The Grasshopper #17: Emptiness
Abstract concepts and creativity
I am going to try and avoid getting philosophical here because I think philosophizing is a self-indulgent waste of time, and as such, pretty boring. So, writing about the role of emptiness in creativity, without philosophizing, is my challenge this week.
I must be bored.
When I wrote my title this week it hit me that I’ve done seventeen of these newsletters already. It started seventeen weeks ago, so that makes sense. I’ve done a Sunday edition most weeks though I’ve slacked off here and there this summer because it’s summer. So that’s something like thirty issues.
To put that in perspective, in my Medium writing during that time period I have written about 125 articles. So, I’ve been fairly prolific this year. I’m happy to say it never feels like work.
“Everything that's created comes out of silence. Your thoughts emerge from the nothingness of silence. Your words come out of this void. Your very essence emerged from emptiness. All creativity requires some stillness.”
Wayne Dyer
“And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.”
T. S. Eliot
Emptiness is a tricky topic because it is nothing and talking about how emptiness is essential to creativity seems counterintuitive. After all, how can you make something from nothing?
And yet that is what writers and artists do. An empty page or canvas is where you start. And from that you make something new, both to you and your audience. Writers create worlds, thousands of them, from emptiness. We also create ideas or give a reader a new way to view the world, if we are successful.
It’s a paradox. So writing about this can be, as the saying goes, like dancing about architecture. My personal experience is that I have to go to an empty place to start writing, a place where I am not distracted by external thoughts and demands. It’s a meditative place and it can be found anywhere.
This is not about only being able to work in a totally controlled environment of silence. I can write anywhere where my attention is not required for other things. When you make up a story, you are pulling that story from somewhere in your experience but not literally. You are grabbing bits of that experience and remaking them into something new and compelling.
Damn, I wasn’t going to get all philosophical about this. That’s kinda hard when you’re trying to describe a state of mind. Even if I’m writing an observation piece about something like the gradual disintegration of Trumpism that assembles a bunch of facts and draws a conclusion from them, I have to create a story, a thread that ties those facts and events together.
I’d argue that you have to empty your mind and let it re-assemble those ideas into something that progresses in some kind of order. Beginning, middle, end- that kind of thing. If you’re unsuccessful the reader will say to themselves, so what is the point? And you will have failed. You have not let the emptiness do its job, you’re thinking too much.
White space
When I started playing music with friends in my early twenties we didn't leave a lot of space in our songs. We felt a kind of urgency to make it dense and fast and brief. It was the nature of the early punk new wave thing. Only after we got better at playing could we spread things out and let silence build drama or longing.
Those who I started out playing with, that still play, have gone almost entirely in the direction of minimalism, letting more emptiness into their playing. The music is entirely a kind of meditation. This ability to leave empty or white space is critically important to writing.
That space creates natural pauses where that help the reader process.
With writing, editing is the tool we use to make this work. Most good editing is a process of removal. You take things out to make it stronger because you see where those things disrupt the flow.
Beginning writers are like those earnest young musicians we were years ago, packing words on a page as though time was running out and then finding themselves unable to edit out those extraneous words that trip up readers. That’s why to learn to edit you must access a different part of the creative mind. For me, these days, that means writing a piece, setting it aside, and then coming back to it as a critical reader, paring and pruning here and there until a balance is achieved.
That balance requires the use of empty moments, spaces like the spaces between paragraphs.
I’m not sure this can be taught. We know Hemingway was a young man when he write his most famous stories, stories known for their extreme sparseness. But to achieve that sparseness he had spent many years as a newspaper journalist, gone to war and had other experiences that taught him that less was more.
He counted a good writing day if he had written one good sentence. To do that meant letting many unnecessary words go back into that empty place where they came from.
Prior to Hemingway, writing was very different. Marcel Proust’s masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past, had sentences that went on for pages. I’ve tried multiple times to read it but get stymied every time by those sentences that go on so long that you forget what the point was at the beginning.
Today, the only writing I know of that glorifies really long sentences and words is academic writing, which is famously obtuse and barely readable. I guess the PhDs think that makes them sound smarter.
Space creates clarity.
I recently read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, her memoir of the year of grief she experienced after her husband’s death and as her grown daughter went in and out of a coma.
I had never read any of her books and this just knocked me out. Her style is unique and I’d argue that it is her use of emptiness and the random jump from one state to another that so clearly describes her state of mind as she grapples with loss.
That emptiness comes in the form of the random detail noticed out of context or a drift into a fantasy of being able to bring her husband back through her actions. I’m going to have to reread it to try and see how she pulls this off as a writer.
It’s a remarkable book, full of gifts. The best one for me, as a reader, is that I have discovered a prolific writer that I somehow missed. I now have a whole list of books with her name on them to read for the first time.