Writing and shame
In Lucie Elven’s Notes on Craft (https://granta.com/notes-on-craft-elven/) she writes that ‘Shame is a large part of my writing, almost to the point that if I’m not taken aback (even mortified) by something when I send it off to an editor, I believe it’s probably no good.’
Shame is a large part of my writing, too, though not in exactly the same way. Mine is not so much, or not always, shame about what I write - its subject matter or its form or its quality (though, God knows, I should have that often enough) - but shame very often seems to me to be the source of what I write. A place from which I dredge ideas and images, as from the Underworld or the collective unconscious. The quarry, but it is of water, not rock.
When I mentioned the natural (to me) conjunction of fiction-writing and shame, lightly, to a friend, he was so deeply shocked that it jolted me into thinking about the meanings I attach to the act of writing. Is it utterance that is the problem? (Why, when the whole idea of the exercise is surely to command memory, unconscious, imagination, to ‘speak’?) The audacity of attempting to create a world of characters, of speech, of action? The egotism involved in fabricating people (when exactly no one else has requested or even desired their existence) in anticipation that others will believe in them, and somehow invest in them emotionally or intellectually? Or is it the act of bringing what rightly belongs in the realm of fantasy, of dreams, into some hardened reality of language that seems transgressive?
I call it a place, this reservoir of shame, but it is about absence, really. I go there, return there, when I write about what I always write about: things that aren’t there anymore, or cannot hold. Loss of faith, crises of identity, ways of knowing undermined, questions of what and who is possessed and lost and given up, how belonging is also possessing.
I go, as always, to other writers, to recognise myself.
To Kevin Barry, reminding me in The Paris Review that, when writing fiction, ‘you’re working primarily from your subconscious. You’re working with all the dreamy, oily, murky stuff back there, and you’re trying to put narrative sense on it. You don’t write because things are going swimmingly and you’re feeling fabulous—you write because you’re a fucking disaster zone made up of fear and dread and anxiety and all that edgy, angsty stuff that just means you’re alive, basically, and every second of it is just a profound and beautiful shock. As a writer of fiction, you’re vividly aware that life is always hovering toward a condition of shapelessness, and you’re trying to put shape on it, you’re trying to tell stories around it.’
To Tegan Bennett Daylight talking, in The Writer’s Room, about ‘[t]he shitting side of yourself, the side of yourself that has desires, that wants to eat, you know. All those sorts of things. I’ve never actually said this, so this is interesting—I grew up feeling obscurely ashamed of that self. Of that hungry self, I think that’s the main thing.’
To Honor Moore (in The Writer on her Work), thinking about the stunted creative opportunities of the women who came before her, repeating that word, re-iterating the loss: ‘Talent. Failure to hold, failure to focus, failure to hold the focus to the hot place so the transformation can occur, carry you out of self, so what you create may support, steady, nurture, and protect you.’
Holding focus to the hot place. The flush, the spreading warmth, as when the body is in shame.
And now, after all, I do feel more conventional writerly shame about this post. Its ideas. The quality of my prose. Maybe I’ll take it down, soon.