I say, “writing saved my life, so I teach writing as if it might save yours.”
This means I teach writing as more than writing. More than a way to publish, earn respect, make money, etc. I do those things with my own writing, and you strive for that, too, what I teach will surely be valuable to you on that path. But I teach writing as more than these “outcomes.” I teach writing as a way of living. A richer, more electric way of living, one that can bring your pages to life, while also bringing you to life, or back to life.
Above all, if you want to write, you have to see—and not only (if at all) with your eyes.
Helen Keller understood this and expressed it unabashedly:
I have walked with people whose eyes are full of light, but who see nothing in wood, sea, or sky, nothing in city streets, nothing in books. What a witless masquerade is this seeing! It were better far to sail forever in the night of blindness, with sense and feeling and mind, than to be thus content with the mere act of seeing. They have the sunset, the morning skies, the purple of distant hills, yet their souls voyage through this enchanted world with a barren state.
In my advanced fiction class at Moose Lake prison, we’re focusing the entire semester on how to write scenes. The English word scene comes from the Latin word scaenicus, which means “dramatic, theatrical,” and from the Greek word skenikos, from skene, “wooden stage for actors.”
In a scene acted out on a stage or screen, character(s) move through time and space—and we watch them. In a written scene on a page, it is exactly the same: character(s) move through time and space and we watch them.
Which is to say, we see them.
Whether we read with our physical eyes or with our hands, using Braille, we “see” scenes on the page thanks to a specific part of our brain known as the visual cortex. In fact, the brain is more important in the function of sight than our physical eyes are—and in the case of “seeing” what we read, the brain plays an even more crucial role, because the visual cortex activates the “inner eye,” or the eye of imagination.1
It’s by using our inner eye, this eye of imagination, that we construct the images conveyed on the printed page.
There’s a catch though: the inner eye is not magic. It can’t and won’t construct images from thin air—or, at least, not the intended images, not the images that lead to the meaning conveyed on a page. Not the images that matter by making us feel something and care. For that to happen, the writer must be detailed and specific, must provide the precise, concrete specific visual and sensory clues to make it possible for the inner eye to make a picture.
And for that to happen, the writer herself must in fact see clearly—see, as Helen Keller states, “with sense and feeling in the mind.” This, Keller assures us—and she holds more expertise on this than I ever could—can be fully accessed even while sailing “forever in the night of blindness.”
If what Keller says is true, and I thoroughly believe it is, than “sense and feeling in the mind” can also be fully accessed while confined to bed or couch in a state of chronic illness or disability, as is the case with a good many writers who’ve reached out to me at various times asking how they might approach certain Writing in the Dark exercises without ready access to the outside world.
My answer to those writers has included (among other strategies) an invitation to employ the body of memory and the body of imagination. This is simply another way of describing Keller’s “sense and feeling in our mind” or the so-called inner eye, eye of imagination.
The most important thing here is how Keller implores us to fully engage the inner eye even if we are physically sighted, otherwise we risk seeing '“nothing in wood, sea, or sky, nothing in city streets, nothing in books.” She implores us not to sleepwalk through the world, seeing without seeing, “voyaging through this enchanted world with a barren state.”
The same is possible on the page—that is, we are fully possible and indeed prone to voyaging through an enchanted language with a barren state. We can easily create long passages of “sensory description” wholly devoid of life, because the images are devoid of truth—fabricated or recited solely with words, without the aid of the inner eye.
Such fabricated images are not real, can never be real, and are incapable of becoming real for readers.
Fabricated images will not bring our pages to life. Nor will they bring us to life, or back to life. Only images that emerge truthfully from the inner eye can do that. However, most of us are not accustomed to seeing through the surface of things to the truth below that surface. We are not accustomed to looking at things long enough that they open like a window, which the poet Marie Howe implores us to do, admitting that it will hurt us.
And it does hurt us.
Because the world is beautiful and broken, like us, and seeing into and through it to the truthful images it contains within will never be painless. But it will always be worth it.
This is what we practice at Writing in the Dark. And it does take practice—it is a lifetime practice. And I think, to be honest, this practice is why so many of you have found a home here, in this place that is never easy yet brings you closer up to and inside of the words and the world than you’ve been before.
This way of seeing with the inner eye, seeing beyond seeing, is the North Star of my life and my own writing, and the guiding principle beneath every single WITD seasonal intensive (next week, The Letter Reimagined), and the underlying quest in every post I write.
Seeing beyond seeing is ultimately how we write in the dark, how we “do language'“ in a way that might, if we stick with it long enough, save our lives and bring us back to the world and each other.
Love,
Jeannine
PS If this post was helpful to you, you might enjoy some of these, too:
PPS I am teaching in Janelle Hardy’s fabulous virtual Dirty, Messy, Alive Embodied Memoir Writing Workshop September 26-29 with Allison K. Williams, Brooke Warner, and scads of other wonderful writers and teachers. The workshop has lots of free options, as well as all-access paid options. You can find out more here and if you do plan to drop by, please say hello!
Gratitude to Jordan Rosenfeld’s craft book, Make A Scene, for detailing this brain science in an accessible way.
Just signed up for Dirty, Messy yesterday!! Can't wait :)
On seeing the world now, after having been here for nearly a year, my eyes (inner and outer) see so much more than before. I notice expressions and body language and movement differently, I see the story in not only others, but in "ordinary" objects. The creative spark feels fully lit and because of you and everyone here I feel more alive than I ever have. I liken it to when I was discovering about our brains in my neuropsychology and evolution classes at ASU, my mind kept exploding with every new thing I learned...and that's how it feels here too! Bursting with colors and words :)
There is such important thinking here, Jeannine. I have hours worth of video and pictures that I had hoped to use to tell a visually based story. To date, I've used only a small fraction of that time and effort to tell even the slightest hint of a story. One of the first things I remember you telling me was that the difference between visual art (video) and writing is that writing has the superpower of interiority. So true, I look back in my video archives and I realize I lost the "why" I took the images in the first place. The reason for being in the moment, the interiority, is lost. The skill I'm trying to hone of presenting a concrete, seen detail, through writing in order to reveal the unseen. is definitely where the fun and the challenge is at. Thank you for this, Jeannine.