Letting go of the parts of your writing that you no longer need.
I’ve just returned from a week in beautiful Croatia where I spent time floating in water so clear that I could watch the fish swimming below me.
In the mornings, the sea was turquoise and in the late afternoons it was inky-blue and spangled with silver. I could hang there in the water, watching the light change, feeling the edges of myself softening, becoming something simpler. I wondered, as I do every time I’m able to return to the sea – which feels so much more like my natural element than floundering about on land – at how simple life can be when I surrender to its natural rhythm, when I let go of all the important deadlines and to-do lists and worries and struggles and self-consciousness.
How lucky I was to be able to get away for a week this summer. But I also caught myself wondering why I only ever allow myself this simplicity for a few days at a time? Why does it take me until around day four of any holiday to really begin to relax? And how might I carry some of this experience – the ocean, the light, the sun on my face – back into my everyday life so that it can nourish me here, where it’s raining and I have two pressing deadlines?
Even as I write this to you, my words seem too shapeless and vague to hold the feeling of it all. It’s like trying to carry seawater in my cupped hands.
Clarice Lispector writes about this in her wonderful, contradictory work, A Hora da Estrela (The Hour of the Star), published in 1977, shortly before her death.
'I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort,' she writes, in the voice of her narrator, Rodrigo. Rodrigo tells us that he himself is a writer and, at the beginning of the novel, he’s struggling to find words to tell the story of Macabéa, a young girl living in a neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro, and all the many stories tangled within her story – of poverty, justice, truth.
Rodrigo writes:
‘I am scared of starting. I do not even know the girl’s name. It goes without saying that this story drives me to despair because it is too straightforward. What I propose to narrate sounds easy and within everyone’s grasp. But its elaboration is extremely difficult. I must render clear something that is almost obliterated and can scarcely be deciphered.’
Writing sounds easy and it is not.
We write anyway.
Living, at least for most of us, is rarely easy. It certainly doesn’t seem to have been for Clarice Lispector.
In this way, writing and living are intertwined.
“So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing,” writes Lispector, through Rodrigo.
Perhaps it’s like this for you too?
Right now, the world feels complex, difficult, hard to navigate. Writing is the best way I know to try to make sense of it, putting one word after another. When we find precisely the right word to cup our trembling feelings, there is a sense of calm, perhaps a small exhalation.
Writing invitation
My invitation to you is to allow yourself a moment, whenever you can, to seek simplicity, to slip into the water and float on your back for a while, or whatever might be your equivalent.
You could do this metaphorically or literally. You might go for a walk, if this is available to you, or just sit quietly for a while, with the natural rhythm of your breathing. You might remember a time from recent weeks or months when things felt, for even a brief moment, simpler or easier. You might imagine as if you could feel just a little bit easier right now.
As Mary Oliver, would say: ‘Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.’
Notice what happens.
The aim of this experiment is not to clear your mind of thoughts. The aim is simply to notice, with kindness and curiosity towards yourself, what happens when you begin to slow down, just for a moment.
And, as always, if this begins to feel in any way upsetting or discomforting and you feel that you need to stop, then please do stop. Don’t push through. Put writing aside for a while and go and do something else.
When you’re ready, ask yourself what in your writing you could let go of. What are the sentences, ideas, scenes, perhaps even characters, chapters, poems that you no longer need?
What can you allow to trickle away through your fingers?
What brings you the sensation of that long outbreath? Keep that part.
What makes your body tighten? Maybe you don't need that part anymore.
If you'd like fresh eyes on your writing and an attentive partner in your writing process, please do get in touch. I'd love to help you to discover the essence of your writing.
