Will write for "likes" and shares

Publishing in a journal is a pleasure. Publishing a book is a dream. But publishing should not be the primary goal of the creative writer.

This statement may sound strange coming from someone who regularly maintains that writing isn’t finished until it finds an audience. But I can’t help but feel that we rush to find our audience prematurely sometimes—and that readers would benefit more from our sustained thought and our deliberative revision more than our speed of production.

Like most writers, I can pound out something pretty respectable right now. It’s no great accomplishment to write a nice little poem. As a former journalist, one of my chief skills in life is writing four to six competent inches that will inform or entertain an audience. I worked in a daily newspaper so small that on a few occasions I had twenty stories in an issue, some bylined and some not, all written from 7 to 10:30 a.m. I wrote; I found an audience. It was all in a day’s work.

But a newspaper is a product (albeit a disappearing one), and its value is in having lots of reliable information. Go to a whole day’s worth of county commissioner’s meetings on Tuesday, a school board meeting at night, and it’s not too hard to fill a front page with a simple record of what happened.

Likewise, a little poem can faithfully record some small thing—the news of the poem being that my son’s hand looks and moves like a starfish, or that I saw the reflection of my eyelashes in my coffee and thought I saw a spider. I can write about these moments, and indeed I have written about both. If I stop at these simple observations, a memorable poem might result.

A small poem that makes meaning of simplicity is a pleasure to read, and nearly all of my favorite poems begin in this way; a lyrical poem often has some moment of observation as its jumping-off point. The poems that feel the most meaningful to me move past observation to arrive at a deeper understanding, though. In Mary Oliver’s “White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field,” that snowy owl is “beautiful, and accurate,” 

striking the snow and whatever was there

with a force that left the imprint

of the tips of its wings—five feet apart—

and the grabbing thrust of its feet,

and the indentation of what had been running

through the white valleys of the snow—

It’s a thing that happened, and she recorded it faithfully. Had the poem stopped right there, I would have felt rewarded by the reading. But Oliver goes much further, into the metaphysical—“the river / that is nothing but light.” She writes,

maybe death isn’t darkness, after all,

but so much light wrapping itself around us —

as soft as feathers —

that we are instantly weary of looking, and looking,

and shut our eyes, not without amazement,

and let ourselves be carried [….]

It’s such a beautiful experience when art feels familiar, when it seems like it’s giving language to our own half-realized thoughts. This poem by Oliver expresses my spiritual viewpoint perfectly. This is my conception of life and death, and of what we become when we’re through with our bodies. I would not have had such an astonishing sense of connection had Oliver not engaged in deep reflection. I don’t know where this poem came from or how it evolved, but doesn’t it feel like the result of deep reflection in the moment of composition, on top of what feels like Oliver’s quiet, introspective spirit? 

A very small poem I admire a lot is William Stafford’s “The Little Girl by the Fence at School.” In only seven lines, Stafford offers a reflection on the nature of death. In this poem, the grass has one idea about forever and the sky has another:

THE LITTLE GIRL BY THE FENCE AT SCHOOL

Grass that was moving found all shades of brown,

moved them along, flowed autumn away

galloping southward where summer had gone.

And that was the morning someone’s heart stopped

and all became still. A girl said, “Forever?”

And the grass. “Yes. Forever.” While the sky —

The sky — the sky — the sky.

In so many ways, this small poem speaks for itself. The grass says “forever,” but the sky (the sky, the sky, the sky …) is an authority on forever, and it is noncommittal on the subject. While the poem takes up very little space on the page, it doesn’t have the feel of something that was dashed off. I just retyped the poem in less than a minute of time—so why does it feel like it took a very long time for Stafford to make it? But it does.

As I see it, there are two factors that point us toward the kind of writing that stays at the surface—that doesn’t reflect contemplation, that avoids deeper waters. One factor is a capitalistic system that forces artists to work for this week’s pay, rather than giving them space and time to create something lasting, or even eternal.

The other factor, possibly influenced by the first, is our rush to publish. The beautiful thing about publishing is finding an audience and completing the circuit from the deep understanding that happens in our notebook to the communication of that insight to others.

But we also rush for other reasons—to show our worthiness for employment, to fill a tenure file, to amass social media “likes” or shares, or to gain a higher stature as an artist.

I do it, too—I have no good reason to rush into publication except to share work and establish a little bit of a community within the relative isolation of my days—so I’m really preaching to myself here. I’d like to go deeper—maybe produce less, and maybe even end up with poems that are less pithy and that require more from a publisher. I think I’ll appreciate the results, even if I miss the instant satisfaction of the share.

The individual and the workshop

Workshops vary a lot—good or bad, helpful or not, weird or really weird.

It’s the natural effect of getting a dozen creative people together. Something off the wall is bound to happen. When you’re lucky, the off-the-wall stuff comes from a fellow workshopper instead of the leader. I have not been particularly lucky in this regard.

I once had a workshop leader who outlawed a color—to wit, “indigo.” Indigo was not permitted in a poem in this person’s class. Of course, I hadn’t considered writing about indigo until there was a moratorium on it, but then every poem seemed to require the night sky.

A friend tells me about a fiction workshop question proffered by the leader: “What if all the men were women and the women were men?” We sometimes joke about that when we’re talking about creative work; it’s just a choice bit of silliness, a joke that never stops being funny. Like a ban on “indigo,” it’s pointless, but it makes us smile.

Within workshops, there were always more than a few clichés from other participants. Here are some classic examples:

·      This has been done. Once we unlock “This has been done” as a workshop criticism, we find that everything has been done. Poets have always talked about things like love and loss and beauty—yawn.

·      Show, don’t tell. As advice goes, this has its place. It’s better, generally, to have an image instead of a lot of blah-de-blah. But more seasoned writers know that there is a place for exposition in a poem, story, or essay, and that there can be such a thing as too much showing. That’s when you tell.

·      I don’t feel it. Isn’t that an odd comment to make to someone regarding a piece of writing? It’s more a commentary on the reader’s capacity to feel than it is on the quality of writing. And I guess it’s a good idea to be properly wary of any comment starting with “I.” It shows where the reader’s attention is, when it should be on the work and the writer at hand.

·      That would never happen in real life. Some of the weirdest things have happened in my real life. I once found a human eyeball in a field. Our planet is endlessly strange, and that’s most of what makes me want to stay on it.

·      Write what you know. Or you could, you know, use your imagination to figure out something new. It would be terrible to be limited to what we know when we enter into a world of imagination.

·      This needs a few more drafts. Of course it does; that’s why it’s in a workshop. People don’t bring their polished work to a bunch of peers for advice, or if they do, they shouldn’t.

One of the most problematic things that happen in workshops is that our fellow writers begin to rewrite our work. I see some value in a straight-up assessment of what works and what doesn’t, but I have a problem with specific advice about how to rewrite a piece.

As I recently told a friend, I don’t need feedback that says, “The narwhal in stanza three should be a nurse shark.” Obviously, I’m keeping my damned narwhal. Have you seen those things?

To take the point further, my narwhal can’t really be switched out with a nurse shark, because the narwhal is in service to the vision of the piece in a way that only it can be. Its selection was never arbitrary. The fact of the matter is that the narwhal poem may be a complete disaster, but making it a nurse shark poem doesn’t help, and that big of a switch to the vision means that it’s no longer what I wanted it to be. It’s not my narwhal poem.

The way I see it, I came up with the narwhal, and I sink or swim with it. The nurse shark didn’t come from me, so I can’t accept it offered up on a silver platter in a workshop. It’s not my poem when I do.

A workshopper can point out clunky words or phrases, maybe suggest replacements for me to consider; it is also useful to point out a passage that falls flat or an image that doesn’t work. The suggestion of bizarre additions that aren’t the product of my own imagination is never going to work for me, though, if I haven’t specifically invited a larger collaboration than workshop feedback.

A piece of writing, and particularly a poem, is the product, ideally, of sustained, private thought. If we’re comedy writers for a late-night show, we might have a lot of luck sitting around a table and spitting out ideas that aren’t our property anyway and then seeing what we can do with them as a team. But that’s not what a workshop is, unless it’s a very unusual workshop. And, heck, I’d enjoy trying an experiment like that—something totally collaborative, where all participants put their heads together to make a shared new thing. But until I’m lucky enough to sit in a workshop like that, I’m probably going to focus on my own writing—and maybe I need the help of a dozen people who aren’t me, but I don’t really want it, and I’m not going to accept it if it’s offered.

For me, a workshop is one of the best ways to get a quick sense of how work is being received by an audience. It’s also a nice setting to make small repairs, which is when it functions most as its name would suggest. In an automotive workshop, I might gap my spark plugs or change my air filter or tighten my timing belt, but if I came in with a silver 2000 Volkswagen Golf with a dent in the driver’s side, I expect to drive out in it—although maybe without the dent, if I’m lucky.

Because if I’m driving out in a new Lexus, the chances are good that I stole it from someone. The title is not in my name.