Aké: The Years of Childhood, by Wole Soyinka

Soyinka describes growing up in western Nigeria in the 1940’s. He was interested in reading from an early age, encouraged by his father who was a school headmaster. An incredibly sensitive youth, Soyinka was acutely aware of aspects of his world from an early age. He was also very stand apart: from his school mates, his family, and the community around him. Often the pressures of community living in his family overwhelmed him and he sought refuge outdoors or with friends.

It was clear how, like Eudora Welty, he ‘listened’ and ‘saw’ from an early age, developing his writer’s mind. He carefully describes conversations he overheard and experiences he had growing up. His descriptions are very vivid and his writing is almost poetic in his choice of words.

A sensitive, thoughtful work, Aké is fascinating to read to discover a young person’s growing consciousness as a writer, especially in the fantastic environment of Nigeria.

One Writer’s Beginnings, by Eudora Welty

Listening, learning to see, and finding a voice. These three skills that Eudora Welty developed during her childhood served her well later as an author. In this work, Welty describes experiences growing up and relates those to the skills she used being an author.

She listened for stories in the conversations of the adults around her and discovered that these stories were made up of scenes. Everyday “lies, strategies, jokes, and tricks” that people used were the stuff scenes were made of. And these scenes were full of “hints, pointers and promises” of things to find out about people. The events in our lives happen in a sequence, Welty describes, but not chronologically. The time the events follow is the “continuous thread of revelation.” Welty describes clearly the scenes she heard growing up, including trips in the car with her family, which she partially recreated in her short story, “Death of a Traveling Salesman.”

In college, she described learning to see through a passion for poetry: “I had come unprepared for the immediacy of poetry.” She discovered that “there’s so much more of life that only words can convey.” I read two of the short stories she referred to in One Writer’s Beginnings, “Death of a Traveling Salesman” and “Livvie.” It was clear how she incorporated years of experience listening and seeing while growing up into these stories with a very acute and descriptive eye.

Some of the best moments of One Writer’s Beginnings are her sharing the background of, and her reaction to, the stories she wrote. Regarding “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” she shares that she began it “writing from a distance,” but the story “led me closer.” She put the character in a scene and let him figure out why he was there. She writes, “greater than scene is situation, greater than situation is implication, and greater than all that is a single human being who can never be confined to a frame.”

It’s clear how she uses this understanding of character in “Death of a Traveling Salesman” to focus the story on the salesman as a human and more than just a person in a predicament or a situation by implication. The salesman’s experience is much more than a situation (though it clearly is on a shallow level; it’s almost a predicament when his car goes into a gulch), and, at the end of the story, it’s clearly more than just implication. The juxtaposition of the salesman with the couple is the conduit by which the reader watches the salesman be transformed in a profound way that only a human can be.

Though she states that none of her characters are biographical, she argues that a “writer is in part all of his characters.” Things she’d observed throughout her life emerge into her characters. People she had been, and people who were her antithesis, both get written into characters she creates. She believes that a character comes alive when a writer gets inside a character’s “skin, heart, mind and soul” to write that character’s experience as he or she experiences it.

Finally, she discusses the concept of confluence as a time or place where separate journeys converge. She believes that we experience remembering most intensely when we are at this juncture of two journeys. She writes that the living experience at those meeting places is one of the charged dramatic fields of fiction.

This very intimate and penetrating work is well balanced between biography and reflections on writing. It’s fascinating to read thoughts on her own work, to watch her discuss themes and efforts she made in writing her stories, and to listen to her search out possible connections between different stories and characters. It seems Welty could not have been anything but a writer with her years of experience listening, seeing, and finding her voice.

The Courage to Create, by Rollo May

After reading Dillard’s, The Writing Life, I rushed out to buy Rolly May’s, The Courage to Create. I felt I needed a boost of courage to deal with the lingering angst I was burdened with after reading Dillard’s accurate and penetrating work.

May discusses a disparity of life: how can we love something, anything, when we know someday we’re going to die. He arrives at a similar solution as Proust did: the creative act allows us to reach out beyond our own death. May describes the creative process as an expression of normal people in the act of actualizing themselves. He describes it, as well, as doing battle with gods. And he says that creativity is making silence answer the writer’s knock.

He also describes it as emergent from the world the writer lives in. He quotes James Joyce, who wrote, at the end of Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated consciousness of my race.”

The creative process is described as an encounter of intense engagement. The intensity makes the act creative and a commitment to the encounter activates a deeper awareness in oneself that brings forth the uncreated consciousness of one’s race. He uses the term ecstasy to describe the experience of being in this state where form and passion are united with order and vitality.

May also describes the a-ha experience of insight, where the unconscious emerges to the surface for an instant, as one constituted by guilt (the unconscious is a danger notion, it destroys a conscious thought in order to emerge), sight (vision becomes more clear and even intense), commitment (insight emerges after a period of voluntary, hard work on a topic), and relaxation (the insight comes at the moment one shifts between work and play).

He challenges the writer to consider what the “external pole” of the encounter is. What is playing against the conscious and unconscious mind of the writer. He stresses waiting for the “birthing process” of writing. An artist must have this sense of timing to wait for period of receptivity. Creative people, he says, live with anxiety and pay the price through insecurity, sensitivity and defenselessness. He argues that we have an innate “passion for form.” That this struggle with limits is a source of creativity.

After reading May’s book, I came across a quote from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream:

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to haven,

And, as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

Shakespeare and May both agree that the writer calls forth something out of nothing, using an awareness of the world around him or her. This something comes alive through the creative process, when the writer gives it “a local habitation and a name.” Finishing Rollo’s work, I have a better understanding of the psychology of the creative act and a revived appreciation of the role of the subconscious. And I feel courageous (somewhat).

The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard

In The Writing Life, Dillard writes beautifully and presents the writing experience so clearly, she brought back all the angst I’ve felt over my own writing.

Regarding revision, she is merciless. In her own work, she removes the early writings of a work, where “leaps to nowhere, dropped themes, abandoned tones, blind alleys, and false settings,” all get abandoned later by the work. She describes writing like laying down bricks, writing one careful word after another. If she keeps a sentence, she says she’s changed it seven or eight times.

Dillard also lays bare a frustrating conundrum of writing: writers are free to develop themes that interest them using their time as they see fit, but writing is ultimately trivial: no one cares whether its done. She says, “writing is mere writing,” and points out that people need shoes.

Writing one-fifth a page a day, words laid down one-by-one in a chain that leads to carefully crafted sentences, seems to be what Dillard expects at her best. She talks about waiting for the writing ‘sense’ to inspire her, distracting herself with walks and chopping wood, until she has something to write on paper. She describes vividly a sphinx moth, which supercharges its muscles with oxygen in order to fly. Once she startled one of these moths and it took off over the ocean. It kept gaining altitude and then losing altitude, losing more than it was gaining, until it drowned in the ocean. It’s clear how the writing experience can ‘drown’ if one doesn’t start off supercharged.

Dillard also shares advice about what to write about: give voice to your own astonishment, write about what you like best, write like you’re writing for terminal patients, what could one say that would not “enrage them by its triviality.” She quotes Anne Truitt that writing is “forcing oneself to walk along the nerves of one’s own most intimate sensitivity.”

She points out that, from the reader’s perspective, there are many good reasons to read, to demand good writing: the hope of beauty laid bare, the experience of life heightened, and the deepest mysteries probed. Writing, Dillard shares, has the ability to isolate and vivify an experience by deeply engaging our hearts and intellects, to magnify and dramatize our days, to reveal us startlingly to ourselves as creatures “set down here bewildered.” These are amazingly poignant reasons to write, and beautifully described and precisely described.

After reading Dillard I was almost thrown into permanent writer’s block. Her descriptions of the writing experience made me feel empty and drawn out, as I’d feel, sometimes, when struggling to get good copy down on the page. However, she offered so many good reasons to write, reasons that strike at the core of what it means to be human, reasons I felt would enlarge my experience of humanity, that I am more excited, than fearful, to be revealed to myself startlingly as a creature set down here bewildered.