Where Does Writing Come From?

Stephanie Golden

Angelica Kauffman, “The Artist in the Character of Design, Listening to the Inspiration of Poetry.” 1782

Word Count 1589

About 45,500 years ago, a human placed one hand on the rock wall of a cave in Indonesia and with the other blew dark red pigment over it, leaving a stenciled handprint. Next to it, someone drew a pig with a curly tail. These images are the earliest known figurative cave art created by a human species, signaling the awakening of a “higher order consciousness” that made symbolic thinking and the creation of art possible. One speculation is that the hand represents an attempt to communicate with a world of spiritual forces through the portal of the wall.

Writers still feel this connection between imagination and spirit and seek to penetrate that portal. In Western culture, the Greek muses have symbolized the feeling, so familiar to creators, that their works arise from a power beyond the human. In her 1782 painting “The Artist in the Character of Design, Listening to the Inspiration of Poetry,” Angelica Kauffman portrays herself as “The Artist,” sitting on a stone balcony, holding her drawing board on her lap and a stylus in one hand. Next to her sits the muse of Poetry, one arm around the Artist’s shoulders and her lyre on her own lap. The Artist gazes pensively out of the frame, her head slightly cocked toward the muse’s song.

No actual muse has ever sung to me, but I’ve often had the sense that my ideas come from somewhere outside myself. Many writers have described this feeling, but four in particular struck a chord for me.

In 1946–47, when she was 21 and a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Flannery O’Conner struggled with the tension between her ambition to be a successful writer and her desire, as a devout Catholic, to think about God “all the time.” She pondered this dilemma in her journal.

You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. … what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by this shadow that is nothing. …

What I am asking for is really very ridiculous… at present I am a cheese, make me a mystic, immediately.

She wants success, but she’s afraid it will give her a swelled head, which will make her unable “to love God all the way.” When, after a dry period, she produces a story, she cautions herself, “Don’t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story—just like the typewriter was mine.”

I am not a mystic, much less a Catholic or even a Christian, but this resonated. I’ve written two books in the grip of two different obsessions, in each case because I needed to understand something I had experienced. Both were written from the greatest depths I was capable of. And with both, I felt that it wasn’t entirely me who wrote them.

In the early stages of conceptualizing my first book, The Women Outside: Meanings and Myths of Homelessness, I remember kneeling on the floor and suddenly feeling I was in the center of a column of energy streaming between me and somewhere up above my head. The sense of connecting to something larger than myself was clear. That specific experience never happened again, but as I worked on that book and another one, Slaying the Mermaid: Women and the Culture of Sacrifice, I felt distinctly that they were coming through me. That is, what you might call “inspiration” entered somewhere around my solar plexus, then traveled upward to where my brain could operate on it.

I wouldn’t call that larger something God, but there are other options: the collective unconscious, universal mind, nondual awareness, Buddha-mind … and those are just from traditions I know a bit about. Whatever you call it, it does feel literally like inspiration, which comes from a Greek word meaning God-breathed and a Latin word meaning blow into. That is, a divine entity is breathing into you a knowledge, an idea, an impulse, from another level of being.

In 1950, at 28, the Canadian short-story writer Mavis Gallant, after a brief early marriage, moved to Europe, giving herself two years to earn her living entirely from writing. And she did it, making the tradeoff so many women have felt compelled to make: “She has quite deliberately chosen to have neither husband nor children, those two great deterrents to any woman’s attempt to live by and for writing,” as one scholar put it. So I take her explanation of what drives someone to become a writer as coming from a very true, deep place. In an afterword to her collection Paris Stories, Gallant says:

The impulse to write and the stubbornness needed to keep going are supposed to come out of some drastic shaking up, early in life. There is even a term for it: the shock of change. Probably, it means a jolt that unbolts the door between perception and imagination and leaves it ajar for life, or that fuses memory and language and waking dreams. Some writers may just simply come into the world with overlapping visions of things seen and things as they might be seen. All have a gift for holding their breath while going on breathing. It is the basic requirement.

What interests me is this phrase holding their breath while going on breathing. And why it’s the basic requirement.

A very different writer offers an explanation. Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk about When I Talk about Running is about writing as much as running. “Most of what I know about writing I’ve learned through running every day,” he says. He runs “to acquire a void… the thoughts and ideas that invade my emotions as I run remain subordinate to that void.”

Murakami also runs to develop and maintain the focus and concentration needed to sit at a desk and think hard day after day for long enough to produce a novel. For writing, he explains, is hard physical and mental labor, like digging a deep hole in rock to “locate the source of creativity.”

You can compare it to breathing. If concentration is the process of just holding your breath, endurance is the art of slowly, quietly breathing at the same time you're storing air in your lungs. … Continuing to breathe while holding your breath.

He and Gallant are both talking about the ability to inhabit two alternate realities at the same time: the limitless world of imagination and the mundane world of objects. So “holding the breath” equals accessing the timeless subjectless place ideas arise from (the other side of Gallant’s door; Murakami’s “void”), while also finding language and constructing sentences that turn these ideas into an object—the words on the page or screen—in time and space.

In her essay “Why I Write,” Joan Didion describes the impulse that starts a novel as “what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” These things appear as pictures in her mind that shimmer around the edges. The molecular structure breaks down and the object and its background “exchange ions” and dissolve into each other. She doesn’t bother to think about where these pictures come from. She takes them as posing questions she needs to answer, and she writes to discover the answers.

That’s what happened to me, minus the shimmering. For The Women Outside, I wanted to know who exactly were the “shopping bag ladies” living with all their possessions on New York City sidewalks during the 1970s. For Slaying the Mermaid, I needed to figure out why the nuns who ran the homeless women’s shelter where I had volunteered, women I loved and admired, fell victim to a psychopathic would-be cult leader. In my case the images appeared after I began pondering these questions and I used them as analytic tools. But I believe they came from that same place of holding the breath.

Didion is right when she says there’s no need to figure out where ideas or images come from. What’s important is being able to live in the condition of unknowing, that suspended space between two realms. The source is a mystery, one that isn’t meant to be solved. But pursuing it leads to insight.

I remember vividly how petrified I was the first time I sat in a radio broadcast studio waiting for the host’s first question. Yet during that show, as well as the later interviews and talks I gave, I found myself responding out of a space much like Murakami’s void. My answers were far more skillful than if they had been formulated purely by my intellect.

So where did those answers—or the book itself--come from? Is that something I can know? Does it matter?

The important thing is not to get a swelled head, but rather to respect the mystery. Some things haven’t changed in forty-five millennia: that ultimate source isn’t yourself and isn’t under your control. So your job is not to dissect or analyze but just to get out of the way, because then there’s a chance it will speak to you again.

Stephanie is a freelance author, journalist, and book doctor in Brooklyn, NY. Her first book, The Women Outside: Meanings and Myths of Homelessness (University of California Press, 1992) was a finalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and received Honorable Mention, Emily Toth Award (Women's Caucus, Popular Culture Association, American Culture Association). She’s also author of Slaying the Mermaid: Women and the Culture of Sacrifice (Harmony Books, 1998) and has written seven books with expert collaborators. Recently she’s been writing essays, which have appeared in The Startup, Aeon, Salon, Tricycle, Curator Magazine, and The Manifest-Station.