"Did Moths Make These Star-Shaped Holes In My Blanket?"

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Live the questions now, Rilke says.

And how can we not, with Brazil on fire and all the guns and news about epidemic stress among parents on top of the epidemic of loneliness not to mention relentless election anxiety … and that’s barely scratching the surface.

I have plenty of personal questions, ones more deeply rooted in my aspirations and, shimmering beyond those, my dreams. Yes, remember that wonderful, luminous conversation we had about dreams last winter, when we tried to Name Our Dreams?

My god, that was beautiful.

Because it’s so daring to dream. Especially when it comes to our art. I believe in dreaming. I consider it essential. Our dreams are the moving pictures of our desires, and both the dreams and the desire are crucial fuel for our creative fire.

I will never relinquish my dreams.

But, I have to acknowledge how little control I—or any of us—have over any concrete manifestations related to our dreams. That is, we don’t get to control the process, or the outcomes. I am not saying we don’t help bring our dreams into being. We do, we must. Otherwise, we destine ourselves to live lives made up of what happens to us rather than what we make happen. I for one do not want that.

But, even if we do work in service to our dreams with devoted cumulative action, and even if we do ultimately manifest our dreams, we still can’t fully control the process or the outcomes. It’s simply not possible (e.g., we can write the book, but we can’t guarantee it’ll be published; it might be published, but we can’t guarantee it’ll sell; it might sell, but we can’t guarantee it’ll be respected by critics; it might be respected by critics, but we can’t guarantee it will be remembered, etc., etc., etc., and that does not even start to get at the truth of how what we set out to create may in the end bear little resemblance to what emerges—which may or may not please us, depending!).

Plus, in addition to all that, we can’t really know how anything will feel for us until we’re there. After all, not everything we dream for ourselves ends up being what we actually wanted—manifesting our dreams does not always feel the way we expect it to. And what tends to matter to us in the end is how we feel in our lives.

So the answer, or at least, part of it, I think, is the same one we writers and artists always circle back to: that is, to center our creative ecstasy—relish in creative ecstasy—and dwell as willingly as we can inside the act of creating, inside the strange, unruly imperfect mess of creating, the amorphous and uncontrolled cycle of creation in and of itself. We have to take real pleasure in our stubbornly human insistence on making, shaping, and breathing newness into being in the form of art, which, in the case of writing, we must do with only the rickety clatter of old words.

How audacious.

I was just reading Jane Friedman’s excellent newsletter yesterday—the post was called “My First Novel Was a New York Times Bestseller. I’m Self-Publishing My Third Novel Today”¹—and I was reminded that no matter where we are on the path of writerly “achievement” (no books, one book, four books, ten books, big 5 books, indie books, self-published books, bestselling books, sold less than 50 copies books, and “I don’t even want to write a book, why do we have to measure everything in books?!”, etc.), we still have no control.

I’m reminded of this whenever I notice Amazon sales rankings showing that some recently “sold in a very good deal” big 5 books don’t fare much better in the rankings than some teeny tiny micro indie press books (by the way, no shade to micro indie presses! I love my tiny micro publisher—go, Split/Lip!—and even more, I love the critics, reviewers, and readers who’ve given The Part That Burns a much bigger footprint than will ever make sense for my hybrid almost prose poem of a fragmented lyric memoirish thing of a book—grateful).

The question, then, is whether I’ll follow the same path with the novel I’m writing now as I did with TPTB.

The answer is, I’m not sure.

I’ve been pondering these last few weeks, since the idea so far has been writing toward an agent, which means (at least to some extent) writing toward the market. And I have nothing against the market, or convention.

But also. The Jane Friedman column did solemnly remind me of the blatant truth that no matter what the book ultimately looks like or which path it takes to publication, I can’t control it.

So I kind of have to follow the book where it’s taking me, and let it become what it’s meant to be, let it become, hopefully, as alive as it can possibly be, whatever that means, even if it’s mostly a rebellious and untamed thing, a thing that doesn’t quite fit.

Like me.

Back to questions. Funny how the answer to so many of them is, “We’ll see.”

And sometimes, the question itself is more interesting than the answer.

For example, a while back, when we were in the heart of the Creativity Challenge (our very first intensive, which, on reflection, is probably what put Writing in the Dark on the map), I experimented with a fascinating online tool² for isolating the questions in any body of text. Back then, I only played around a little bit, and I shared with you what the tool produced for the first chapter of Moby Dick:

But, yesterday, I returned to that interesting tool, and I put in three of my own most recent essays published in literary journals.

Here’s what the tool spit out. These are in the order in which I wrote these essays and in which they were originally published. I have not rearranged the questions, only very slightly edited them by removing quotation marks from questions that were dialogue in the narrative:

“What My Father Knew,” Los Angeles Review of Books/Dorothy Parker’s Ashes

Did you know that about her back then? You had better reconsider your behavior, young lady, and I would suggest you do so sooner than later, or, Goddamn it to hell, you think I asked you to pick up your garbage just for shits and giggles? How could they? Something about how she tried back then to make him get counseling for what he was doing to me? You know what I mean? Didn’t your mother teach you anything? Did my father like Kenny Rogers? Did you used to melt cheese on crackers in the microwave? Maybe we could meet you afterward for lunch? So, was he there? Would we otherwise wait in his driveway? But you’re okay now, aren’t you? Aren’t you?

“The Cost,” Ilanot Review (this essay included short excerpts from “What My Father Knew,” which explains the repeated questions)

Look at this, will you? Does it even matter now? I know, but do you think it counts? Like, for what Ms. Nick said after the movie? So what did it cost me to tell, again? I remember asking my mom, If you know, why don’t you do something? Something about how she tried back then to make him get counseling for what he was doing to me? You know what I mean? Was I still afraid of the cost? Your sister’s partner? What sister? What partner? What? Has she ever asked my father about these things? Why he almost never visited me? Why he never attempted to know his beautiful grandchildren? In fact, they probably did hear my thoughts that day when they looked up and said, What? But as the adrenaline swallowed me, I said nothing more except, Wanna take a walk?

“Incorrigible: A Love Story,” The Rumpus

Or maybe they were glass? Why, then, did she so often seem drunk? Should he throw out the fish he’s caught to lighten his load and increase his odds of survival? Is it level? Why is she always like this? Why, Mama? Look, shouldn’t everyone be astonished by the miracle of children in their lives?

Interesting.

The question as an integral tool in writing is certainly worth our time and attention. Consider this passage written by the daughter of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget:

Where does that little baby come from? I don’t know. Out of the wood. Are you dust before you are born? Are you nothing at all? Are you air? Babies don’t make themselves, they are air. Eggshells make themselves in hens. I think they are air too. Pipes, trees, eggshells, clouds. The door. They don’t make themselves. They have to be made. I think trees make themselves and suns too. In the sky they can easily make themselves. How is the sky made? I think they cut it out. It’s been painted.

Strange, beautiful. And oddly wise.

Ultimately, the word “question” implies a quest, as Paul Matthews writes in Sing Me the Creation. He goes on to say:

Without a question we are forever shut out from the inner life of one another. In coming to the question we leave the firm ground of the statement behind and trust ourselves to the in-betweens, for the question is nothing if not open and receptive. This is the ideal it strives for.

In this sense, the question is the most creative of the four sentence types. It will be most interesting to see what comes out of this week’s structured exercise based on this deep well of a sentence type. I drew this week’s structured exercises from our question work during the Creativity Challenge.

Not only will you be guided in this exercise to “live into the questions,” as Rilke suggests, you’ll also have a chance, in the followup bonus exercise, to construct and use specific questions as possible portals to your most elusive inner material—the stories, essays, and poems that sometimes shy away from you.

Let’s see what happens, and I look forward to seeing you in the comments.

Writing Exercise: Did Moths Make These Star-Shaped Holes In My Blanket?