So Words Are What You Feel

Confession:  I didn't do a photowalk.  

I walked around the Mackenzie Art Gallery.

I had shown one of my stories—one I had worked very hard on over the summer—to a trusted critiquer, who subsequently ripped it apart.  While he was positive about it, he didn't get what I most wanted to get across. He felt like he didn't believe either of the main characters would act in the way I have them acting. I was proud of the story—am proud of it—and half thought he would be jumping up and down and saying something like, "I know a guy who knows a guy who wants to publish this."  But instead was reminded that a first draft is a first draft, no matter how good you think it is.

So then I was absent in all of my classes.  I was there, yes, but I was rewriting my story in my mind.  I was replaying everything my critiquer had said and was deciding my story was crap, and was about ready to pull out my notebook and start it all over.  I wrote out the first line of the story in the middle of my art history notes, then started thinking, "Is this even a good first line? It's actually kind of cliche. It's lame. It's amateur. It's freakin lousy."  I scratched it out and sulked through the rest of the class.  I walked around campus trying to find someone, anyone from any of my creative writing classes who I could sit down with and say, "Isn't the writer's life tuff?" as if it was thrust on me, as if it's some supernatural thing that has me trapped in it's talons, as if I'm being forced, as if I don't actually love it.

I couldn't find anybody. So I hopped on the bus and went over all of the little things that I use to try to pump myself up for revising: Peter Carey rewrites a novel from top to bottom 13 or 14 times before anyone else sees it; Stephen King just slips his first drafts away for 6 weeks, or until he can read them as a reader and rip his own stuff apart;  James Joyce spent a day writing 7 words and was still upset, and when his friend said that's actually a lot for you in one day, James said, Yeah but I'm still not sure if they're in the right order;  there's that guy whose friends talked about him spending the morning putting in a comma, then spent the afternoon deciding if he should take it out again;  rewarding work is hard work; if it was easy everyone could do it;  "For the serious writer, writing is revising.... for, however good the work, it isn't so good as it might have been" - Joyce Carol Oates.

By the time I got off at my stop at the corner of Albert and 23rd, I was feeling better.  And as the main character in my story is a painter, I thought I'd check out the gallery.  I often go to the Mackenzie and try to immerse myself in the artwork.  It took me a long time—through all the years of skateboarding, and playing and watching sports obsessively, and chasing the beautiful woman who is now my wife—to consider myself an artist. It's only been in the last two years where I've actually embraced it.  But still, when I walk into an art gallery and stand, solemn in front of an abstract work of beauty, I inevitably feel like a fraud.  I have no idea what the artists are trying to do, or even what makes one piece 'better' than another, or what it is people are looking at when they stand forever in front of a single piece.  Still, I like going.  I like imagining the process they went through of imagining it, and working on it, and getting it just right.

This time, there was a woman standing in front of a long canvas.  The canvas was white, with thin white lines running horizontally from one end to the other.  But for two lines in the middle which sort of bowed, making a sideways parenthesis, the lines were straight.  I watched the woman in my peripheral as I went to 5 or 6 paintings and moved on.  The entire time, she stood standing in front of the white lines on white canvas, and I wondered, "What the hell could she be looking at, all this time."

So I asked her.

"Are you an artist? " I said.

"No," she said. "Are you?"

I told her I wasn't.  I know I just said I've embraced it, but then there I was in an actual art gallery, wondering what I was supposed to be doing, so I said I wasn't.  I told her I'm a writer, and one of my characters is a painter, so I was just wondering what it was artists look for when they're looking at a painting.

"I just look for the feeling I get when I'm looking it," she said.

It may be elementary—of course you look for the feeling it evokes—but it was eye-opening for me (are we allowed cliches in our blogs?).  I walked around the gallery and stopped looking at strokes and colors and technique, and just looked for the feeling.

And isn't this what we do with our writing?  Haven't we all started writing because at some point in our lives we decided we like the feeling we get when we encounter good writing, and have decided we want to evoke those feelings in others?  I read the Narnia series when I was young, and felt desperate to find a new, magical world.  I would search through cupboards and closets and whatever else, trying to find talking beasts.  I read Harry Potter later and felt jealous of them for getting to go to Hogwarts.  I read Life of Pi, and felt awed by Martel's ability to write an entire book length story, and then tell me in the end that the story wasn't at all what he said it was—the first time I actually thought about what the writer was doing, rather than just immersing myself in the story.  I read Mr. Pip and felt like crying, a feeling I don't have entirely too often.  I read The Road and felt like hugging my son, kissing him (and I felt like recycling).

And I've read countless books in between these, each of which gave me some sort of feeling, a feeling I don't get from anywhere else, the feeling I've taken part in someone else's creative process.  For what would a book be if it weren't ever read by someone other than its author?  Would we write and revise and strive to create this art, if we knew we were the only ones to read it?

I don't think I would.