You listen for a story in the way a broom sweeps across a floor or the way thin chords of rain strike a window. ~Grant Faulkner

Creativity Prompt #3: Listening As A Strange Thing, A Magnetic Force | 30-Day Creativity Challenge

Gustave Caillebotte - The Floor Planers - Google Art Project

Day 3 already! And we’re accomplishing so much! I love your comments on these posts and in the chat, and the snippets of process and work you’re all sharing about getting unstuck, launching new essay projects, publishing new work (!!), overcoming some small amount of rejection anxiety, composing new poems, and discovering fresh insights. You’ve told me about becoming absorbed in the exercises, getting outside when you didn’t expect to, seeing old things anew, and losing track of time. You’ve even told me about returning to abandoned book projects. It’s so inspiring and we’ve only just begun! And if you haven’t jumped in yet, it’s definitely not too late. Every prompt will remain archived under the 30-Day Creativity Challenge tab, in reverse order (oldest at the bottom, newest at the top). The prompts take only 5-10 minutes and are meant to be repeated (they are incredibly elastic and get better with practice), so, in truth, you’re never too late and you’re never behind. Those are my rules for creativity, and I stand by them.

And remember, you can always scroll past this up-front mini deep-dive into the “why” behind each day’s creativity challenge and skip straight to the prompt by scrolling down to the bolded subhead for Creativity Prompt #3 (or #4 or #5, etc.).

But as long as you’re here, let me just say, that today’s exercise is simultaneously low-stakes and crucially important, because we’re turning ourselves back to the arduous task of paying attention, but from the vantage point of listening.

“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories,” wrote Eudora Welty. “Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.” ~Eudora Welty

Welty’s quote came to my attention in a Medium post on the topic of listening by Grant Faulkner, founder of National Novel Writing Month, who himself wrote:

To listen for stories is an art unto itself. You have to practice listening with a curiosity that goes beyond yourself. You have to listen with wonder and receptiveness. You listen for the past’s murmurings, to what the tongue can’t, or won’t, say.

You listen to the way a broom sweeps across a floor or the way thin chords of rain strike a window. There is always a sound, a story, in the air. The loop of a song curling into the dark of the night. The churning crescendo of cicadas in the thick air of summer. The sound of a distant lawnmower.

But to listen is different than to hear. When you’re really listening, you don’t expect anything and you don’t want anything. You simply take in what the other person is saying, the timbre of their voice, the rhythm of their speech, not judging, not commenting, just absorbing, paying them the honor of being heard and recognized. You relinquish control. You move beyond yourself.

This, I have found, is wholly true. For example, when a writer (or creative person) hears sirens, we might hear the story of the tragic dropped cigarette unfolding somewhere across town. When we see the ads for the lottery, we might think of the man on his way to purchase another ticket, the unpaid bills on his bureau. We might also hear fragments of stories in the words of others all around us. I know this happens to me. What about you? Have you ever found yourself in a coffee shop or train station or theater queue and realized you’re shamelessly eavesdropping on a nearby conversation, not because you know the people and are snooping, per se, but because there is a story unfolding in the outside world and it seems to be flowing toward you?

Once, in South Carolina, I was dining outdoors with my husband near a table occupied by two businessmen, one of whom was going on at length about his bad divorce, the way his soon-to-be ex-wife was going off the rails, threatening him, even showing up at his workplace to make scenes. “She’s out of control,” he said. “I don’t know what to do.”

And without missing a beat, his friend said, “You know what you need? A hummus plate.”

I have never forgotten those lines of dialogue. For me—perhaps because I’ve been through my own epically bad divorce—that simple exchange holds worlds of potential stories within it.

But listening need not be only for words or even for possible stories with actions, people, and dynamics between them. Stories can be deeper and more mysterious than that. I like to think of listening in the way Karl Menninger describes it, as “a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force” all its own.

What lives in the sound of wind or running water? In the sound of a thousand-pound tree branch breaking and falling almost silently into deep snow? In the sound of a sleeping dog’s inhales and exhales? What do we—or can we—perceive in these sounds?  

And how can we benefit—creatively (and perhaps otherwise, as well)—from deep listening? That’s what today’s prompt is designed to help us discover.