Admit to your obsessions
Dorothy Lehane, 20th November 2024
Why do we write?
I’ve been thinking a fair bit about why we write, the purpose and function of the activity. Ask yourself why you write and what your passions are? What are your obsessions? Sometimes it is to do with capturing something of the fleetingness of the everyday, locking the ephemeral and embodied experience of being into words. Sometimes we write to be free of the burden of our feelings and there is a therapeutic function of rendering ideas into consciousness with clarity - ultimately, a type of cathartic purging.
We are all unique products of our unique life stories, our minds a vast network of information and experiences in process. Creative people are compelled to take notice of everything, we want to obtain knowledge. We want to know why that the shoe was left on the side of the motorway, how a full bag of chips ended up in the gutter. What events led to these discarded objects? I try to leave myself open to the distractions and preoccupations, to the twists and tangents of the myriad stories that surround us, so my writing has a sense of that chaos rather than sounding forced, composed, and artificial.
My main piece of advice to writers is to admit to your passions, in fact, lean into them.
Admit to your passions
I love these two quotes:
In Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg suggests your writing is going to go there anyway whether you like it or not. So, as Goldberg suggests, "you might as well give in to them." Your obsessions are a power to be harnessed and that is where the energy in your writing will lie.
E.B. White: a writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. I feel no obligation to deal with politics. I do feel a responsibility to society because of going into print: a writer has the duty to be good, not lousy; true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down. Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life; they inform and shape life.”
1
Admit to your obsessions: If you read my work, you would hear scientific themes occurring, specifically about medical languages. But you will often also encounter my own experiences, personal elements that are highly coded and multi-interpretational. For me, this experiment in assemblage and collage wasn’t necessarily about authenticity, clarity or cohesion, it was about the new resonances the information bought to the page, even if this might mean that the meaning is abandoned. I find it intensely valuable and productive to repurpose information from another discourse and mix it with the lyricism and emotional undertow of poetry. I loved working with those shifting juddering registers crashing against each other.
2
As we know from Judith Butler, identity is fluid, rather than fixed and stable. And so much of our behaviour is a performance of our identity. It is important to name it, to own it and feel it. No matter what your craft, my first tip would be to call yourself the profession you want to be. If you write, you are a writer. If you like to draw or paint, you are an artist. If you take photographs, you are a photographer. Your chosen creative pursuit will catch up with the grand label.
3
A lot of writing happens when we are not writing, because thinking is essentially a gestational form of writing.
4
It is important to get out there, to engage with the world. Henry Miller suggested making occasional visits to museums and galleries to write and sketch in cafes, on trains and streets. Doing so will change your output and usher in a range of fresh material that otherwise would not have emerged.
Get out in the world
Let the environment dictate, to a degree, what emerges.
As our experiential journey in the world progresses, our reasons for writing change because fundamentally we are changed. Our interests (reading and otherwise) develop, what we find most fascinating at any one point in our lives, is subject to consistent renewal.
Dorothy
Copyright © 2024, Dorothy Lehane.