The Power of Story

I saw the film "The Central Park Five" over the weekend, compliments of the Saratoga Film Forum, a grant-supported, volunteer-driven organization in Saratoga Springs, NY, that brings one of more independent new releases, classics, foreign and/or documentary films for an affordable screening to the small town every week. This film was part of a public interest series that the forum has initiated, in which members of the public are treated to a panel discussion by local experts on a particular issue following the screening of a film.

I didn't stay for the panel discussion, but I did find the film to be riveting. Directed by Ken Burns, the film documents how detectives in the New York Police Department more or less coerced a false confession out of five teenaged boys in 1989 of raping the woman who has come to be known as the Central Park jogger. (The five are pictured above in a 2012 photo taken by Michael Nagle for The New York Times. A link to a story about the lingering effects of the case and the film is here:
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/11/19/justice-and-the-central-park-jogger-case)

Watching the film sent a series of flashback memories racing through my head. I was a staff writer for The Seattle Times in 1989, and remember feeling a little queasy about how the press coverage of the New York dailies I had so deeply admired unfolded. The police said the boys were guilty and so the press quoted the police, without further ado. That was standard journalistic practice. I was quite young then, as a journalist, a writer, and a person. So I accepted what the New York daily writers did as standard practice. But it didn't feel quite like the story.

I also was reading the novel Eva Luna by Isabel Allende around that time. The basic story line involves a girl who grows up to become a mystical, magical realist storyteller who, living in a police state, uses magical realism to create stories about the truth that contest the truth being delivered by a heavily censored press. While it was never explicitly stated, the novel's narration implied that most of the public -- without actually admitting it -- knew how to separate fact from fiction. I sort of thought, maybe naively believed, that most American readers could make the same distinctions when they read the decisively certain truths being presented about the alleged Central Park jogger's rapists in the oddly inconsistent reports from the boys, if nothing else.

Other memories conjoined in my head, savoring the benefit of historical hindsight: Spike Lee's film "Do the Right Thing" was released in 1989, and many mainstream movie theatres were afraid to screen it, out of a fear that a fictional story that seemed so potentially jarringly real would generate race riots. An African American liberal was running for mayor of Seattle, as was an African American liberal in New York City. Yet, African Americans were seen popularly as whiners responsible for their own lower socioeconomic status in life, or as fitting the widely circulated Reaganesque prototype of the welfare queen.

Later that year, both Norman Rice and David Dinkins were elected the first African American mayors of their respective cities. And, in Seattle, a white-dominant coalition of parents managed to get a referendum on ballots that kept the inner-city -- well, not racially divided because Seattle is remarkably interracial but racially un-mingled at the basic elementary and secondary educational sense. Just another year later, an amateur videomaker captured footage of Rodney King being beaten by Los Angeles police. A year after that, riots erupted across the country after a white-dominant jury held that the police acted in an acceptable manner. And, one year after that, scores of minority youth cheered O.J. Simpson as he eluded police following his alleged involvement in the death of his estranged wife.

Most of these stories are true, even if they seem to be the stuff of fiction. Allowing them to come into a conversation with each other in my own head reminded me of the value of writing and storytelling. The tales that are not going to be told by the mainstream will not ever be told -- unless we tell them ourselves. 

The boys all spent time in their late teens and twenties in maximum security prisons. In 2001, the "real rapist" confessed. Public pressure mounted, and the convictions were vacated, restoring to the boys who were now men a sense of personal integrity but not the years of life they had lost. A civil suit against the City of New York remains unresolved.

"It could happen here," muttered my husband, as we left the theatre.

Of course, it could. If there's anything, however, that might forestall that possibility, it might be the power of story.

Where I began

One premise that I hold about blogging relates to the term from which Blog is derived, Web-log. A log implies a journal that should contain serial entries, delivered over time.

I promise to stick to the "rule" in future contributions. But now that I've finally gotten over Stage Fright, I'm going to plunge in with a first post.

I spent Saturday reading Floor Sample, a book that self-help writer and artistic recovery specialist Julia Cameron describes as her creative memoir. I have been following Cameron's prescription for writing Morning Pages -- three pages of longhand each day, penned ideally in the morning, first thing in the morning -- since 1998 off and on, and pretty much always on (though I do miss a day here and there) since that fateful moment in 2002 when I threw all previously hard-wired caution to the winds and decided to start calling myself a writer. Over the years, I have gone through the writing and other creative activities in many of Cameron's books: The Artist's Way, Walking in This World, The Right to Write, The Sound of Paper, and The Vein of Gold, among them.  I have adapted some of her activities for my own students who have enrolled in classes ranging from Educational Planning Workshops to Introduction to Political Science. Recently, I became aware of an online program 750words.com that is modeled after the daily Morning Pages concept. I also have been aware of the disdain that Cameron attracts from many people, some of them successfully published writers in their own right: New Agey, flaky, a waste of time, not about art at all are a few snide critiques that I've heard, with one person asserting that Julia Cameron -- like supposedly Nancy Drew series creator Carolyn Keene and cookbook author Betty Crocker -- wasn't a real person at all.

 

I had been interested in reading Cameron's memoir for all of these reasons, including the intriguing possibility that this author and developer of so much empowering and practical writing advice might not be a "real person" at all.

 

Two Empire State College students enrolled in January 2013 in independent studies on memoir writing with me. This created an opportunity to blend work with pleasure, and to satisfy my own curiosities. I assigned them both Floor Sample among other texts.

 

One of the students -- unfamiliar with Cameron's processes -- called the text heavy slogging. The other one has found Morning Pages to be a healing and enjoyable process but has had little to say so far about Cameron's memoir. I found that the text was a relatively fast read because it incorporated much of the personal story that is loaded into the text of the other books. But I found that it also offered some understanding about how she created her methods of morning pages, daily walks (which other authors of writing books such as Brenda Ueland also advocate), and weekly artist's dates. I was surprised to discover that she treats her own Morning Pages as more than just stream-of-consciousness writing but sees a three-pages-a-day regime as a way to produce 90 pages in a month, a full draft of a screenplay in six week, and me, doing my own math, a 240-page draft of a book manuscript in less than three months.

 

The method behind the process is a practice that Cameron describes as "listening." The book you want to write, the film you want to create, the sculpture you imagine: All these are already made. The task is to let a "something" -- sometimes, she calls it God, sometimes The Great Creator, and sometimes the "something" -- create it through you.

 

Cameron is a recovering alcoholic, and models her methods after the Twelve Step recovery approach created by Alcoholics Anonymous. She asserts that letting go of her addiction to alcohol made the listening easier. As I read the text, I started to think about how "listening" seems somehow to equate to the moments when Stage Fright disappears and prose begins to flow. It's sort of a blend of the Knowledge of Brain plus Knowledge of Heart that I alluded to in my Stage Fright post.

 

On a personal note, I quit drinking alcoholic beverages in mid-December 2012. Reading about Cameron's issues with alcoholism as well as other recovery stories causes me to think that I wasn't in a perilous state. However, I did feel that my enjoyment of wine and other libations was taking over my life, and that the clarity that might accompany non-drinking would help me write more and help me write better.

 

I felt the clarity almost immediately. But I didn't feel the more and the better. In fact, I didn't think I had been writing at all. But then ...

 

Reflecting on Floor Sample prompted a projects inventory. In the three months that have elapsed between mid-December 2012 and the writing of this post, I have completed the following:

1) A book review

2) A book chapter for an edited compilation

3) A detailed eight-page single-spaced response to a book publisher on proposed manuscript revisions

4) An internal report on a matter of college business

5) Four lengthy contributions to a second blog that I maintain entitled Moving Your Body

6) Three conference proposals

7) A detailed layout for a two-hour workshop that I co-presented with a colleague on March 15 on "The Poetics of Sustainability".

 

Looking back, I think I had envisioned "life after alcohol" as a sort of mythic 48-hour day that would let me write and write and write for 24 hours and carry out my business-as-usual for the remainder of that expanded day. Reality: The day didn't get any longer and I didn't write any more than I usually wrote over three months. But I did bring more projects to completion. And the writing did seem to receive external recognition for its quality, suggesting that perhaps it indeed was "better": The book review was promptly accepted for publication; the book chapter, which was conceptual, came back from the editors as strong and with some very helpful suggestions for revision; the book publisher praised the eight-page response as thorough, detailed, and a sign of my ability to produce what was required; the internal report was praised for its quality; all three conference proposals have been accepted; and the workshop was met with success and a possibility for a new, creative work.

 

Morning pages, of late, have stretched beyond three pages of longhand, in four, five, sometimes six pages. Looking at the accumulation of 8-1/2 x 11, college-ruled notebooks, I see the next challenge that faces me is to transfer the longhand to computer files. The issue of morning pages being longhand and "stream-of-consciousness" (meaning that writing about your cat's cute antics is as acceptable as work on that essay that was supposed to be done, oh, say, two weeks ago) is one reason why some writers deride morning pages as "a waste of time." The argument is a good one: If your day only has 45 minutes available for writing, why in an age of computers waste it on time with a notebook and pen?

 

I believe that the value of morning pages lies in listening. The pages offer a chance to do a first draft that is not even really that. It's a pre-draft, or what Kwok Pui-lan (a professor of theology and veteran blogger and book author) calls the "zero draft." It's the "before" of formality, the opportunity to put the knowledge of the heart into words that the knowledge of the brain can understand and integrate with the words that come from research and study.  It's one of the ways, perhaps, to lessen the stage fright before the performance.

 

I titled this post "Where I began." A bit of history might help: I practice tai chi ch'uan, as well as yoga and many sports including running, bicycling, swimming, and walking. I was fairly active with a tai chi group in Honolulu from 1995-2001, and met up with a member of that group one evening for a banquet in 1998. He asked me how I was doing. I responded that I was working so hard that I did not have any time to think, and that that was okay because I enjoyed the hard work. He looked at me long and hard and said, "Three pages, longhand, every morning." I said, "You're crazy."

 

The next morning, I woke up. I did my tai chi warm-up, and thought, "Three pages, longhand. That's crazy." I then picked up a notebook and began to write.

 

Three pages later, it felt a little less crazy.

 

Fifteen years later, it doesn't feel crazy at all. 

 

Stage Fright

 

Hello everyone,

 

Beginning this blog has proven to be rather daunting because I have been struck with a sense of -- no, I won't call it Writer's Block; rather, it's Stage Fright. I am a professional writer. By this I mean that editors of newspapers, magazines, book anthologies, newsletters, encyclopedias, and other printed and online sources have paid me to write for them. By this I also mean that I have been employed in the past by publications under the job title of "Staff Writer." And by this I also mean that I teach and coach students in colleges and high schools to learn how to be better writers.

 

I have been doing this work for awhile now: writing as a staff writer and/or freelancer since 1984, teaching since 2001. One would think the jitters would have long been past. On the contrary, they're as alive as ever.

 

I decided to create a blog on Writing and Storytelling for fun and for practical purposes. I wanted to play with blogging, a craft that I've dabbled with before but not really practiced reliably. I also wanted to put my writing "out there" into the world in a more structured fashion, partly (truth, be told) for self-promotional purposes. I just signed a contract with a book publisher for a manuscript and I want to start building an audience for that hopefully soon-to-come book. And, finally, I wanted to create a space where I could communicate with students who take my classes as well as some others about the art and practice of writing.

 

Good intentions led me to Blogger, an attractive layout and page links. And then to Stage Fright.

 

Perhaps like every other writer, I wonder on a daily basis whether I really am a writer, if I can lay claim to the title. In the journalism program I attended as an undergraduate, I was told that we were reporters, not writers, that to call one's self a writer was to be self-flattering and pompous. That reputation was reinforced in courses and workshops on fiction writing that I subsequently took, where it was declared that "writers were not normal people" and that only a few, a chosen few, had the "God-given gift of being writers."

 

So, not wanting to appear pompous, I called myself a reporter, though later I got a bit daring and began to self-identify as a journalist. By this point, I already had decided I was not entirely normal, but I still did not think I possessed any special God-given gifts. (The fact that I was raised as a Hindu and held an appreciation for a notion of God as being one and all, simultaneously didn't particularly lessen my image of God as genie and giver of gifts to just a few.)

 

Finally, writing Ph.D. comprehensive exams in 2002, one month before my fortieth birthday, it dawned on me that I had just spent a week creating 140 double-spaced pages of prose based on a blend of what I had learned in studying and what I felt in my heart. Knowledge + Knowledge, I suddenly realized, equaled something I had always yearned to do: Create Writing in the form of books, essays, and poetry. (I would add blogs to the list, but they hadn't quite emerged as an art form in their own right in 2002.)

 

I almost abandoned my Ph.D. program in Political Science to pursue a master's of fine arts in Creative Writing. The only thing that stopped me was that I already had a Master's Degree, one of those pre-requisites for a Ph.D., and I really wanted to do the dissertation that I thought would become my first book. (That dissertation is going to be my first book.) But, from that moment on, I forgot about God-given gifting processes and the pomposity embodied in calling one's self a writer, and adopted the title for myself. Old conditioning dies hard, however. Thus, the idea that I can put myself out there as a Writer who might be able to help others become Writers generates stage-fright.

 

Stage-fright -- like Writer's Block -- is a symptom, however, of growth and creative breakthrough, if one allows one's self to believe that it is. And so, my first post, is perhaps an invitation to anyone and everyone who might read this blog to take this message as my first insight into the writing process. Like singing in the shower and dancing like no one is watching, writing is first and foremost process. It's a process available to anyone who wishes to pursue it, and I happen to think it's a healthy and happy way to connect with one's inner self and find a way to walk in this world.

 

I welcome you all to join the journey, to comment and critique the blog, and to use whatever I share for your own learning and growth. 

 

And stay tuned for more.

 

Himanee