The messy chambers of the (creative) heart

I. Papering over the cracks

Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash

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When I was drafting my first novel, my mentor gave me some feedback I’ve retained ever since: you have a genius for papering over the cracks.

The prose was polished to the degree, he said, that reading was like gliding across a smooth surface. He’d been so focused on the language that it took him several pages to realise the bigger things (like plot and character) weren’t working as effectively as they might.

I took it as a compliment. I mean, who wouldn’t want to produce prose that makes the reader feel as though they’re gliding? I was proud to wield words that were powerful enough to obscure (at least some of ) the flaws.

It turns out I was wrong.

In the past, and especially with that first novel, I spent so much time perfecting the sentence-level writing that I neglected the foundations—the construction of which is (necessarily) messy. I’m not saying that line-by-line polishing isn’t necessary in the final edit. We owe it to the reader to finish things well, I believe, and to ourselves to honour our process and give it all we’ve got. What I’m saying is that, in the drafting stages, I risked bypassing what the reader needed to be transported; to connect fully with the story, with the characters, with the essential message. Forget your perfect offering, Leonard Cohen famously writes in the lyrics of ‘Anthem’, there is a crack … in everything/That's how the light gets in.

It has taken me a long time to un-remember how to write ‘perfectly.’

These days, what I’m most curious about is why I have been so invested in perfection.

Much of my avoidance of creative mess has been caused by fear of uncertainty—the not-knowing where my writing was going (in my mind uncertainty represented lack, or failure). It was also, perhaps, to do with resistance to feeling things were out of my control. I was wary of entering an emotional field that was unexpected, even subversive. I wanted to rein things in, keep it neat, keep it safe. As the French writer Anaïs Nin writes in The Four-Chambered Heart: when you trust, you are tender and delicate, but when you doubt, you are dangerous and destructive. I couldn’t trust myself enough to doubt. I didn’t want to be dangerous and destructive. Now, I’m more prepared to face the danger. I’m not saying I want to be so destructive as to rip the reader apart. I’m saying I want to evoke a powerful response: to incite feelings, in order that I, and the reader, might transform.

In the past, in staying with the tender and the delicate, I was protecting myself but denying readers access to the messy chambers of my creative heart—spaces that are repositories for the gamut of my experience, for the raw, messy realities of a life in all its bittersweetness; its light and shade, its shame and glory.

In tidying my prose, in polishing the surface, I realise I’ve stuffed the discomfort about who I am into the long, invisible bag I drag behind me.

Unpacking that bag is a long project—probably a lifelong one. Being comfortable with mess is now something I now try to embrace—with all the zeal of the convert!—for myself and others. Luckily, artistry can help with this. One of the reasons I set up my online writing programme is to cultivate safety and permission to explore, a place to be in and with the mess. We do this alongside others who reflect back to us, in the midst of this chaos, the glints of precious material buried underneath: our golden sentences, as I call them. However messy, there is always at least one golden sentence in any piece. And from there, we build.

There’ll be more in my next post on navigating creative mess. In the meantime, here’s a question to contemplate: what lurks in the dark, messy chambers of your own creative heart that could facilitate connection, the full array of feelings that express your human-beingness?