Rabbit Rabbit #7: Write That Down!

Language, poetry, and the will to contribute.

An Angel at My Table (1990)

I’ve been doing Rabbit Rabbit for seven months now, and each month without fail, I am extremely intimidated by the blank page. The initial act of typing the first sentence, of coming up with my topic or title, has always seemed nearly impossible to me until I somehow catch myself in the act of doing it, at which point I’m almost done with the newsletter. It’s like trying to fall asleep– you are awake, and then suddenly you aren’t. I have to black out a little while I’m writing, anesthetizing the cultural critic in my brain who wags a finger chiding, “and who asked you?”

In her memoir Girl in a Band, Sonic Youth lead singer Kim Gordon details her simple strategy (which I must paraphrase because my copy is in Massachusetts) for shirking self-consciousness onstage. Gordon, famous for her screamy, body-flingy, balls-to-the-wall onstage persona, is actually quite a nervous, neurotic performer. The trick, she writes, is in forcing oneself to begin, to “go,” before one is decidedly ready. Instinctually scream-sing as soon as the song starts. That way, you are already doing the thing before you can analyze how you are doing it.

It seems that, for hundreds of years, artists have sought out new ways to shed that seemingly impermeable layer of terror which accompanies the free fall into a new project. Of course, it’s harder for some than others. I think this is what we mean by “the creative process,” which can only function in certain emotional or spiritual or physical circumstances, different for every person on the quest to make something original.

Virginia Woolf describes it best in To the Lighthouse, when Lily Briscoe, a plagued painter at a brutal impasse with her blank canvas, suddenly finds her inspiration, her “vision,” in recalling memories of the Ramsay family that border on the miraculous in their mundanity. Lily, too, blacks out with brush in hand: “Certainly she was losing consciousness of outer things. And as she lost consciousness of outer things, her name and her personality and her appearance…her mind kept throwing up from its depths scenes, and names, and sayings, and memories and ideas, like a fountain spurting over that glaring, hideously difficult white space, while she modelled it with greens and blues.”

I was reminded of Kim Gordon and Lily Briscoe when I took a playwriting workshop a couple weeks ago at Signature Theatre Company. It was taught by Sarah Ruhl, definitively one of the most famous living playwrights of our time. Her plays are performed at theaters large and small across the country. I am a big fan of Ruhl’s work, especially her play In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) which chronicles the accidental invention of the vibrator in the 1800s as a cure at the time for women’s “hysteria.”

Walking into the workshop on a Monday afternoon, I had no idea what to expect– would it be seminar-style, like a college class? (Ruhl teaches playwriting at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale.) Would she lecture the entire time, giving us tips from a PowerPoint presentation? Instead, I entered the small blackbox theater to find a desk on the thrust stage, adorned with a desk microphone, water bottle, and a notebook. Ruhl’s jacket was already draped over the chair. Homey.

There were about fifty of us in the room, all young aspiring creatives early in our careers, some still students. Each of us, I gathered, possessing a burning desire to write creatively, and to learn from someone who does just that for a living, and does it wondrously. Ruhl began the workshop by having us free write for ten minutes, with a simple prompt: write a scene where something invisible happens. She participated too. It was thrilling to look up from my notebook and see this blazing playwright at her pretend desk, also thinking quietly and putting pencil to paper.

She invited us to raise our hands and share after each exercise, which I thought was generous. My heart pounded for the first three, and I was too clamped up to even consider offering up my own words for consumption. (When I first got to college, it would sometimes take me weeks to warm up to a particular class space, so this was warpspeed.)

“I began as a poet,” Ruhl stated about halfway through. She talked about poetry as her first foray into writing as a means of creative and emotional expression, and that her love for the artform permeates each of her plays. Her stage directions, known for their whimsicality– at one point in Eurydice, “raspberries, peaches, and plums drop from the ceiling into the River”– read like poems sprung from a love and lust for nature.

Poetry, she said, allows us to crack language open, neglect its conventions, and begin to string words together in a completely strange and illuminating way. Sometimes we require the discipline of a writing exercise to tear us away from our own seductive headspaces, and genuinely surprise ourselves.

The longest section of the workshop involved some geometry. We were instructed to draw a grid in our notebooks, and fill in the empty boxes with finite amounts of adjectives, verbs, nouns, etc. that we associate with a current piece of our own writing. Then, we had to use those words –and the word “I”– as the building blocks for a short monologue.

The things people read aloud were spellbinding. I found myself furiously writing down snippets of their phrases– not to steal, but to capture their beauty for safekeeping. “Desperately hoarding Narragansett.” “I dangerously arrange furniture.” “I move quick–– not pretty, but there.” “I’m with you, Amy. You’re just sad.” All of these could have been first lines of a full-length play. I was amazed at the patterns of words I could come up with just by working in a nonlinear, reconstructed manner.

I have always sort of dismissed poetry, instead favoring concise narrative, so I was taken aback by how drawn I was to this exercise. Earlier in the afternoon, Ruhl had us write haikus based on a favorite theatrical moment, and I was joyfully transported back to elementary school. It was during the haiku beat that I raised my hand to share.

My poem was inspired by Jen Silverman’s Collective Rage. When I finished reading, Ruhl, ever warm and generous, responded by saying she wished she could “read that to Jen.” I mention this only to highlight the community among these people who write and dream up whole characters and worlds for a living. There is an familial quality among artists who choose to make their way through the muck of the blank page for the sole reason of survival. Oh, them? They’re just Jen. And she’s Sarah.

The workshop breathed new life into me, nourishing me with a fervor to continue writing as my friend Jessica and I work on a short film we plan to shoot early this summer. It’s our first collaborative project. We are nervous and excited and have a shared Notes document. For our first couple of writing sessions, we could not find a groove. We’d plant Pavlovian rewards for ourselves once we had completed a certain amount of pages, or put way too much pressure on the location of the session. (Warning: do not attempt to write in a double bed after a sleepless sleepover.)

But since then, we’ve written almost a complete first draft, and I’ve noticed that much of our writing happens when we are apart, experiencing life and jobs and the stimulating onslaught of other people. We text constantly, joking that “we really need to talk more,” sharing stories of things that happened during the day, who said what, and why we felt weird or happy. And then we’ll realize, delighted each time, this can go in the movie! Perhaps observation is our greatest power. It’s like Lily Briscoe, drunk on the sudden flashes of memory that usher her into a dream, the midwife for her masterpiece. It’s all we need.

In an Author’s Note essay, Marilynne Robinson writes, “Writing should always be exploratory. There shouldn’t be the assumption that you know ahead of time what you want to express. When you enter into the dance with language, you’ll begin to find that there’s something before, or behind, or more absolute than the thing you thought you wanted to express.” Ruhl’s workshop confirmed the truth of Robinson’s statement, which I have revisited many times over to remind myself that writing should never feel easy or comfortable, but rather positively challenging.

In my first-year college seminar on Jane Austen, my professor would encourage us to come up with essay topics by marking what we found “weird” in the text. A character’s gesture, a word, even the particular placement of a comma is sufficient to spark a question from which to work outwards. Usually, “why?” When we find ourselves on the precipice of creation, we tend to figure ourselves Atlas, carrying mountains of history and expectation on our shoulders. To shrug off that weight and to instead ask, “why?” is both liberating and empowering. We cannot will ideas out of the ether, but we can make space for their welcome arrival by ceding control to genuine curiosity.

One minute you’re awake, and the next you’re asleep. You wake up with ink stains on the bed. Somehow, every single night, it just happens.

***

Haiku for Betty #5

Roused, Betty punches

Breathless, eyes wide, bewildered

Love, for the first time.

Margaret Monologue

I lick Stone’s golden hair and ruin church. I thought it was caramel. Sorry! We tickle ourselves lilac and erupt blindly on a bench. She whistles, clean. A dream? No. Just a nose. A nose. Delicate. Feverishly, I abandon Stone. “Are you mad at me?” “No. Jealous.” “But why?” “You dream.”

Social photo from My Brilliant Career (1979)