Diane Morrow

Every Craftsman by Rumi

Posted by Diane Morrow on June 12, 2007 in Healing Images, Healing Poetry, Writing Ideas

For the past week or so I’ve been looking for a poem that would speak somehow to revision—and I couldn’t quite find what I was looking for. And then I found this poem by Rumi. It’s not what I thought I was looking for—it does something slightly different. But at the same time it feels like the right next image for revision. For looking again. For looking at the big picture. And what was it again that I wanted to write? What did I hope would come of this? What can I do with the pages I’ve written? What do I hope will come of this? Not infrequently, I find that when people come up against a serious illness or a serious loss–or any kind of significant transition—they may find themselves, eventually, asking certain kinds of questions: And what is it that I’m here for? What is my piece? What is my gift? What do I want to leave behind? Rumi’s poem, Every Craftsman, speaks to these questions. Here are the first 17 lines: I’ve said before that every craftsman searches for what’s not there to practice his craft. A builder looks for the rotten hole where the roof caved in. A water-carrier picks the empty pot. A carpenter stops at the house with no door. Workers rush toward some hint of emptiness, which they then start to fill. Their hope, though, is for emptiness, so don’t think you must avoid it. It contains what you need! Dear soul, if you were not friends with the vast nothing inside, why would you always be casting your net into it, and waiting so patiently? Rumi’s poem is another way of asking: What is the one piece of writing that you, and only you, can write? What emptiness is waiting to be filled? Orhan Pamuk, a Turkish writer, said (among other things) in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “I write because I want others, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey.” What sort of life is it that you—and only you—can write about? What gap is waiting?...

Writing and Healing Idea #40: A Clean Copy

Posted by Diane Morrow on June 10, 2007 in Writing Ideas

In order to practice revision—looking again—it’s necessary, first, to have something to look at. And a good way, I think, to practice this, is to have something written down—some clean unmarked pages of writing. Thus, I propose, a first step to revision: a clean copy of at least 10 pages of writing. What kinds of pages? Anything. It can be pages from a journal. Pages you wrote in response to a writing idea. It can be a story. It can be pages of freewriting. Anything. Anything you feel like you’d like to look at again. Really. And if you don’t have any pages you want to look at again—–you can create some new pages. You can, if you like, begin by freewriting. If your pages are handwritten pages, it’s probably best to enter them into your computer and print them out. It’s easier, I think, to see words and sentences when they’re typed and have spaces between and around them. The goal is (at least) 10 freshly printed, unmarked pages of your own writing. And then find a folder for the pages and put them away for a while—for a week at...

Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story”: A Radical Revision

Posted by Diane Morrow on June 7, 2007 in Recommended Books, Revision

When I think about revision—when it comes to writing or healing—I tend to think about it in radical ways. I’m not thinking so much here about rereading a paper or a story and fixing a few grammar or spelling mistakes. Those kinds of surface changes are important in late stages of the writing process, but I tend to think of those kinds of changes as editing or proofreading. When I think about revision I think of something that goes beneath the surface—and nearer to the root. Looking again—and seeing something that one has never seen before. Looking again—and seeing where the gaps are—- Looking again—and changing the plot. The story that comes to mind when I think about this kind of radical revision is Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story,” in his incomparable collection, The Things They Carried. This is one of those stories better read in its entirety than described, but here is an excerpt to give some sense of it if you’ve not before come across it: In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. When a guy dies, like Curt Lemon, you look away and then back for a moment and then look away again. The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed. The story is, at one level, about the death of Curt Lemon. It’s a story about a soldier, home from the war, trying to tell, among other things, about the death of his friend, Curt Lemon. The story is told in fragments—pieces—and at the center is Curt Lemon stepping on a booby-trapped 105 round and the explosion blowing him up into a tree. Curt Lemon’s best friend, Rat Kiley, another soldier, goes mad with grief, after. He shoots at a baby water buffalo in his grief. Over and over. And then he writes Curt Lemon’s sister and he tells her that Curt Lemon was a tremendous human being, that he loved him, the guy was his best friend in the world, his soulmate. And the sister never writes back. The story continues. The speaker of the story is home from the war, he’s telling the story, it’s twenty years later, he’s still telling this story, and then he’s telling what it’s like to try and tell it—and that too is all part of the story: Now and then, when I tell this story, someone will come up afterward and say she liked it. It’s always a woman. Usually it’s an older woman of a kindly temperament and humane politics. She’ll explain that as a rule she hates war stories; she can’t understand why people want to wallow in all the blood and gore. But this one she liked. The poor baby buffalo, it made her sad. Sometimes, even, there are little tears. What I should...

Writing and Healing Idea #39: Changing the Plot

Posted by Diane Morrow on June 5, 2007 in Writing Ideas

This idea springs out of the previous post and from E.M. Forster’s distinction between story and plot. Story: The king dies and then the queen dies. Plot: The king dies, and then the queen dies of grief. You can begin by choosing five moments—from your life—from someone else’s life—or you can make them up. Or you can, if you like, write about the king and the queen. Draw the moments as plot points on a piece of paper. For instance: • THE KING DIES. • THE QUEEN DIES. Then, begin to play with connecting the points—and reconnecting them—in new ways. Write about the connections. Write different plots. Different ways that the dots get connected. If possible, make the plot mildly ludicrous, improbable—this itself a way of stretching the mind to imagine new possibilities. Write new points. Here, for instance, is one way—an alternative way—of connecting the two plot points about the king and the queen. • The king dies. • The queen dies, under mysterious circumstances. • The prince, their son, wants to believe his mother died of grief. (It’s so much harder to accept, sometimes, that death—it just happens—accidents and illness—mysteries—-) • The queen returns in her next life as a fish. • The prince meets this fish one day when he’s out on a boat and she jumps up out of the water next to his boat. • The fish speaks. • And she tells him—– What? What does she tell...

So What is Revision? And Why Might it Be Important to Writing and Healing?

Posted by Diane Morrow on June 3, 2007 in Revision

Here, by way of beginning, are 10 synonyms for the word revision, all found in my desktop thesaurus: Reconsideration Review Reexamination Reassessment Reevaluation Reappraisal Rethink Change Alteration Modification When I look at the list I see a pattern: Reconsideration Review Reexamination Reassessment Reevaluation Reappraisal Rethink Change Alteration Modification From looking again to reappraisal to rethinking—to transformation. This, I think, is what can come, ultimately, out of the process of revision: transformation–a literal change in form. And it has always seemed to me that going through this revision process in writing—and perhaps going through it over and over again—can point to what’s possible in healing. One can look again—at the body itself—at an illness—at a loss—at a particular moment from one’s life. One can see what one perhaps couldn’t see when one was smack in the middle of it. One can, perhaps, see the value of something in a new way. And then—-something can change—– The facts themselves may not change—they usually don’t. What changes, I think, is the way the facts get put together—and the meaning that gets attached to those facts. E.M. Forster, in his book, Aspects of the Novel, describes the difference between a story and a plot. A story: “The king died and then the queen died.” A plot: “The king died, and then the queen died of grief.” The facts don’t change in the second rendition. The king and queen still die. Those points—those events—remain unchanged. But the dots are now connected in a particular way. A particular meaning is attached. A theory. A hypothesis. (I mean no one but the queen really knows for sure, right? And she might not even know.) Maybe that’s one of the key things that changes when we practice revision, and maybe that’s what makes the practice of revision especially important to healing: we can reconsider the plot. And we can change...

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