In the Beginning
A few thoughts on creativity as I prepare to re-enter the classroom.
As I gear up to return to teaching for a few months, filling in for a maternity leave (the teacher going on leave my former student at this same arts magnet school), my head has been abuzz with the things I like to work on with students who want to learn how to do what we call “creative writing.”
One of the first things I will invite them to think about is the fundamental nature of what they are doing—the reasons why so many of us desire to write poetry, fiction, films, creative nonfiction….
I remember struggling with this mightily in graduate school and coming to the epiphany that at some point in the course of human history, one of us made the remarkable leap of looking to something out there in the world and making a sound that correlated with that thing, a deer, a sheep, a mountain, the sky, the sun…. At some point in time, someone made that powerful, playful, creative gesture which took humankind far beyond the rest of the animal kingdom. Or perhaps it began with etching into a cave wall a rough approximation of something seen in the lived world, an antelope, a prominent feature of the landscape, a memory of a hunt…. Whichever it was, the human mind had begun a remarkable journey, one that makes what I am currently doing possible.
I like to remind students that creative writers return to that initial, critical moment in human history whenever they write, exercising the thing that most distinguishes us as human beings—the ability to express ourselves complexly through abstraction, through metaphor, with mere noises that well up from the backs of our throats, simple markings that emerge on the flat white of the page like so many prehistoric etchings. Creative writers work to tap deeply into the thing that is most central to our species—our ability to use language (including the languages of sound and shape and color and line) to express ourselves.
Ezra Pound famously urged young poets to “make it new,” and by saying this, I think he was giving a nod to those long-ago ancestors who first made their utterly new utterances or dug with pointed implements into cave walls or banged on hollowed out logs in a rhythm they felt welling up inside and needed to urge outward into the thick, prehistoric air.
Now, so much of our communication, so many of our expressions, are mere echoes of former utterances. So much dialogue in movies and television shows is regurgitated from other scenes in other shows, so many plots mere shadows and echoes of other stories. Much of what we say in our day to day lives is couched in parroted expressions, borrowed phrases. Snapchat and Instagram and texting especially often reduce our written language to cryptic codes, three letter stand-ins for true, complex human expressions, brb, lol… wtf…
It’s as critical now as it ever was for artists to reclaim language, to use it in new ways, to remind us of the place it deserves as such a critical dynamic in our evolutionary development.
I want to give young writers a sense that language is the human tool that has always done remarkable things—something we invented and can still continue to invent and reinvent. It is still possible to push and bend and mold it in new and powerful ways to help unearth meaning, deeper understanding.
Creative language, play, invention.. hold a place of the highest esteem. Just as that first artistic, expressive, daring leap propelled humanity forward, language artists (all artists) continue in the spirit of those earliest of humans, who were necessarily artists.
I’ll invite the young writers to also consider the inherent, inescapable metaphorical essence of so many common words and expressions we use daily—the leg of a table, the face of a clock, the arm of a chair, the head of a company…. Human expression has and will always be couched in and is reliant on fundamentally artistic (metaphoric, analogical) expression. I’ll remind them, too, of how essential story, narrative, imagery were before the rise of the sciences, when thunder was a great being pounding a hammer in the heavens and what we now call Michigan the shape of the hand of a great spirit who stopped the spinning sphere of the earth allowing human life to thrive.
If you’ve been enjoying my writing, please consider doing any/all of the following:
Help me grow my audience by Sharing this post or my main site with a few people you think might enjoy it as well.
Upgrade your subscription to paid. For only $.14/day, you can help me continue to devote the many hours I do each week to writing, editing and promoting this page.
JourneyCasts is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
You can also help a lot by making a one-time contribution at any time by “buying me a coffee” (or two). And certainly a good amount of real coffee has gone into the making of JourneyCasts.
As always, I encourage you to leave a comment.
Be sure to check out my podcast, “Hemingway, Word for Word.”
Your students will be lucky to have you Arnie. Always wise thoughtful words on the craft of writing.
Give ECA my love!