Have You Been Silenced? Tillie Olsen Lesson 12 Write it! How to get started Late!
As a writer, how to free yourself and sing!
Two writing experiments follow in this lesson. For Lesson 13, coming in two weeks after another guest post, it would be a good idea to buy and read Young Men and Fire by Norman McLean. Mclean (1902-1990), who started late! That book is available used at ABE Books for about 5 bucks and check out Thrift Books. (I don’t recommend buying any book used if the author is alive, as the author never gets a cent from that sale.)
Let’s break the silence and begin with two writing experiments (below—and more!):
Here’s a line from Olsen’s “I stand Here Ironing”(see Lesson 11) : “I will never total it all.”
Take it and begin free writing. I explain “free write” and give you our first one here:
Now that you have that free write, what to do? First “journal” as Rebecca Holden discusses in her guest post.
On the problem of silence, Olsen is eloquent. Silences1, available in libraries and on Amazon, new, old and Kindle. Quotes used here are “fair use” for teaching:
“Does it become clear … what literary history bears out—why most of the great works of humanity have come from lives (able to be) wholly surrendered and dedicated? How else sustain the constant toil, the frightful task, the terrible law, the continuity? Full self: this means full times as and when needed for the work. (That time for which Emily Dickinson withdrew from the world.)
“But what if there is not that fullness of time, let alone totality of self? What if the writers … must work regularly at something besides their own work—as do nearly all in the arts in the United States today.
“I know the theory (kin to ‘starving in the garret makes great art’) that it is this very circumstance which feeds creativity. I know, too, that for the beginning young, for some who have such need, the job can be valuable access to life they would not otherwise know. A few (I think of the doctors, the incomparables: Chekhov and William Carlos Williams) for special reasons sometimes manage both. But the actuality testifies: substantial creative work demands time, and with rare exceptions only full-time workers have achieved it. Where the claims of creation cannot be primary, the results are atrophy; unfinished work; minor effort and accomplishment; silences.2
“What follow is the blues. Writer, don’t read it. You know it anyway, you live it; and have probably read it in one way or place or another before and said better. This is for readers to whom it may be news. An unrevised draft is all I can bring myself to.
“When Van Gogh … said:
‘The dissatisfaction about bad work, the failure of things, the difficulties of technique … and then to swallow that despair and that melancholy … to struggle on notwithstanding thousands of shortcomings and faults and the uncertainty of conquering them … All this complicated by material difficulties … One works hard, but still one cannot make ends meet.’
“He was speaking for most dedicated writers. Ah, if that were all.
“ ‘Who will read me, who will care?’ It does not help the work to be done that work already completed is surrounded by silence and indifference—if it is published at all. Few books ever have the attention of a review—good or bad. Fewer stay longer than a few weeks on bookstore shelves, if they get there at all. … ‘Works of art’ (or at least books, stories, poems, meriting life) ‘disappear before our very eyes because of the absence of responsible attention,’ Chekhov wrote nearly ninety years ago. Are they even seen? Out of the moveable feast, critics and academics tend to invoke the same dozen or so writers as if none else exist worthy of mention, or as if they’ve never troubled to read anyone else.” 3
“As for myself, who did not publish a book until I was fifty, who raised children without household help or the help of the ‘technological sublime’ (the atom bomb was in manufacture before the automatic washing machine); who worked outside the house on everyday jobs as well (as nearly half of all women do now, though a woman with a paid job, except as a maid or prostitute, is still rarest of any in literature); who could not kill the essential angel (there was no one else to do her work); would not—if I could—have killed the caring part of the Woolf angel; as distant from the world of literature most of life as literature is distant (in content too) from my world:
The years when I should have been writing, my hands and being were at other (inescapable) tasks. Now, lightened as they are, when I must do those tasks into which most of my life went, like the old mother, grandmother in my Tell Me a Riddle who could not make herself touch a baby, I pay a psychic cost: ‘the sweet beads, the long shudder begins.’ The habits of a lifetime when everything else had to come before writing are not easily broken, even when circumstances now often make it possible for writing to be first; habits of years—response to others, distractibility, responsibility for daily matters—stay with you, mark you, become you. The cost of ‘discontinuity’ (that pattern still imposed on women) is such a weight of things unsaid, an accumulation of material so great, that everything starts up something else in me ; what should take weeks, takes me sometimes months to write; what should take months, takes years.” 4
Post in comments what you’ve written—or any thoughts you have. Only paid subscribers have access to this lesson and the more you participate, the better these lessons get.
Doing so would not only be an act of generosity, and if you ask, I will write back to you privately via your email to help a bit. I’ll comment here only positively, as we don’t want to “throw out the baby,” meaning the invention, “with the bathwater.” This is not and will never be a punishing place for you to experiment.
Here’s a second getting-started free write exercise: Take this sentence from Olsen’s “Tell Me A Riddle” and do a free-write: “She (he) did not know if the tumult was outside, or in her (him).”
When I began teaching this course, I said the writer’s work comprises: the analytical (what the writer needs to understand, the conscious work) and the intuitive (the unconscious work). Make sure when you do a free write and are in the process of invention to keep the analytical quiet.
My Rule for inventing:
Closing quote 5:
Remember Joseph Conrad’s words. Take courage, dear writers. I do!
Lesson 13 will take us to Norman McLean, whom many of you know from the film, based on his book A River Runs Through It. Click to buy and ➡️ Read Young Men and Fire to prepare for the lesson.
Click ➡️ Lesson 13, Starting Late, part one q’s: Norman McLean Young Men and Fire
Or
Tillie Olsen, Silences, Dell Publishing, New York, 1972.
Ibid, p. 13.
Ibid, pp. 169-170.
Ibid, pp. 38 -39.
Ibid, p. 172-3.
What Olsen says about literary silences hit me in an unusual way -- I thought of music. Silences occur there too: Despite an innate, life-long love of music, years spent not listening, not playing, not learning and inventing. I know. Thanks, Mary, what you bring us here is inspiration and hope.
"Editing is always a secondary task." So true. I didn't know back then how liberating free writes could be. Learnt this from you. Analysed too much. Thanks again, Mary.