Reaching for Artistry

While slogging my way through the muck

Greetings from the trenches. I’m late in posting this week, but it wasn’t because I procrastinated. I did write something. Last Wednesday, I sat down at my laptop and fell into some timeless zone, tapping out what I thought would be my biweekly missive. Friday, I edited it. It still needed a proper title, so I gave myself an extension and resolved to post Saturday morning. But when I revisited the piece for a final read-through and titling, I was astonished. How had I not realized how awful it was?

This has been my process lately, thinking what I’m writing is good, but then, on final read-through, finding it unworthy of being read by others.

There’s a well-circulated interview excerpt from Ira Glass I share with coaching clients when they’re feeling similarly dejected about the quality of their writing. I recently discovered that someone had set it to a short video:

In case the video doesn’t work for you or you can’t watch it at this moment (though it’s only about 2 min long), here’s my very abridged version:

“…All of us who do creative work…we have good taste. But…there’s a gap…for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t that good…But your taste…your taste is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment…It is only by going through a volume of work that you’re going to catch up and close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.”

The thing is, Glass is directing his advice to beginners. I’m not a novice. I published my first articles in the 1990s. I’ve been paid well for my writing. I’ve published articles, narratives, poems, and short stories I like and am proud of.

But this dislike for something I thought was good only a day before—I don’t know what to make of that. And it’s frustrating to put in hours on a piece and ultimately decide it isn’t good enough to share.

Look, I have no illusions. I am not a great writer. I don’t say that to put myself down, and certainly not to fish for compliments. It’s simply the truth. On a not so good day, I am a good enough writer. At my best—at least, so far—I am a good writer. I have yet to publish anything I consider great. Great is what I reach for, and that’s as it should be.

I have the requisite skills for writing: a solid command of grammar, a better-than-average vocabulary, and the ability to edit and proofread well. But these elements alone do not make great writing. Great writing has imagination. Great writing stirs people. Great writing has artistry.

Like Glass says, our killer taste can be discouraging when we measure ourselves against the writers we admire. You know who is a great writer, in my estimation? Patti Smith. (She has a wonderful Substack, by the way.)

I love Smith’s lyrical style and the aliveness of her dream world. She often meanders into a mythopoetic voice that reminds me of Rilke. In my Audible review of her memoir M Train (scroll down when you get there), I wrote, “In M Train, Smith lets the reader into her private inner world of dreams, thoughts, and imagination…Along the way, Smith repeatedly mourns the regularly occurring losses of objects--some inconsequential and others of deep personal significance--which serve as a lens for life's big losses….”

Allow me to illustrate with a few excerpts. Here, she talks about lost things:

Lost things. They claw through the membranes, attempting to summon our attention through an indecipherable mayday. Words tumble in helpless disorder. The dead speak. We have forgotten how to listen.

Getting lost:

If I got lost along the way I had a compass that I had found embedded in a pile of wet leaves I was kicking my way through. The compass was old and rusted but it still worked, connecting the earth and stars. It told me where I was standing and which way was west but not where I was going and nothing of my worth.

Longing for lost people and moments:

We want things we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment, sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother's voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don't go. Don't grow.

See what I mean? How does she DO that?

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My favorite musing about the power of writing to change the writer comes from Russell Banks’s novel, Cloudsplitter, an imagined history of radical abolitionist John Brown’s raid on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, as told by the book’s narrator, Brown’s son Owen:

Father believed that the universe was a gigantic clockworks, brilliantly lit. But it’s not. It’s an endless sea of darkness moving beneath a dark sky, between which, isolate bits of light, we constantly rise and fall. We pass between sea and sky with unaccountable, humiliating ease, as if there were no firmament between the firmaments, no above or below, here or there, now or then, with only the feeble conventions of language, our contrived principles, and our love of one another’s light to keep our own light from going out: abandon any one of them, and we dissolve in darkness like salt in water. For most of my life, surely since that day in October when I fled the field at Harpers Ferry, I have been a steadily diminishing light—until the day when I began to set down this long account, and my light flared up as it never had before. It has continued to burn brightly against the night ever since.

You can exhale now.

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In my own writing, I’m reaching for a level of artistry that requires I continually balance on tiptoe (which, as a short person, isn’t an unfamiliar place to be, in the literal sense, anyway). Then I leap through a portal into a mysterious mental space, like passing through the back of the wardrobe into Narnia. Except the wardrobe keeps moving, and I have to hunt for it every time. (Here is where you picture me calling out into the vast nothingness, “Oh poooooortal…where arrrrrre you?”)

The right prompt can get me there—say, beginning with a line from a Rilke poem. But most of the time, these states of mind are ephemeral, the words seemingly “out there” somewhere. They certainly don’t spill from my heart onto the page. Even when I can achieve that moment of heart-spilling artistry, I find I’m playing peek-a-boo with substance, like I did on Wednesday. I’m deceived by ideas masquerading as brilliant insights that, once written, turn out to be quite mundane. If nothing else, writing practice is an exercise in patience and humility.

Thank you for witnessing my process as I slog through the muck. I invite you to visit my Audible Listener Page, where you can read some of my audiobook reviews and see some other books that have inspired my praise.

(A shout-out to Canva for all the photos. I can only hope they were made by humans.)

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Do you ever feel like you’re wading through the writing muck?

Do you spend time on drafts that never see the light of another person’s eyes?