Lightning (the other kind)
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Lightning. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
Writing is never only descriptive. It’s synthetic—both in the sense of making something new, and in the sense of fusing together disparate pieces, pieces (of information or experience or emotion) with no innate relationship. I write because writing secures the meaning of what I’ve done and been and felt. It ties those things to my own understanding of my purpose and direction (which are properties I’ve also derived through writing, and which evolve as I do more of it). But that’s all an exercise in invention: It’s taking what happened on Tuesday and what happened on Wednesday and lashing them together by an act of intention. When we do this, Thursday is no longer an accident. It builds on the rest of the story.
You see how powerful that is? I had a conversation with an old friend this week about a story this person wanted to tell about their own life. It seemed to me that they were unsure about what audience the story should be for, about what they wanted to emphasize, about what they might change in the world by telling it. They were concerned that personal details would make the story too narrow to be interesting to other people, or that the story’s contradictions would strain their sympathy. My advice was to forget all that and just start up a daily habit of writing, with as little stricture as possible at first. If you make the container, I said, the contents will come—more than you can keep up with. You’ll find out what you’re fascinated by. When you can describe what that is and why it’s fascinating, you have a track into other people’s attention.
My feeling is that on Sunday I was in serious danger from lightning. I’d set out on a run that I now realize should have waited, given even the distant presence of thunder. In the sunny beginning I heard the roar of it so far away that I wondered if a supersonic aircraft was flying over the region. It seemed like the ominous gray clouds up on the northern horizon were on a track to somewhere else. But that wasn’t true at all. Forty minutes later, as I finally bypassed a phone touchscreen rendered useless by rain to call James for a rescue, I was hiding in the only shelter I could reach, the woods next to the road, and tears were running down my face. The last bolt had flashed without any pause at all before the cracking boom.
I don’t hide my disdain for the linguistic concentration of stupidity “Everything happens for a reason.” (Oh yeah? Explain the dead kids.) On the other hand, it’s interesting to think about how you’d tell the story of your life if the whole point of it were to build to where you are now. Which is actually the opposite impulse: It says that meaning is not pre-imposed on us but that we have absolute freedom in its construction. And I don’t mean a story for public consumption, by the way. This is not your campaign biography. I mean a story for you. Just humor me: If the whole point of all of this has been to get you to where you are now—what do you make of that?
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram.