rough draft updated into a final draft

CHAPTER EIGHT INSIGHT

Literature is devoted to exploring the human experience, and as creative writers, we’re constantly attempting to show our readers, with words, the subtle and complex drama of being human. We want to entertain our readers, yes, but we also want readers to learn and understand more about who we are as humans. This kind of work is an important aspect of the craft of writing, one often over-looked in manuals and craft books: insight. We read and write in order to see into the human condition.

A writer looks closely at his or her subjects, and in rendering people and topics with action and dialogue, pattern and image, the writer brings to light some of the more interesting features of human nature—why we do the things we do, why we avoid certain situations, why we repeat behaviors that are clearly counter-productive. Thus insight results not from “deep thoughts” or isolated genius but rather from a writer simply paying close attention to the world and to people. Insight essentially boils down to looking at people and situations and nature up close and in depth and then questioning what it is one sees. Things other people might pass right by are the source for writers’ insights. Most people hurtle so quickly through life that they risk missing some of the more interesting aspects and conclusions one can draw. Writing slows us down, asks us to pay attention. Literature captures what is missed when we’re rushing through.

Of course you can’t take a piece in progress and just decide to make it more insightful. Wisdom doesn’t work that way. In fact, if you try to “put in” insight, you might end up writing clichés, or oversimplifying what’s complex and interesting in your work. But you can use some principles and techniques that will help you generate work that is complex, layered, thoughtful, and meaningful.

Remember that having survived childhood, you know a lot more about human nature than you might think. And a core part of your lifelong work as a writer is knowing how to bring the insights—your inner wisdom—up from within your soul and out onto the page, reflected in the images you present to your reader. As you work on the strategy of insight, you’ll find your previous work with energy, tension, images, and pattern has already prepared you to look and listen and shape raw material into subtle, complex, meaningful writing that is necessary and long-lasting.

PRACTICE

Identify one of your favorite pieces included in this textbook. Write a short paragraph about the insight into human nature that this piece offers. Can you put into words the wisdom in the piece?

Another way to think about insight in creative writing is to recall what you’ve learned about reading in your literature courses. In creative writing, insight—depth—is what is most meaningful in a piece, and often it’s what’s most memorable. In literature courses, you may have reduced pieces to a “theme” or message—that’s one approach to talking about insight, but not always the most helpful approach for writers. The matrix of insights in a single piece of literature is often complex and varied, and most writers find their way toinsight, or theme, from working with images and characters. The idea that writers take a Big Concept and then illustrate it, using their characters to play out an idea, is something of a myth. “No ideas but in things,” the poet and physician William Carlos Williams famously said, meaning that writers, like scientists, must look at what is before them and accurately lay down what they see, and that very process will be the idea, or meaning.

For example, Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral” ( p. 119 ) contains numerous insights, small and large, into how sighted people behave around the blind and how married people behave in general, resulting in wisdom about human growth and the potential for people to change their vision of the world. But this wisdom is always embedded in the characters, their action and dialogue, and the setting itself. The Pharmacist’s Mate (excerpted on  p. 76 ), Amy Fusselman’s memoir, contains wisdom about asking profound and unanswerable questions about death, music, and fertility. She offers valuable, rarely heard observations about the wisdom of changing your mind, taking risks, and following your passions and inner wisdom. But these ideas came to her during her writing process, not in advance. Insight is created less by Thinking Deep Thoughts and more by writing. Paying attention + writing = insight.

In presenting her portrait of truants in “We Real Cool” ( p. 101 ), the poet Gwendolyn Brooks presents insight into the romanticized attitudes toward death held by members of a gang. She doesn’t talk about her subject; she has the subject itself speak. “No ideas but in things” or, in this case, people. And Marisa Silver’s short story “What I Saw from Where I Stood” ( p. 251 ) plays out hard-won insights into just how complex it is to be young, in love, living in a large city, and up against some of life’s toughest questions—the action of the story illustrates her ideas. Gregory Orr focuses his poem “The River” ( p. 302 ) around insights into the exact nature of desire, and the risk we take when we fall—or in this case leap—into love. Many people might not think there’s much to learn from listening to truants or quirky, struggling English majors or skinny-dipping couples on the brink. Creative writers, however, believe that examining everyday human situations—no matter how superficial or weird or sensual or sad or hilarious they might appear to someone else—is of great value.

Good writers learn how to reenter the scenes and moments in their writing that might yield an insight, and they let the speakers and the characters in their work discover insights. Working with the strategy of insight is really just a matter of practicing noticing and recording in this new way: Creative writers are explorer-discoverers, finding insights as they work rather than working from conclusions and then using the work to illustrate canned or packaged ideas. Good writers don’t sit down and come up with brilliant insights, sticking in bits of wisdom here and there throughout a piece of writing as though mixing gelled fruit into a fruitcake batter. For example, if you take six photographs of your mother, study them closely, work hard to render these images of her into language, and re-create scenes that reveal specific aspects of her, you will likely discover more than one or two insights about your mother. Parts of her personality will come into focus. The reasons that she does things the way she does might suddenly become clear. This is much more interesting for your reader than your deciding, in advance, “I will write an essay about my mother the control freak,” and then proceeding to marshal evidence you have already decided will fit your thesis.

There is only one trait that marks the writer. He is always watching. It’s a kind of trick of mind and he is born with it.

— MORLEY CALLAGHAN

Writing makes us wiser, and insight is a kind of dance between knowing what you want to say and letting the writing take you to a new place of discovery. As William Stafford writes in Writing the Australian Crawl:

A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them. That is, he does not draw on a reservoir; instead he engages in an activity that brings to him a whole succession of unforeseen stories, poems, essays, plays.

PRACTICE

Examine the short story “White Angel” by Michael Cunningham (p. 341). What wisdom is directly stated in the piece? What insights are implied? Can you find wisdom in any of the dialogue? Do any lines in the story that are in the thoughts of the main character strike you as wise? Does the author include insights about how people behaved in this time and place? Try to come up with a list of ten insights from the story.

PRINCIPLES OF INSIGHT

When it comes to reading and writing for insight, writers rely on two principles: accuracy and generosity.

Accuracy

To employ the strategy of insight in your writing, you’ll practice a kind of laserlike, dead-on accuracy in your observations and details. Comedian Jerry Seinfeld’s television show Seinfeld was popular partly because Seinfeld and his friends on the show spent an enormous amount of time simply observing and then naming, with great precision, everyday things we experience all the time but never notice: the low talker, the close talker. That’s in large part what “smart” is: accurate. Noticing tiny true things that everyone else glides by. Seeing closely. You don’t have to be “deep.” You just have to get it exactly right.

A writer’s mind seems to be situated partly in the solar plexus and partly in the head. — ETHEL WILSON

How? By paying close attention to your subject.

In your writing, strive for a kind of scientific accuracy (describing things exactly as they are) and psychological accuracy (presenting human behavior exactly as you see it, not slanting actions one way or the other to make a particular point). What you discover by writing will always be more revealing, more likely to produce insight than what you think of ahead of time. The image work you did in Chapter Four is the best way to practice insight. To allow the deeper insights to come to the surface, practice looking closely at scenes and settings, and pay particular attention to what you see. Simply listing what you see when you look at a place can result in a piece chock-full of insight, as in Bob Hicok’s poem “A Primer” (p. 74), about exactly what it’s like to experience spring after a long Michigan winter.

When you focus on accurately rendering just what you see, pay special attention to each of these areas: gestures and dialogue. Often, these are the places wisdom comes shining through.

Gestures.

Actions speak louder than words. When you write about people, write from close up, and focus tightly on their gestures—how they move their bodies and what those gestures imply about what they want and how they are feeling. You want to focus on action—it’s our behavior that reveals our character. What kind of things, large and small, do the people you are writing about do? How exactly do they do it, and what tiny distinctions do you notice between one person’s little actions and another’s way of doing the exact same thing? Focus less on facial expressions—wrinkled brows, crinkly smiles, and raised eyebrows—which almost everyone does roughly the same way to demonstrate feelings of worry, happiness, and disapproval. Focus on the way a father walks wildly down the aisle in the liquor store; the way a lonely, newly married woman calls to a small cat, using a high, silly voice; the way a baby—who will, the speaker imagines, someday be a bride—grabs and pulls the laminated safety card in the airplane seat back pocket. Gestures are the things we do that make up the fascinating texture of our individual lives; if you look closely and record, you’ll likely create a layer of revelatory insight.

PRACTICE

Examine Mary Robison’s “Pretty Ice” (p. 166). For the mother, the daughter, and her fiancé, make a list of two or three gestures—the physical behaviors of the characters—and how each reveals an insight into that person’s psychology. For example, the mother honks the horn repeatedly. What insight into that kind of person does this gesture show? Will smokes the mother’s cigarettes. What does that gesture perhaps reveal about his nature?

Dialogue.

In addition to the insights that come from watching human behavior as closely and carefully as a scientist, you also find insight by listening to exactly how people talk. There’s a kind of shorthand, faked dialogue that marks amateur creative writing: Avoid writing down what you think people sound like; instead, be like a reporter and capture the exact things people say. Rather than giving your characters lines, let them surprise you. Interview them. Your characters may or may not speak wisdom. But your reader will find your insights into human behavior compelling if you record the ways in which people say and misstate what they mean, often hiding what they really think. In Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” (p. 119), the wife says to the blind man, “I want you to feel comfortable.” He replies that he is comfortable. That dialogue has wisdom in it. The author is using the dialogue to say something deeper about the blind man’s character, our definitions of comfort, and surface social interactions. The blind man doesn’t need anyone’s help to feel at ease. He is deeply at ease in who he is. He is, truly, comfortable. It’s the others who aren’t, but they don’t know it.

The reader gleans insight.

PRACTICE

Read Ernest Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain” (p. 337) several times. What do you notice the characters saying? In what ways does their dialogue provide insight into their character? Or choose any short story or essay and read it, focusing tightly on the dialogue. Do any spoken words mean more than what they say on the surface? Write a brief analysis of the dialogue lines that seem to you to contain a deeper wisdom, or resonance.

Generosity

Perhaps you used to write for yourself, and maybe you still do. But now you are doing something different: You now write for readers. Good writers are generous to their readers, creating work that flows and is clear and enjoyable to read, filled with surprises, careful observation, and precise word choices. But writers are generous to their characters and subjects as well. Good writers make sure they include compassion and complexity in each piece of writing. If a character is all good or all bad, the reader will probably rebel and perhaps even start to side with your villain, or turn against your shining angel girlfriend character because, frankly, no one is that perfect and she makes us sick. Give your villains some good qualities. Give your heroes a few small flaws, and at least one large one. We are all flawed.

If you write from “on high,” hypercritical of everyone and everything you write about, showing humans only at their most petty, most violent, most unaware, you will likely not be writing lasting, insightful work. Recall Raymond Carver’s story “Cathedral” (p. 119). Carver is generous in his insights. He shows Robert’s annoying qualities as well as his good ones. He does the same for the wife and, most importantly, for the narrator. The narrator has a lot of limitations. But he has some good points, too. Carver explores all these angles. He’s a master of tension, and he uses these tensions to draw conclusions—insights—about how human psychology works. We don’t always act in ways that get us what we want. Sometimes, we can’t see what’s right in front of us. We put on acts, try to impress others, when really we are insecure, afraid. Carver, like any highly evolved human, is generous to the narrator. He sees the man’s limitations as well as the context for those limitations. He shows the reader what the narrator is trying to do. When the narrator fails, Carver shows us his pain. He shows his humanity.

Smart writers seek to understand human flaws, see weakness and strength, and balance their description by looking at a moment from many sides. Even artists famous for a dark or despairing view of the world, such as Franz Kafka or Quentin Tarantino or Sylvia Plath, thread humor or compassion or earnest attempts at human connection into their work. They are generous with compassion and empathy. “If it could happen to you, it could happen to me.” That’s the basic premise of generosity in art, and that’s why art connects us.

PRACTICE

Reread “Boys” by Rick Moody (p. 212). What are his insights into boys and families? Which insights are stated directly? What wisdom does he have about boys and maleness that is stated indirectly, that is found between the lines? Is Moody generous in his insights? That is, does he say, “Here are the flaws, but look at how, and why, and see the good, the complexity”?

PRACTICE

Reread “Buying Wine” by Sebastian Matthews (p. 69). Is he generous to the people in this poem? Not generous? What lines in the poem give the most insight into who these people are and what’s important to them? Does Matthews try to understand human weakness and create insight into it, or does he judge? Something else altogether?

CULTIVATING INSIGHT

What follows are eight practical avenues to insight. You can use these insight techniques to improve pieces in progress, to start new pieces in any genre, to get unstuck, or just to build observational skills. You can mix and match the techniques, but it will be most helpful to try each one on its own, at least once. You can also use these techniques when you read in order to see how authors layer insight into their works. You can use these techniques to practice a writerly habit of mind—noticing tiny details, focusing on images, staying open to questions, toying with reversals—all conducive to building the muscles of close observation, strengthening your ability to uncover inner wisdom. The goal is to develop works of creative writing, works that are rich, innovative, observant, fresh, and smart. Experiment out of your comfort zone. You know a lot more than you think you do! The trick is finding ways to get your depth and your inner wisdom out onto the page.

Use Experience

Most writers, when they are starting out, feel they don’t know enough to be considered Wise and Writerly. Even experienced writers doubt they have enough to say or important things to say. For most writers, the feeling of having something to say varies daily, even hourly. Often, on any day we feel empowered to write, when we sit down to create a scene, we feel dumb, blocked, empty. Pointless.

The most important thing a writer can do to develop wisdom and insight is to trust that if she pays attention to her own experience in the world, if she looks long enough at the very things in front of her and closely enough at her own life and the lives of those she knows, then she will have a fairly good chance of writing some interesting stuff. This method for cultivating insight doesn’t mean you are stuck writing only from personal experience. It means you work from life, starting close to home, writing what you know intuitively and emotionally, and working out from there. An important caveat: Use your actual experience in your lived life. If you write about firefighters, based on watching shows about firefighters, the reader will probably be able to tell that this is not your firsthand experience. Unless you work from your experience or very detailed, in-depth research—which requires you to actually talk to firefighters and experience the emotions they do when actively involved in a crisis—chances are the work will be thin, clichéd, false, or all three. Viewing actors portraying characters is not the same as having your own experience.

Remember: You have been in relationships with all kinds of people—brilliant, limited, powerful, mean, beautiful, spiritual, petty, stupid. As a writer, you combine and recombine details and experiences from your life.

In fiction, you create composite characters, using a bit of Brenda’s cocky attitude and mixing it with Sarah’s prim bossiness, blending character traits to create a convincing person of your own invention on the page. Even as a child, you knew a great deal about how complicated human situations are, and as a writer you draw on all your experiences with death in order to write a story about loss and grief. Your characters aren’t foreign to you; they’re combinations of people you’ve known intimately over the years.

Maybe your life has been straightforward—nothing too terrible. Or maybe you have struggled mightily for years because of all kinds of circumstances beyond your control. Regardless, you know a lot about the depths of the human psyche because you have owned and operated one for some time now. From your lifelong study of humans in the world—your humans, on your street, in your circumstances—you do have something to say. Maybe you haven’t read Moby-Dick or traveled to South America. Maybe you don’t speak two, three, four languages or study ancient cultures. Maybe you have no idea what you want to be when you grow up. You don’t need to know more than you know right now in order to get started on insight. The great writers of the world have simply focused very tightly on the insights they can glean from what is right before them: Zora Neale Hurston’s African American Floridians north of Orlando, living their lives. Ernest Hemingway’s kid up north in Michigan, fishing, hunting, falling in love. Jay Mclnerney’s superficial, greedy New York City partiers. Amy Tan’s mother-daughter struggles in a tightly knit Chinese American family. Great writers look at what’s in front of them, instead of thinking that wisdom is out of reach.

Whether you are writing fiction, nonfiction, poems, plays, or essays, tell the truth of what you know the most about—minigolf employee subculture; surfer slackers on the Great Lakes where there are no real big waves, literally and metaphorically; dorm life in the midst of a massive World of Warcraft addiction. Tell, as close and finely as you possibly can, everything about the behind-the-scenes subcultures you know. Tell the secrets of the inner lives. Notice every tiny detail. Tell it all.

We are each called to speak the truth—share the wisdom—from our little corner of the world, saying this is how people are here, this is what they do, this is how they react to this, here is how they’re going to respond to that, and here’s why.

A writer’s duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.

— ZADIE SMITH

You don’t have to write from personal experience. But you probably do need to consider writing about what keeps you up at night. What to understand about what you don’t know about what you do know.

PRACTICE

Examine Jessica Greenbaum’s “A Poem for S.” ( p. 335 ). It’s a complex poem, and you’ll want to read it aloud and to read it several times. The poem was written to offer solace to the poet’s friend, S., whose wife is very ill. What is the wisdom in this poem? How does Greenbaum try to get her own personal insights on suffering, religion, death, and hope across to the reader? If Greenbaum didn’t have a specific friend in pain, could she have written a convincing poem on the topic? Do you think S. received solace from her poem?

PRACTICE

Revisit the list of topics you made in the second Practice on  page 17  (or try this Practice now). Choose one you haven’t tackled this semester, one that would be hard to write about because it would ask you to reveal quite a lot. Write for ten minutes, listing all the human actions and reactions you can “see” in your mind’s eye on this topic.

Trust Images

Creative writing is all about providing readers with a sensory experience. When working on insight, go back to the core strategy that informs creative writing: creating images that work like moving pictures—little movies—in the reader’s mind. Creative writing works through the five senses. We don’t write in order to hit the reader over the head with The Deep Meaning; in fact, in this particular art form, we actually avoid writing about ideas. In creative writing, wisdom is lodged inside images, layered between experiences; it’s seen and felt and touched. The most powerful way to cue the sensory world in your reader is to provide “moving pictures”—images, as you learned in  Chapter Four —that will play out in the reader’s mind and evoke insight.

When writing about an abstract situation, such as love or injustice or doubt, creative writers often use techniques such as personification to ground their message in concrete images. Take a close look at the poem “Another Lullaby for Insomniacs” by A. E. Stallings ( p. 335 ). Read the poem out loud several times, and notice how sleep is portrayed here as a fickle lover—an actual person—who refuses to visit the speaker of the poem, leaving the poor person tossing and turning and filled with jealousy because elsewhere people aresleeping.

PRACTICE

Read “The Colonel” by Carolyn Forché ( p. 185 ) aloud several times. In what ways does Forché use images—action and dialogue—to make arresting political observations in this prose poem? If she had spelled out her ideas about brutality and power, what would be gained? Lost?

PRACTICE

Write a short piece in which you take an abstract situation or a feeling or an emotion such as insomnia, jealousy, fear, or boredom. Turn the concept into a person, and set the two of you in a scenario where you struggle. The more specific you can make the person and the more detail you can offer on your fight, the better.

Ask Questions

Instead of answering big questions on the page, insightful creative writing often poses questions. Artists, like children, ask many questions—huge, ridiculous, sacred, amazing, inappropriate, tiny, potent, unanswerable questions. Creative writing often points to conclusions even as it resists coming up with pat answers. Creative writing isn’t afraid of a little mystery. Why your ex behaved that way isn’t ever going to be revealed. It’s just not. But looking closely at the how and why of the tension between the two of you may well generate something more useful and interesting for both you and your readers. Questions usually lead us closer to the truth, toward deeper insights, and into the realm of wisdom. Asking the right question—specific, targeted, precise—is wisdom. When writing pretends to have all the answers, readers often keep the work at arm’s length. Certainty can close things down, end things too quickly, cut off the very curiosity that keeps us learning, moving us toward insight. In fact, asking the right questions is often wiser—and more difficult, truth be told—than coming up with answers.

You never know what you will learn ‘til you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed.

— ANITA BROOKNER

Getting in the habit of questioning—staying open to not knowing longer and longer—gives you a direct line to your innate wisdom. Practice letting your work pose small pointed questions, as well as giant life-mystery questions, so the reader remains engaged, active, surprised, and wondering right along with you. The secret here is to make sure your questions take place from within images—in scenes, in real places at real points of time.

Instead of having “great ideas” or answers for writing projects, get in the habit of asking questions about human behavior and motivation.

Asking good questions requires you to develop a habit of paying close attention to exactly what you were wondering at an exact moment. This takes time and practice, but you can do it just as well as anyone else—just ignore the uncomfortable feelings that will come when you first give it a try.

Good questions are usually not the first ones you think of. Use listing as your technique—before, during, and after writing—in order to generate insight-bearing questions. Wise questions often come in clusters—not freewriting, not thinking out loud, but a calculated, forceful deepening of the narrator’s hopes and considerations.

The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.

—ANAÏS NIN

Instead of recording your feelings in your journal, get in the habit of keeping a writer s notebook in which you ask questions. You can use this notebook to explore the questions that keep you up at night. What is the nature of your father’s essential personality, and what of that—good and bad—have you inherited? Why do we drive too fast, drink too much, act irresponsibly? What motivates us? Why do we keep dating the same wrong person? Why is doing the wrong thing sometimes pleasurable? Asking questions that don’t have easy answers—or possibly any answers at all—is a great reason to start a piece of writing.

Writers spend time asking questions. We’re the ones who pause on the street and say, “Wait. Stop. Did you notice that? Do you wonder why?”

PRACTICE

Read Brian Doyle’s memoir “Two Hearts” ( p. 340 ). The author asks a question in the piece, but many other questions are implied. Make two lists—one of overt questions and one of implied questions. In what ways do the questions the piece raises generate insight?

PRACTICE

Set your timer for ten minutes. By hand, quickly write a list of every single question that has crossed your mind in the past twenty-four hours. Leap from big questions (Is there a God?) to mundane ones (Will I eat pizza for dinner?) to ultra-personal to ultra-serious to wildly crazy questions. Type up your list, and if you share lists with a classmate, discuss the questions on the lists. Are any insights or wisdom implied in this list?

Go Cold

To allow the insight in your work to emerge, trying pulling back on writing about emotion directly.

In an essay she wrote for  Brevitymag.com  on the writer’s craft, author Dylan Landis notes: “Early drafts (at least mine) and student writing are often marked by descriptions of strong feeling. Characters gaze at each other with overt love. They feel proud, ashamed, joyous and heartbroken, and the writers come out and say so. What could be wrong with that?” She goes on to describe how the great short story writer and playwright Anton Chekhov critiqued another author, telling her not to overwrite the emotions and feelings in her work. Chekhov said, “When you describe the miserable and unfortunate, and want to make the reader feel pity, try to be somewhat colder—that seems to give a kind of background to another’s grief, against which it stands out more clearly. Whereas in your story the characters cry and you sigh. Yes, be more cold.”

You’ve heard this before because it’s another way of understanding show, don’t tell. “Going cold” means that the more intense the emotion is, the less intense the writing should be. Going cold means that at moments of high emotional intensity the author actually pulls back on the writing itself so that the reader has more room to feel.