Over break, I read Anne Lamott's Bird by Birds. I felt like I was coming late to a book that so many of my peers read as freshman in Writer's Style, but at least I was coming late to something good. Anne Lamott gave me permission to be myself, to write badly, and most of all, try to find my broccoli.
"You need your broccoli in order to write well," I read aloud to my sister, pretending to be disappointed (these "trees" aren't exactly my favorite vegetable). If I could become a better writer by acquiring a taste for food I can usually only eat raw, drenched in no less than half its weight in ranch dressing, I would do it in a second. But that isn't the broccoli Lamott is referring to.
Borrowing the word broccoli from an old joke she likes to tell her students, broccoli instead refers to intuition. But we have intuition trained out of us, she says, when we are still young. When children report the truth they see in the world, adults mock them, try to change their views, or lie to them. Is it any wonder that the little voice inside our head is ignored before we get terribly old?
Anne Lamott says we need to get that intuition--our broccoli--back. To turn off that rational voice that quenches our creativity and rejects what deep down, we believe is true. Save your inner editor for later, after you have a draft--it's better to write what comes to you, and worry about fixing it later.
I promptly tried to listen to my broccoli with my next two attempts at tackling projects, but my results were mixed. The first time I let come what came, I wound up with a rewrite of a story that was accompanied by enough practical back story to give me a good base as I continue to dive deeper into who my characters are and where they come from. The second time, I saw some painfully bad stuff coming, but let it come anyway to see where it would go. Maybe it was my time rush, but that draft--a brand new draft of a different story--went down a path I absolutely hated. There is almost nothing in it that I want to keep, so it feels rather wasted.
What happened? What was the difference? Do we as writers just need to give ourselves permission to do terrible work and then go for the risk? Is sifting through the good and bad that comes out of us a natural part of writing more relaxed?
I'm curious to see how much you let intuition and/or simple permission to write whatever comes affect your work. Do you listen to YOUR broccoli?
I always find it really difficult to sift through the bad to pick out the few pieces of good in my writing. I'm kind of an all or nothing sort of person, so trying to find those few little gems is a big challenge. Usually I find it easier just to completely write a new scene rather than massaging the old one. For these reasons, I struggle to just write (even stuff I know is bad) because I know I'll have issues fixing it in the future.
ReplyDeleteEmily, I just want to say that I enjoy your voice and your input with Capstone. You are a smart cookie and I like your words.
ReplyDeleteMoving on, Bird by Birds is a book that I have completely forgotten about until reading these blogs. Thanks for the connection! Good topic for today. Intuition is key in being confident in your direction of writing. I think I may have a mix of broccoli and spontaneity, which doesn't often combine well. But it takes some bad to get to the good!
I keep changing my ideas about intuition. Some days it seems like an easy way to write something brilliant, and other days I feel like it's just turning out garbage--I guess it's kind of a mixture of both, which makes it so hard to have a single opinion on the subject.
ReplyDeleteIn my own writing I've found some of my best pieces as being purely intuitive, but some of those are often the most revised and re-worked. But sometimes it's definitely worth going for, because you never know what you'll get.
Yes, a well-balanced meal needs its broccoli (or intuitive vegetable of your choice). But it also needs carbs. And meat. And why not a little dessert?
ReplyDeleteI think intuition is a good starting point. It's definitely necessary if you want to wander into the realm of good writing because more often than not (for me anyway) intuition leads me to the most natural characters. And of course, we all know that you need a heaping portion of revision. But sometimes we forget about that staple food (formerly the bread/rice/pasta portion on the old food pyramid): hard work, and lots of it. This is probably my biggest downfall. Even if I follow my intuition, even if I revise each scene as instructed, if I don't spend enough time with a piece of writing, it simply will not be as good as it could have been. Time, attention, and hard work when combined with intuition and revision are what makes for the best writing diet for me.
I was talking about this with Prof. McCann the other day. Not specifically about broccoli, but about the process of writing and how it comes about. I generally have to choose a subject very intentionally but after that, I generally let come what will come. I always have to read back through it several times, however, to see if what I wrote even sounds good. Or let it sit for a night and then read it the next morning.
ReplyDeleteIntuition is such a curious thing to me. Like what is it exactly? And how do we get it? I have a few friends who are super intuitive about all of life in general, and I love seeking to understand how they just "know" things sometimes. What a cool gift from God.
Yeah, sometimes I wish that I had my old "broccoli." It seems that whenever I approach a new project, I feel like I won't be able to be creative enough to come up with something good, especially when writing in a genre that I'm not comfortable with. Yet, somehow, something ends up coming out, and usually it's terrible.
ReplyDeleteI've found that I can't overthink my stories. I just have to start typing and, if this makes any sense, stop paying attention to what my fingers are typing. That'll happen sometimes. They'll just start going. I love getting in those funks because everything flows so well (though, usually, I'm interrupted and then can't get back into the funk).
But I really think we should allow ourselves to write terribly. I mean, not that we mean to, but if that's how the story's going to come out, then go for it. There's always time for edits.
Generally, i don't listen to my broccoli. i might listen to my cauliflower critical voice, which berates my intuition for the broccoli that it is. i think it's interesting that you connect this broccoli-cide to children, how their "unmannered" storytelling get lassooed and herded into what is conventional. i remember now that Leif Enger talked about how much it helped his writing to spend time with children.
ReplyDeleteWe writers lead strange lives at Northwestern. Part of why my writing gets malnourished of the broccoli is that i am so used to cramming the drafting and revising into a single space, which works so well for most of my academic pieces.
At this point, i'm bad at letting myself be bad. i'm glad you shared these thoughts by Lamott!
I really liked this book by Lamott; such awesome thoughts. I do wonder though, how effective it is to go back to intuition. There are some gems buried in it, I would hope, but more often than not, it ends up being annoyingly terrible.
ReplyDeleteAlthough, this can also be an encouragement, since I find that until I get all of the bad writing--the choppy diction and dumb dialogue--out of my system, I don't have a channel through which to send all the good ideas that are packed up in my brain somewhere.
And I rarely, if ever, enjoy my first drafts. I might be in love with an idea, but I generally hate my first (or second and third) interpretation of it. It might take time for us all to actually get back to our broccoli, the actual good stuff, and we root through brussel sprouts first, or something.
I feel like what you said kind of relates to the last post I just read, about allowing yourself to write terribly. It's so difficult! We have to suppress the perfectionist tendancies in us and just WRITE! I thought this line was interesting what you said: "When children report the truth they see in the world, adults mock them, try to change their views, or lie to them." I think that could be true in a lot of ways. A child might honestly say something about somebody in the grocery store, and their parents will shush them... Or the concept of death. Maybe parents could lie about that. But if we let things simple be, as they are, truthfully... Might it make a difference?
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