Journal for Creative Writing Seminar

The writing metaphor Annie Dillard uses that most works for me is the concept of writing as a miner’s pick or as a woodcarver’s gouge. It’s like we are faced with some huge, formless mass that is the collective cultural consciousness, and it’s our job as writers – or any other artists – to chip away at what is extraneous to what we are trying to tell in a particular work, and then refine it and polish it into something true. Not just “true” as in “accurate”, but “true” as in “sound”, “plumb”, “solid”, “fixed”. Stephen King in On Writing suggests that things we write are like dinosaur bones, already waiting for us in a rough form deep in the ground. Our job is to dig them up and clean them, eliminating the detritus that is not what needs to be told. It also reminds me of Michelangelo’s quote that he saw an angel in the block of marble, and took away every part of the marble that was not the angel until he had set the angel free.

My own preferred metaphor for writing, one that takes a different tack on the process but seems just as accurate to me, is that of an oyster making pearls. The grit that gets inside an oyster sometimes causes discomfort, sometimes even pain, to the oyster, which coats it with secretions that protect the soft organs from irritation. In time this makes a pearl. Similarly, writers take the grit that is unhappiness – or depression, anxiety, anger, frustration, or just simply wanting answers to why things are the way they are – and coat them with layers of distilled cultural consciousness, as filtered through their own experiences and worldview, to take away the harshness of it. This has a side effect of making something unique. 

Not all pearls are of high “quality”, in that they do not all have marketable luster and smoothness of shape, but all of them have at least done the job of soothing the oyster’s heart and the writer’s soul. The secretions an oyster produces do not come out of thin air. The food an oyster imbibes, that an oyster filters from the water,  is analogous to the stories that we take in from the moment we understand speech. Writers who have a greater, richer background of story and myth will produce greater and richer works. A malnourished oyster’s pearls will never be as good as that of an oyster well fed. The food for creative people is the stories we are told, the stories we seek out, the stories we live. They become the stories we create, because we need them to keep us safe from the roughest portions of life that otherwise would wound us too deeply to go on.