Emerging-writer and Beyond-emerging Paths...

Knowing and Knowing-About

Time for another “Foundation” post…

Workshopping has been the topic of the past couple of weeks, and I’ve written about reading-as-writer and steps to learning about writing. These foundational posts tend to “basics.” But maybe this—knowing and knowing about—is as basic as anything else.

I’m in the final throes of the writing of a novel for adults, and the emotional drain of the writing is causing me to want to share beyond basic. It’s the tough stuff of writing, yet the best, too. What is it that we are doing here—here in the Unschool, and here in writing?

Cynthia Rylant, my most beloved writers for young people of all ages, never shows up in public as she is too shy and private (remember when writers could be private people?) She spent her childhood mostly in the out-of-doors. She lived with her grandparents in rural West Virginia, while her mother studied at nursing school. She had no story-books, only comics. Even when she was reunited with her mother, there was little access to books. She had no drive to be a writer until her college years. Her first published book, a picturebook about her childhood, was written in an hour.

This says much about the power of listening, of paying attention. How did she hear stories and gossip? How did she absorb nature—with its rhythms and patterns? What did she daydream about? And sing?

Rylant’s language is stunning. It’s poetic and emotional. After the age of four, she never saw her father, and he died when she was thirteen. She said, “I did not have a chance to know him or to say goodbye to him, and that is all the loss I needed to become a writer.”

She is speaking to the emotional awareness that writers need in order to create real people/characters, and stories that matter. We need this to create care in our work. Caring about the work isn’t enough.

I’m doing research looking at the work and exile of William Tyndale, and this quote of his caught my eye: To know God is more important than knowing about God.

The same can be said of so much, including writing. We can read about writing, we can talk about it, but to sit with a paper or screen, and know the work of it, is something else. And it is something that takes courage and trust.

Trust

Before I wrote the word “trust” I was thinking “naivete.” And there is an element of that, yes, and of removing ourselves from external complications and constructs. (To be naive is to think these don’t exist. So this is a conscious step—aside.) Even now, in my own work—a novel in final pushing stage of labour—I am proceeding with trust and naivete. I push against the thought of the exacting and emotional work of it, even as I dig in; I push against the thought that it might go nowhere in the world, once completed. I focus on what I must do to see it through, and I trust. It is time to know the work, and not the “about.”

Rylant was not a well-read person when she went off to college. She had no dream to “be a writer.” But at some point, she responded to some deep need in her self, and she began to write.

Steps and scaffolding

Knowing and knowing-about are two separate pieces—even as they require reconciliation at some point. While writing and God both can appear to come from nowhere, we could say that the fact that we even have the word “God” comes from the “knowing about” sphere. “Knowing” would be an unnamed sense of something… Maybe this explains why, when writing gets tough, it feels as if we are forging through uncleared trails. And explains the hunger to understand the tools and elements of the work. This is why emerging writers (and not so emerging) are hungry for classes and workshops and feedback and knowledge.

So often these posts for the Unschool circle around the learning and then the abandonment of all learning in order to sit and write. We can’t be off the hook for either of these.

Workshopping offers the opportunity to bring these together—and to grow courage and trust. Both are parts of the work, even if, like Rylant, we never show our faces in public. Courage—even if you have no intention to ever share or publish your work.

It takes courage to write, to see—on paper—what is inside. So often I don’t know what is inside my self, which is no doubt why I’m a writer, and not a story-teller or actor.

At the end of my writing workday yesterday, I had a feeling of utter exhaustion. (Some of which may be reflected in this post!) I have a self-imposed deadline of end-of-month to complete this draft—which I’m hoping will be the final, or at least the final before being in the hands of my agent. I am being reminded daily of the emotional piece that is writing. It’s a bit like being someone who lives with migraines; no one sees it, but it’s real. At the ends of some writing days, I know I should not be driving a vehicle.

We are small numbers here on the Unschool. We are growing slowly but deeply, I think, and appreciate. We care deeply about writing, about words, and stories and poems. I feel as if we are here to learn writing and learn self, as opposed to learning “about.” It’s not an easy path. But you know and feel the difference as you work and as you read.

Courage and trust are part of reading and responding to the pieces posted in the Workshop space here. If you don’t feel you are ready to approach them as a writer, then read as a reader, absorb and respond to them as a human being. That process will grow you as a writer.

Balance is key

And because writing is what it is, and learning and growing is what it is, I’ll write about image and concreteness as ‘foundational basic’ next week. Because we need all the pieces.

Courage and peace—