In which I gratefully acknowledge the origin of this newsletter's title in Dean Wesley Smith's "Writing into the Dark" and a great video complement by Michael La Ronn.
I’ve often wondered about how much of the fear of writing into the dark (or “pantsing” as it’s sometimes called) comes from the dread of facing a lot of revision, to bring the disparate products of the creative mind into the kind of coherence (plot) modern audiences seem to demand. My experience is that the deep mind knows what it’s doing even if you (the writer) don’t, and the end product usually needs far less revision than you might initially fear.
Having given up long ago on my writing aspirations as an English major, I realized I was not a story teller. Perhaps this was partly due to growing up without siblings and local relatives to interact with. In my twenties, though, I embraced drawing and painting as my side line to reality (working in banking). I now allow my art to draw or paint itself, much as this method of writing into the dark espouses. Frequently when looking back through my creations, I spot art I don't even recall making. Faith is a quality I try to embrace, and I believe and hope there is a higher power, even though "it" is beyond my understanding. Thank you for affirming my own crazy method of creativity.
"Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It’s never been anything but your religion. Never. I’m a little over-excited now. Since it is your religion, do you know what you will be asked when you die? But let me tell you first what you won’t be asked. You won’t be asked if you were working on a wonderful, moving piece of writing when you died. You won’t be asked if it was long or short, sad or funny, published or unpublished. You won’t be asked if you were in good or bad form while you were working on it. You won’t even be asked if it was the one piece of writing you would have been working on if you had known your time would be up when it was finished…I’m so sure you’ll get asked only two questions. Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out? If only you knew how easy it would be for you to say yes to both questions."
Sep 17, 2022·edited Sep 17, 2022Liked by Matt Cardin
Dear Teeming Matt, it is a joy to be able to continue reading you, now in Substack. Apropos of your inspiring inaugural post, I have taken the liberty of translating for you and your readers, to the best of my more than limited abilities as an amateur translator, an excerpt from Mircea Cărtărescu's essay "The Carpenter's Pencil", which I hope will be of interest to you.
“I never wanted to be a writer, I only wanted to write, really write, with all my strength. Isolated in my poor province, in an obscure country, in a city in ruins, in a crooked house like those of Soutine, I always remember myself, at all ages, reading and writing. As a teenager, I built myself a kind of personal myth that, in a way, I have kept as a sacred icon throughout my life: I would always be alone, without family or friends, I would live in a room furnished with a table and a bed. Through the window, the yellow light of the sunset would eternally filter through. Under that light of heartbreaking sadness I would write, day after day, a few pages of an infinite manuscript, fed with the ghosts of my mind, stained with the fluids of my body. There it would all be, the fabulous engram of my mind and my life, the complete map of my complexes, the patience game of my reflexes, the fantastic flight over itself of a destiny that had turned me into a feather in the hand of an unknown God. That is what I wanted to be: an instrument for writing, someone through whom the writing is written. I would not publish anything, ever. I would calligraph infinitely, by hand, on yellowed leaves, the loops of ink letters, tiny, rough and tight, that would levitate a finger's breadth from the page, as they say the letters on the tablets of Moses, written with the finger of God, levitated. The manuscript would grow, increase, over the years the paper would crumble and disappear, devoured by the little scorpions that live among the leaves, but the letters of ink would remain, spread layer upon layer, connected to each other, joined horizontally and vertically through transparent denticles and synapses, they would begin to live and think independently, like a textual brain reflecting the whole world. Someday they would find me dead, under that same yellow light from the window, with my head on my manuscript, discovered at that moment with astonishment, not as just another book, but as a new planet or a new universe. Only free of me could my book finally stretch its bones, like Gregor Samsa's sister at the end of ‘The Metamorphosis’, and then spread its wings over the world.”
"The practicing writer, the writer at work, the writer immersed in his or her project, is not an entity at all, let alone a person, but a curious mélange of wildly varying states of mind, clustered toward what might be called the darker end of the spectrum: indecision, frustration, pain, dismay, despair, remorse, impatience, outright failure. To be honored in midstream for one’s labor would be ideal, but impossible; to be honored after the fact is always too late, for by then another project has been begun, another concentration of indefinable states. Perhaps one must contend with vaguely wearing personalities, in some sort of sequential arrangement? – perhaps premonitions of failure are but the soul’s wise economy, in not risking hubris? – it cannot matter, for, in any case, the writer, no matter how battered a veteran, can’t have any real faith, any absolute faith, in his stamina (let alone his theoretical “gift”) to get him through the ordeal of creation. One is frequently asked whether the process becomes easier, with the passage of time, and the reply is obvious. Nothing gets easier with the passage of time, not even the passing of time. The artist, perhaps more than most people, inhabits failure, degrees of failure and accommodation and compromise; but the terms of his failure are generally secret. It seems reasonable to assume that failure may be a truth, or at any rate a negotiable fact, while success is a temporary illusion of some intoxicating sort, a bubble soon to be pricked, a flower whose petals will quickly drop. If despair is – as I believe it to be – as absurd a state as euphoria, who can protest that it feels more substantial, more reliable, less out of scale with the human environment? Yet it is perhaps not failure the writer loves, so much as the addictive nature of incompletion and risk."
This was a genuine breath of fresh air to be signposted to and to read. I've often done the vast bulk of my creative writing in a spontaneous manner, that I tend to refer to as 'instinctive writing', otherwise loosely articulated as having been 'sucker-punched' by an idea or put into a stranglehold until what is desiring to be written is. I now have a whole domain of articulation to embrace that makes a delightful amount of sense.
I’ve often wondered about how much of the fear of writing into the dark (or “pantsing” as it’s sometimes called) comes from the dread of facing a lot of revision, to bring the disparate products of the creative mind into the kind of coherence (plot) modern audiences seem to demand. My experience is that the deep mind knows what it’s doing even if you (the writer) don’t, and the end product usually needs far less revision than you might initially fear.
Having given up long ago on my writing aspirations as an English major, I realized I was not a story teller. Perhaps this was partly due to growing up without siblings and local relatives to interact with. In my twenties, though, I embraced drawing and painting as my side line to reality (working in banking). I now allow my art to draw or paint itself, much as this method of writing into the dark espouses. Frequently when looking back through my creations, I spot art I don't even recall making. Faith is a quality I try to embrace, and I believe and hope there is a higher power, even though "it" is beyond my understanding. Thank you for affirming my own crazy method of creativity.
"Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It’s never been anything but your religion. Never. I’m a little over-excited now. Since it is your religion, do you know what you will be asked when you die? But let me tell you first what you won’t be asked. You won’t be asked if you were working on a wonderful, moving piece of writing when you died. You won’t be asked if it was long or short, sad or funny, published or unpublished. You won’t be asked if you were in good or bad form while you were working on it. You won’t even be asked if it was the one piece of writing you would have been working on if you had known your time would be up when it was finished…I’m so sure you’ll get asked only two questions. Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out? If only you knew how easy it would be for you to say yes to both questions."
-J.D. Salinger, “Seymour: An Introduction”
Dear Teeming Matt, it is a joy to be able to continue reading you, now in Substack. Apropos of your inspiring inaugural post, I have taken the liberty of translating for you and your readers, to the best of my more than limited abilities as an amateur translator, an excerpt from Mircea Cărtărescu's essay "The Carpenter's Pencil", which I hope will be of interest to you.
“I never wanted to be a writer, I only wanted to write, really write, with all my strength. Isolated in my poor province, in an obscure country, in a city in ruins, in a crooked house like those of Soutine, I always remember myself, at all ages, reading and writing. As a teenager, I built myself a kind of personal myth that, in a way, I have kept as a sacred icon throughout my life: I would always be alone, without family or friends, I would live in a room furnished with a table and a bed. Through the window, the yellow light of the sunset would eternally filter through. Under that light of heartbreaking sadness I would write, day after day, a few pages of an infinite manuscript, fed with the ghosts of my mind, stained with the fluids of my body. There it would all be, the fabulous engram of my mind and my life, the complete map of my complexes, the patience game of my reflexes, the fantastic flight over itself of a destiny that had turned me into a feather in the hand of an unknown God. That is what I wanted to be: an instrument for writing, someone through whom the writing is written. I would not publish anything, ever. I would calligraph infinitely, by hand, on yellowed leaves, the loops of ink letters, tiny, rough and tight, that would levitate a finger's breadth from the page, as they say the letters on the tablets of Moses, written with the finger of God, levitated. The manuscript would grow, increase, over the years the paper would crumble and disappear, devoured by the little scorpions that live among the leaves, but the letters of ink would remain, spread layer upon layer, connected to each other, joined horizontally and vertically through transparent denticles and synapses, they would begin to live and think independently, like a textual brain reflecting the whole world. Someday they would find me dead, under that same yellow light from the window, with my head on my manuscript, discovered at that moment with astonishment, not as just another book, but as a new planet or a new universe. Only free of me could my book finally stretch its bones, like Gregor Samsa's sister at the end of ‘The Metamorphosis’, and then spread its wings over the world.”
https://store.deepvellum.org/products/solenoid
"The practicing writer, the writer at work, the writer immersed in his or her project, is not an entity at all, let alone a person, but a curious mélange of wildly varying states of mind, clustered toward what might be called the darker end of the spectrum: indecision, frustration, pain, dismay, despair, remorse, impatience, outright failure. To be honored in midstream for one’s labor would be ideal, but impossible; to be honored after the fact is always too late, for by then another project has been begun, another concentration of indefinable states. Perhaps one must contend with vaguely wearing personalities, in some sort of sequential arrangement? – perhaps premonitions of failure are but the soul’s wise economy, in not risking hubris? – it cannot matter, for, in any case, the writer, no matter how battered a veteran, can’t have any real faith, any absolute faith, in his stamina (let alone his theoretical “gift”) to get him through the ordeal of creation. One is frequently asked whether the process becomes easier, with the passage of time, and the reply is obvious. Nothing gets easier with the passage of time, not even the passing of time. The artist, perhaps more than most people, inhabits failure, degrees of failure and accommodation and compromise; but the terms of his failure are generally secret. It seems reasonable to assume that failure may be a truth, or at any rate a negotiable fact, while success is a temporary illusion of some intoxicating sort, a bubble soon to be pricked, a flower whose petals will quickly drop. If despair is – as I believe it to be – as absurd a state as euphoria, who can protest that it feels more substantial, more reliable, less out of scale with the human environment? Yet it is perhaps not failure the writer loves, so much as the addictive nature of incompletion and risk."
- Joyce Carol Oates, "Notes on failure"
This was a genuine breath of fresh air to be signposted to and to read. I've often done the vast bulk of my creative writing in a spontaneous manner, that I tend to refer to as 'instinctive writing', otherwise loosely articulated as having been 'sucker-punched' by an idea or put into a stranglehold until what is desiring to be written is. I now have a whole domain of articulation to embrace that makes a delightful amount of sense.