Diane Morrow

What Audience Do You Imagine When You’re Writing?

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 20, 2007 in A Different Perspective

Peter Elbow, in his book, Writing With Power, makes a distinction between safe audiences and dangerous audiences. He proposes that we write more authentically when we’re writing for audiences that feel safe. He writes [p. 186]: First, a dangerous audience can inhibit not only the quantity of your words but also their quality. That is, if you are trying to talk to a dangerous audience, instead of finding yourself mixed up or tongue-tied or unable to think of anything to say [which, of course, can happen], you may find yourself chattering away nervously, unable to stop but also unable to say anything important. If, for example, I have to speak to a person or group that I find difficult, I might adopt a voice that hides my real voice and speak with, say, a tinny jolliness or an inauthentic pompousness. If, by contrast, I am with someone I trust, I may say less than usual but talk from my depths— I may say less than usual but talk from my depths. Maybe that’s how we begin to suspect we’re in the presence of a safe audience—when we find ourselves speaking from some depth. Maybe we only recognize a safe audience after the fact—when we realize what kind of writing or speech has become possible in its presence. Elbow also makes a distinction between an actual audience—a person or group we know will actually be reading what we write—and the imagined audience—that audience that we carry around inside our heads, the one we tend to assemble from all our past experiences of speaking and writing. Say it happens one morning—or perhaps it’s evening—say that we find ourselves writing something true—something that feels authentic. Say we write something that we didn’t even know that we knew, but then, after we write it, the words feel like they have this ring of truth. What has allowed those particular words to emerge? What does the audience for those words have to do with it? How much of it has to do with the outer audience? How much of it has to do with the inner audience? More questions here than answers—– What audience do you imagine when you’re writing? Does the inner assembled audience change with time? And what kinds of things cause it to change? And does this inner assembled audience have anything to do with...

A Bit of Writing Advice from John Steinbeck: What He Did to Keep from Going Nuts

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 18, 2007 in A Different Perspective

Just over forty years ago—on February 13 and 14 of 1962—John Steinbeck wrote some advice about writing to Robert Wallsten (a man who, it turns out, is one of the editors of Steinbeck’s letters). Steinbeck prefaced his advice on writing this way: Now let me give you the benefit of my experience in facing 400 pages of blank stock—the appalling stuff that must be filled. I know that no one really wants the benefit of anyone’s experience which is probably why it is so freely offered. But the following are some of the things I have had to do to keep from going nuts. One piece of his advice seems especially relevant here to this notion of perspective—the possibility of reframing our stories (and perhaps our bodies? our lives?) in a clearer and somewhat kinder light. That possibility of looking at our stories in new ways— Steinbeck writes: Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theatre, it doesn’t exist. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person—and write to that one. It’s sound advice, I think. It also leads quite naturally to a couple of questions: What does the nameless, faceless audience look like? What does your nameless, faceless audience look like? And say that you could address your writing to one particular person—any person in the world—alive or dead—real or imagined—who would you pick? [Note: I found the above quotes by Steinbeck in Pat Schneider’s Writing Alone and With Others, p....

Emily’s Story: Reframing Anorexia

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 15, 2007 in A Different Perspective

The thread this week (which, again, may or may not be apparent) is how looking at something in a different way can shift things. And perhaps one of the clearest instances I’ve seen of this shift happened with Emily, a young woman with anorexia who I’ve written about here before. She had severe anorexia, weighed only fifty-two pounds when I began seeing her. And she had, when I first began to see her, a definite point of view toward her body. She viewed her body as the problem—disgusting actually—a stance that only became accentuated after a meal. Her stomach would protrude a bit after a meal—and she would see and feel this protrusion as disgusting. The body was seen as the problem. The body, in her point of view, was disgusting. And the antidote? It began with horses. Or some part of the antidote began with horses. Horses helped her reframe the story of her own body. It started like this. Emily began to imagine a safe place where she could experience healing. She imagined herself at a barn among horses. Then, with time—and this was a surprise to me—something I didn’t foresee—she began to realize that it was easier to have a stomach when she imagined herself being around the horses. She felt freer among the horses. She felt free to eat a meal and have a small pouch of a stomach afterward. She didn’t feel so disgusted by her own stomach—so disgusted by her own body. And all of this had something to do with the fact that she felt the horses weren’t judging her. It had something to do with taking a respite, for a while, from human eyes. It wasn’t that all human eyes that looked at her body looked upon it with judgment—but some did—and some had in the past. She’d had some shaming experiences as a child and into her teen years. And, perhaps because of this history, it seemed, at least for the time being, all human eyes were suspect. All human eyes put her at risk. But the horses’ eyes. She felt safer with them. This went on for a while, imagining herself at the barn among the horses. And as she practiced imagining herself the way the horses saw her she began to imagine that her pouch of a stomach could be a kind of pregnancy. The pouch she’d once perceived as ugly and shameful began to transform when she began to see it from a new point of view. She didn’t think she was literally pregnant. It wasn’t delusional like that. It was subtler, and more in the imaginal realm. She told me that she could sometimes hold onto the thought that the pouch of her stomach was a pregnancy, and inside it she was carrying some new kind of life, and, sometimes, she told me, this made her feel something like hope. A pregnancy. New life. She was beginning to imagine her body as nurturing—as potentially good. And it was one of those moments—I can remember thinking this—it was a moment that had the potential to change things. If the body is potentially good, then maybe, just maybe, it would be okay to nourish that body, to feed it, to offer it sustenance. The moment, if truth be...

Writing and Healing Idea #23: What If the Moon’s a Balloon?

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 13, 2007 in Healing Poetry, Writing Ideas

There’s a poem by e.e.cummings—“who knows if the moon’s a balloon” It begins like this: who knows if the moon’s a balloon, coming out of a keen city in the sky– The poem can serve as a kind of springboard for making a list of questions that begin by asking: WHAT IF? For instance—— What if the moon’s a balloon? What if the balloon pops? What if the moon is a hot-air balloon and the Wizard of Oz gets into the balloon and floats away, and all of this before you can get into the balloon with him, and you have to find your way back home on your own? What if. . . what? Consider making your own list of questions. Write as fast as you can without thinking. Begin with a single question—with e.e. cumming’s question if you like—and then just keep going. Don’t worry about the questions making sense—or the questions being clever—or even interesting. Just write them. Try to write fast without thinking too much. When you have come to the end of something—a pause—look back over the questions you’ve written. Circle the ones that you like–or that surprise you in some way. Save the questions—especially the circled ones. Who knows? One of them could become the beginning to a poem—or to some other whole new...

What If?

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 11, 2007 in A Different Perspective

In his most recent book, Fabric of the Cosmos, Brian Greene, a physicist with a particular gift for translating physics into plain language, tells about a game he used to play with his father, walking through the streets of Manhattan. It’s a game that may have uniquely prepared him to be a physicist, a game that involves shifting perspective. It’s also, I think, a potentially wonderful game for a writer—or for someone who is interested in looking at something—anything—in a new way. It’s like playing “I Spy”, but with a twist. In this game Brian Greene or his father would spy an object on the street, describe it from an unusual perspective, and then the other one had to figure out what was being described. For example, this from Greene’s book: “‘I’m walking on a dark, cylindrical surface surrounded by low, textured walls, and an unruly bunch of thick white tendrils is descending from the sky.’” The answer? An ant walking on a hot dog while a street vendor is dressing it with sauerkraut. You can probably think of other examples. Here’s one: I am repeatedly diving into a hard invisible barrier while an enormous four-legged white creature chases after me and makes high-pitched sounds. (That’s a fly at the window while our dog—a whippet—tries to catch it.) Greene says this game did two things for him. It not only stretched his brain to consider different viewpoints. But it also led him to consider each of these viewpoints as potentially valid. Here’s another example: an ant resting on an ice-skater’s boot. To a spectator in the stands, it appears as if the ice skater, along with her boot, is spinning. But what about to the ant? And which point of view is more valid in regards to absolute space? This is the kind of question that can give me a bit of a headache. It’s also the kind of question—having to do with motion and relative motion and absolute space—that physicists wrestled with in the early part of the twentieth century. And the key to beginning to resolve this kind of question, according to Greene, had everything to do with being able to ask a new question: what if? What if the way we’re looking at things now is not the only way to look? What if we look at things from a different perspective? And what if this new perspective is potentially valid? I’d never thought about it in quite this way before, but this, Greene says, is what Einstein did. Einstein asked, What if? And he came up, among other things, with the special theory of relativity, which says, according to Greene, that space and time are “in the eyes of the beholder.” Einstein didn’t so much answer the pressing physical questions of his time, Greene says. He reframed them. And Greene describes reframing like this. p. 39: Some discoveries provide answers to questions. Other discoveries are so deep that they cast questions in a whole new light, showing that previous mysteries were misperceived through lack of knowledge. You could spend a lifetime—in antiquity, some did—wondering what happens when you reach earth’s edge, or trying to figure out who or what lives on the earth’s underbelly. But when you learn that the earth is round, you see...

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