ManicDDaily

Love Your Elephant!

Readers of this blog may not realize it but I love Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman, Dostoyevsky, the plays and poetry of Shakespeare (who doesn’t?), Rilke, Wallace Stevens, John Donne, Sharon Olds.

But what comes out half the time when I sit down to write this blog is…Robert Pattinson….

And when I write my non-blog work (aside from legal memos and poems), I often end up with children’s novels about talking dogs, teen novels about oversized noses, young adult fantasies about Royal beauty and magical gifts.  (Yes, I’ve written grown-up types of things too, but the number of pages devoted to the talking dogs and magical gifts is undoubtedly higher.)

I love Goya, Velasquez.  Matisse and Giotto.  Fra Angelico, Francesco Clemente, Kandinsky, Anselm Kiefer, Alfred Jensen;  I have a great deal of respect for Tintoretto. (The Scuolo di San Rocco is not exactly my style but absolutely amazing.)

But what (more than half the time) comes out when I put my own pencil to the page?  Elephants.

The curves of trunk, humped back, toe nails, seem to just form.  I long ago stopped fighting against it.

I’m not saying that it’s not good to rail against one’s natural tendencies;  to stretch one’s self.  But it also can be both skillful and liberating to just accept where your energies take you; especially if you are suffering, or have a tendency to suffer, from writer’s or artist’s blocks.

I would be the first to admit that it can be very embarrassing to hieroglyph in pachyderm.  If you have any pretense of sophistication, you may hate that all your cuneiforms are cutieforms.

You may feel disdainful of your talking dog.  (His name is Seemore by the way; as in see—more, since he’s so very observant.  He has taught himself to read and is an amazing speller.)

You may give up re-writing your novel about the beautiful princesses with magical gifts, not because it’s derivative (it really isn’t), but because it’s feels just sort of… silly.

Don’t.  At least don’t give up on these things because of embarrassment.

If your voice or vision tends towards another direction—science fiction, prose poetry–camels!—check it out!    (I don’t mean here to try a lot of different things—I mean if you happen not to be interested in children’s book or elephants, but in something equally unhip—check it out!)

What you are ultimately looking for is authenticity, a channel for energy, a bunson burner to create energy (which really is difficult to sustain if you are not genuinely caught by your material. )  Don’t be put off if what is authentic to you takes an odd, or unexpected, form.  The fact is that your own voice is by its nature somewhat unique (and, if you are anything like me, it may also be kind of odd.)

For more on writer’s block, check out the category from the ManicDDaily home page, and for more on elephants, check out 1 Mississippi by Karin Gustafson on Amazon.