deviant strategy: mystery
All writers write for some kind of audience whether that's one good friend, your journal, a writing circle, or a wider readership. If you’re like most writers I speak to, sharing work doesn’t get any easier however experienced you are. In fact, some of the coping strategies they use to deal with sharing work can reinforce painful feedback loops and make the experience even harder. The process of sharing can be bruising and tender, but it can also provide you with perspective and affirmation without draining yourself in the process.
When I work with writers, I focus on some well-known areas (perfectionism, self-doubt, comparisons with others, fear of ostracism, hard-wired survival strategies), but I think there is one area that is harder to pin down: the richness of the interior world you have created.
When you have been inhabiting a world so deeply, it can feel like a loss to turn it into something that other people can perceive. In some ways, the more fully-realised your imaginative space, the more difficult to let go of your vision.
Elvia Wilk, whose book I have been savouring, quotes Lewis Hyde on the etymology of the word ‘mystery’. “The root of our English word ‘mystery’ is a Greek verb, ‘muein’, which means to close the mouth. Dictionaries tend to explain the connection by pointing out the initiates to ancient mysteries were sworn to silence, but the root may also indicate, it seems to me, that what the initiate learns at a mystery cannot be talked about. It can be shown, it can be witnessed or revealed, it cannot be explained.”
I think this idea can act as a key for unlocking one of the reasons why sharing work can feel difficult.
If you spend a lot of time in your world, it makes sense that you can’t trust that others will understand it as you do. You may be reluctant to let it go. You may feel you have a closed mouth, and you don’t want to initiate others into your world.
Elvia Wilk, again, says that “in the Middle Ages in particular, women’s access to theological knowledge (the explanation and interpretation of sacred texts) was limited by circumstance. Therefore, the knowledge about God they produced was often empirical in the plainest sense: a kind of truth only obtained by firsthand, affective experience. Although not necessarily opposed to the religious theory or conventions of their time, given the radical authority implied by their often intimate communion with God, female mystics have at various points posed political threats to religious institutions; in these cases, mystics become martyrs.”
This “plain empiricism” can be applied to writing too. You might find yourself caught between feeling able to communicate with others, and fearing they won’t understand what you have so carefully crafted. This might be even more true if you are sharing something that has a deep personal resonance.
Perhaps the way to counter this is to show, witness or reveal. To extend trust that the other will feel what you are conveying to them. That the mystery is part of the pleasure.
I didn't name this series The Writing Mysteries by accident. I named it partly because of the rosary I grew up with, and still sometimes work with as a form of Folk Catholicism. There was something mystical, in the divine encounter sense, in praying the rosary, meditating on those poetically names mysteries. Jesus whipped and bloodied, Mary ascending to heaven in a dress made of stars, the betrayal in the garden. Those meditations allowed me time and space in the school chapel, or parish church, away from the real world that was often baffling and painful to me. I had a divine encounter with storytelling, and I learned that to meditate on those mysteries of life and death, betrayal and transformation, was one of the most transcendental experiences I could have.
I wish you a closed mouth and an open heart, and courage in sharing your work, the work that the world is hungry for, and which no one but you can gift to us. I hope you will consider initiating readers into your world, and trusting them with your work.
Image caption: August Strindberg's ‘Celestograph'. An image of copper swirls on dark blue ground. Impression of the night sky captured by photo-sensitive plates.