By Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew
When my partner Emily teaches traditional circle dance to a group of newbies, they go through a predictable progression.
First, they stride easily into the class, unaware of their grace.
Next, Emily teaches a few steps. She’s patient, and the movements themselves are simple and repetitive. But students nonetheless trip over their feet, giggle to draw attention away from their awkwardness, scowl or apologize and sometimes give up. The circle jolts and falters.
Then, if the dancers continue practicing over weeks and months, their effort and self-consciousness fall away. They turn their attention away from individual steps to a shared, collective movement.
I know this learning progression from the inside because I, too, have been Emily’s student. Despite having two left feet, over time I’ve lost myself in the turning circle; I’ve closed my eyes and become the dance.
The pattern is uncannily similar to learning to write.
Before I teach students how to transition between scenes and reflection in memoir, they zoom easily between the two—we humans do this naturally when we speak, and the skill usually transfers to the page. But when I call attention to the distinction between “showing” and the reflective voice, when I point out the transitions and their effect on the reader, brows furrow, self-consciousness makes their attempts clumsy, and the class ends with everyone writing worse than when they arrived.
Similarly, when I note the power of sensory details, suddenly my students become overly conscious about not using their senses and assume they are failures, or they cram their scenes with cloying incense, tingling skin, and so much flashing neon they really do fail.
Every time this happens, I momentarily feel like a terrible teacher. It’s a wonder anyone comes back. But inevitably, with practice, my students’ hyper-attentive flourish falls away. Nuanced reflection creeps into scenes. Details begin speaking for themselves. Their stories shine.
Learning craft is a matter of becoming aware of our natural gifts so we can make intentional choices. Everyone intuits what makes a story good and most of us come by storytelling skills organically, effortlessly. But at first our stories control us. As we learn to write and as we take pieces through revision, making deliberate decisions about language and perspective and structure and theme, we gain agency. Skill allows us to return to our natural state, only smarter and with more potency behind the pen. Stick with it and awareness becomes a writer’s greatest asset.
Gradually I’ve come to recognize the disintegration of our natural giftedness followed by its incremental recovery as the learning curve for every art form, and (I suspect) for living life well: first we’re unconscious, then we’re self-conscious, and then we’re aware of being self-conscious, which is truly agonizing. Only then can we come into consciousness and make conscious choices. We writers need to recognize when and how and why to use a technique before we can choose to use it. Intention, not happenstance, makes art. And intention makes life itself artful.
At some point, though, even intention sinks into muscle memory and the body takes over. Consciousness makes way for magic. Poet Seamus Heaney describes this writerly phenomenon as “walking on air.”
“We must teach ourselves to walk on air against our better judgment,” he says.
Lately in my own practice I’ve experienced this as a form of forgetting. The literary tools hanging from my belt-loops, my desire to communicate, my own inadequacies, my audience—I forget all these for the sake of the story. I walk on air. When this happens, writing becomes an act of faith. I close my eyes, trusting the broader movements of the dance to carry me and my readers forward. Then the writing process itself becomes as artful as any product, and far more gratifying.
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Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew is the author of Swinging on the Garden Gate: A Memoir of Bisexuality & Spirit, now in its second edition; the novel, Hannah, Delivered, and three books on writing: Writing the Sacred Journey: The Art and Practice of Spiritual Memoir; Living Revision: A Writer’s Craft as Spiritual Practice; and The Release: Creativity and Freedom After the Writing is Done, forthcoming this fall. She is a founding member of The Eye of the Heart Center, where you can nurture the transformational gifts in your writing with a free microcourse and ongoing online writing community. Connect with Elizabeth at her website and at Spiritual Memoir.
