Writer in the World
I'm captivated by stories of becoming, stories that study and suggest subtle influences on people we know as the finished, polished product. As I toddle as a writer, I'm especially interested in this becoming process. How did flesh-and-blood people we honor with that exalted sobriquet arrive at that acknowledgment? From whom did they borrow? What did they get wrong before they got it right? Perhaps most intriguing for one who would see himself as writer and counselor both, who implanted that imperturbable self-confidence to write, to listen, to slash, and to write again?
Enter my interest in Stephen Greenblatt's book Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. With what must have been painstaking research combined with the pluck to guess, Greenblatt is reconstructing the Bard's childhood. Already I've taken to school in midlife by what Greenblatt suggests tutored Shakespeare at about six. At this formative age, little Will would have seen his first drama in a format called the morality play. Greenblatt narrates, "The authors of the morality plays thought they could enhance the broad impact they sought to achieve by stripping the characters of all incidental distinguishing traits to get to their essences. They thought their audiences would thereby not be distracted by irrelevant details of individual identities. Shakespeare grasped that the spectacle of human destiny was, in fact, vastly more compelling when it was attached not to generalized abstractions but to particular theme people, people with an unprecedented intensity of their individualization: not Youth but Prince Hal, not Everyman but Othello."
This presents at least two challenges to a writer so fond of and familiar with moralizing abstraction that he admitted in a previous piece to a tendency to grind down life's particulars in the Sermonator so he can dispense them to the general populace. If I am to take these first steps toward what made Shakespeare compelling, honesty about my individual journey is required. Not, insert the quote and jump to the lesson for the benefit of the masses, but I have to develop a willingness to honestly describe the contours of the shadows in my own valleys. Wait until I emerge on the other side, and somehow, the fear I describe in retrospect wasn't so real. Scrub the honest phrasing which admits, as I did yesterday, that I apply for jobs to fight off despair as much as for any calculated career benefit, and there is no there there. Internecine and ordinary as the conflict in my day is, I have sucked the life out of it for the sake of tidiness. Better to open a vein and bleed on the page, as Red Smith describes the process. Better to record experience in the moment than to convey a dry abridgment later on.
The second challenge to enforcing the writing mind actually can run counter to this documenting discipline. If I can commit to writing honestly and more regularly about what passes for drama as I experience it, I can do so to the exclusion of a much richer mine for writing than my own limited experience. Shakespeare was no Moor, nor the royal heir he wrote in Prince Hal. Even if gaining perspective or material for some unified work that will emerge in time, making the most of today means inhabiting the words and expressions of the real-life characters around me. The writer must, it seems, commit to the discipline of emerging from his own intracranial drama and a tendency to impose his own phrasing on the world around him. He or she must cultivate a fascination with what matters to others in the moment that it matters to them in the wildly individualized phrasing they use to express their experience. A committed writer must be able to hear and convey the thrill of the hunt, for instance, in bargains stalked on a Saturday trip to the grocery store.
Shakespeare, it seems, had an earlier start along with immeasurably more native talent. Though I won't attain his legacy with my written word, and though some of my readers may not aspire to write at all, I suspect the yield of these two disciplines escapes the margins of the written page. To find an outlet for the intensity of our own experience is to be readier and more resolute for life's next battle, and perhaps to better equip others. To listen with active interest, to discern the glory of God in the manifold differences in His human creations and their experiences is in itself an act of humble and fascinated worship.
Enter my interest in Stephen Greenblatt's book Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. With what must have been painstaking research combined with the pluck to guess, Greenblatt is reconstructing the Bard's childhood. Already I've taken to school in midlife by what Greenblatt suggests tutored Shakespeare at about six. At this formative age, little Will would have seen his first drama in a format called the morality play. Greenblatt narrates, "The authors of the morality plays thought they could enhance the broad impact they sought to achieve by stripping the characters of all incidental distinguishing traits to get to their essences. They thought their audiences would thereby not be distracted by irrelevant details of individual identities. Shakespeare grasped that the spectacle of human destiny was, in fact, vastly more compelling when it was attached not to generalized abstractions but to particular theme people, people with an unprecedented intensity of their individualization: not Youth but Prince Hal, not Everyman but Othello."
This presents at least two challenges to a writer so fond of and familiar with moralizing abstraction that he admitted in a previous piece to a tendency to grind down life's particulars in the Sermonator so he can dispense them to the general populace. If I am to take these first steps toward what made Shakespeare compelling, honesty about my individual journey is required. Not, insert the quote and jump to the lesson for the benefit of the masses, but I have to develop a willingness to honestly describe the contours of the shadows in my own valleys. Wait until I emerge on the other side, and somehow, the fear I describe in retrospect wasn't so real. Scrub the honest phrasing which admits, as I did yesterday, that I apply for jobs to fight off despair as much as for any calculated career benefit, and there is no there there. Internecine and ordinary as the conflict in my day is, I have sucked the life out of it for the sake of tidiness. Better to open a vein and bleed on the page, as Red Smith describes the process. Better to record experience in the moment than to convey a dry abridgment later on.
The second challenge to enforcing the writing mind actually can run counter to this documenting discipline. If I can commit to writing honestly and more regularly about what passes for drama as I experience it, I can do so to the exclusion of a much richer mine for writing than my own limited experience. Shakespeare was no Moor, nor the royal heir he wrote in Prince Hal. Even if gaining perspective or material for some unified work that will emerge in time, making the most of today means inhabiting the words and expressions of the real-life characters around me. The writer must, it seems, commit to the discipline of emerging from his own intracranial drama and a tendency to impose his own phrasing on the world around him. He or she must cultivate a fascination with what matters to others in the moment that it matters to them in the wildly individualized phrasing they use to express their experience. A committed writer must be able to hear and convey the thrill of the hunt, for instance, in bargains stalked on a Saturday trip to the grocery store.
Shakespeare, it seems, had an earlier start along with immeasurably more native talent. Though I won't attain his legacy with my written word, and though some of my readers may not aspire to write at all, I suspect the yield of these two disciplines escapes the margins of the written page. To find an outlet for the intensity of our own experience is to be readier and more resolute for life's next battle, and perhaps to better equip others. To listen with active interest, to discern the glory of God in the manifold differences in His human creations and their experiences is in itself an act of humble and fascinated worship.
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