‘The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.’ Mary Oliver
Years ago, in a novel writing class conducted within one of the half-renovated rooms of the then Council for Adult Education in Degraves Street, Melbourne, our teacher, the late Olga Lorenzo asked, ‘What would you have people write on your gravestone? She kept a tidy house, or she wrote a good book?’ We were all in agreement, ten women – the two men less so. The alternative did not fit their expectations – the book came first.
Mary Oliver’s words resonate here: those sad souls, the ones who neglected their creative urges, whether through fear or necessity, are now filled with regret. How many of the gazillion souls floating above the universe were unable to give expression to the creative urges that first arose in childhood with mudpie making, cubby house construction, or chalk scribbles on concrete, only to find they could not sustain their imaginations throughout the rigours of daily life?
Some tried to turn to it in their twilight years when the burdens of family and work had shifted, but all too late. Their joints were rusty, their thought patterns sluggish and the whimsy of childhood was over. How much can we ascribe these failures to address our creative energies throughout our lives to the critic within?
Patricia Hampl tells the story of travelling in a crowded bus when she heard a woman’s voice spill over the crowd: ‘I could tell you stories.’ She was filled with the urgency of wanting to let others know about a world unknown to them.
In Hampl’s mind, however admirable the oral tradition, the sharing of stories by word of mouth, is different from putting words on the page. The impulse to write has a distinct energy. It requires different parts of our brain, the opposite to that part we use to form judgments. Which is why when we write, we must not listen to the critical voice which tells us repeatedly: This is crap. This is boring. And asks questions. Who would want to read this?
Then insists, There’s nothing new here. It’s already been said. It’s too wordy. Too vacuous, too full of fluff.
The writer might stop in their tracks, then. Or decide not to begin in the first place.
When I settled down to write this morning I had no idea where it might take me. It is one of those days when I’m under pressure. To prepare for a family birthday breakfast. To tidy my kitchen. Forgive me, Olga Lorenzo, whose gravestone most clearly does not include the words: she kept a tidy house, and she certainly wrote more than one good book.
Olga, my dear writing teacher of many years ago had a habit when she took us for lessons on how to deal with dialogue, how to workshop writing, how to get to the heart of a story. She described arguing with her husband as they walked along the sand on the beach near her home. She piled on detail after detail: the bad sex, the uneven parenting and housework, the money worries, the usual stress of many a mid-ranking couple in Melbourne, Australia during the early 1990s, when one of our class members piped up:
‘Too much information, Olga.’
We tittered, but Olga was undeterred. Just as I remain convinced the information and detail of our daily lives, as prosaic as it might seem to some, is the stuff of the stories we tell.
So the writer’s voice can turn the repetitive and daily dross of life into something wondrous. The lambchopdom, as the writer Gillian Mears once described her life when constrained by home and family, is still the background to our lives, whether in a grass hut, a tree top shanty or a palatial palace. The ‘little boxes’ of Pete Seeger’s suburban landscape, ‘all made out of ticky tacky’ and all looking just the same, comprise a million variations in the unique interior housed by the many different people who go through the front door each night and leave in the morning.
The uniqueness of the individual, of their internal worlds, of their thoughts and feelings, the experiences that make them tick. The stereotypical shells they occupy, whether white skinned or black, bodies whose shape and function fits the ideal or is misshapen, too big or too small, too acne scarred or with perfect alabaster skin that can only crease over time. All these elements comprise the outer skin that encases the inner workings of each one of us.
The writer’s task is to get to the heart of story, which I have failed to do here, on my soap box of memory and understanding, but I shall now tell you the story of a small boy who sat with me the other day and looked upwards towards the soon-to-be night sky.
‘Look at the moon,’ he said, and above I saw a sliver of white.
The boy reached up his hand. ‘I want to catch the moon,’ he said his arm flailing. ‘Why can’t I get it?’ He swiped again and again.
‘It’s too far away,’ I said, as if this explanation alone might suffice.
Still the boy was determined to drag down the moon. He whipped a curved soup ladle from the contents of his child size kitchen and swung upwards.
‘Even if it crashes down and smashes us to smithereens?’ I asked.
In this place of imagination and unreality lies the source of our creativity.
The boy did not stop trying until his mother called him inside for dinner and bed. Still resolute, one day he’d catch the moon.
