Going Deeper
Blog / Produced by The High Calling
A few years ago, I picked up the book My Dear Mother: Stormy, Boastful and Tender Letters by Distinguished Sons—from Dostoevsky to Elvis while browsing in the bookstore. It was close to Christmas and I thought it would make a nice gift from my husband to his mother. On Christmas morning, my mother-in-law phoned us in tears. She loved the book, but it was the addition my husband made that melted her heart. He had written his own letter and slipped it between those crisp pages containing words of esteemed sons. In the end, it wasn’t the words of Marc Chagall or Leo Tolstoy that stole her heart--but those of the one she had carried inside her body, the one whose nose and bum she had wiped--that baby boy she knew intimately.
He knew his reader well.
This knowing our audience , says Julia Cameron, enables us to go deeper in our writing. This week in The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life, Cameron says we should write to a specific someone to add dimension to our words.
Better to let the audience be someone real—a lover, a best friend, a colleague, someone who gets your jokes or just likes how you think. Choose someone on whom nothing will be wasted, someone with and appetite for life in all its messy glory. That someone will enjoy your writing specifically. Write specifically to that someone. This will make your writing targeted and focused. It will also bring to your writing a purity of intent…It is a great paradox that the more personal, focused, and specific your writing becomes, the more universally it communicates.
I’ve heard this brand of advice before. Know your market, one agent told me. I’m not sure you can write about that in a Christian novel, said another.
While these statements left me feeling like a hostage to the pen, Cameron says that being specific in this way is all about freedom.
In the act of naming things precisely as they appear to us, we free our work from misunderstandings, from ambiguity, from vagueness. At its base, writing is an act of love, and when we perform it consciously, concretely, and lovingly, grace enters the equation. We—and the reader—have an experience of something larger communicating through the vessel of our work. That larger something—whose eye is on the sparrow—knows a great deal about the value of specificity.
Once again there is that urging to listen, to observe what is around us, and simply let the words flow from our mindfulness.
I like the idea of addressing my work to someone specific. In this way, I can more readily choose the appropriate words. I simply visualize the conversation in my mind. When I do this, the thing nearly writes itself. This week’s exercises have helped me be more descriptive.
This week, Cameron also talks about writing for revenge and valuing our experience. What jumped out to you this week?
Three more chapters for next week! See you there.
photograph, One by ELK, used with permission. Post by Laura Boggess.