise, I don’t want these proto-poems to represent me. It’s part of the reason I never make students read early drafts of their work in class.

The problem is that the mine that brings up all the fool’s gold also brings up the actual, Au, atomic number 79 gold—the good stuff. And it’s hard to sort one from the other. They’re both sort of pretty, when you get right down to it.

And I’m not just referring to the sparkle—the clever wordplay, the vivid imagery. The really good stuff is embedded in flawless logic, in thought-provoking new ideas. It’s hard to see what you have flashing in the pan until you get a chance to examine it and to polish it.

Fear of foolishness may make me throw away ideas that are of value. I’m a little sad that I can’t be stupid in front of myself; I’m like people who can’t bear to be naked when alone in their own homes. On a personal and possibly unrelated note, I absolutely love doing that. Down with pants!

In fact, sometimes I prance pantless through my own home, despite the fact that there is a Christian coffeehouse right across my back lawn, and I am likely very visible in my altogether, and in front of some very upright folks. Sure, I’m being baldly confessional, but there is a useful metaphor here. Those good, religious caffeinators aren’t looking at me, and if they caught a glimpse of a shocking expanse of peach, they would likely disbelieve that it was what they thought it was.

No one sees this stuff, so why don’t we parade through our pages, boldly and proudly? I’m starting to get there; I’m reaching the point where I can let the stupid stuff stand. Most of the time the stupid stays stupid, but sometimes there is value in it; sometimes you just have to look at your pen as a vehicle and see where it’s going to take you.

The world doesn’t really need a whole lot more finely crafted work that has nothing risky or unusual to say. We’re nearly full up on that. And trying to get at the real insights, what’s different, can place us on a rocky path. But I’ve noticed that some of the best places are reached via rocky paths—paths that are barely paths at all; paths that maybe seemed like paths until we started to follow them; paths it turns out we blaze.

Sometimes we blaze. And sometimes when we blaze, we sparkle.