Getting things “wrong” as creative conversation
The courage and vulnerability of making cracked pots and collective poems, with help from Jenn Ashworth, Ursula Le Guin and Ephesians.
Writing a book is a bit like a multi-year pregnancy. Lots of work is going on, but only the outlines are visible to everyone else, and you don’t want to bang on about it too much until the “baby” actually arrives. Many things have to happen even after the text itself is finished and I am in one of those stages: correcting proofs. It messes with the process if I start changing things at this point (beyond grammar and spelling) because every word is set precisely on the page and editing anything is like literary Jenga. And so, of course, all my sentences strike me as shaggy and I have an almost physical urge to attack them savagely with secateurs. I am suddenly full of necessary caveats and crucial points to add, footnoted attempts to assuage my future critics. I can do none of these things, allowed only to send my imperfect, wonky pot of a book onwards down the production line, towards the printers and eventually, the shelves.
In times like these, as I ride the waves of vulnerability, I remind myself that all meaningful work feels like this. Particularly creative or innovative work, where there is no preexisting path and you are just following a series of hunches while trying not to lose faith. Breaking with the ways things have always been done or the lives we are “supposed” to lead takes a certain kind of courage, and courage is another of my deep values, something I want to cultivate in myself. Creativity takes more courage than I expected it to, alongside a certain kind of imperviousness to embarrassment, or at least a tolerance of it. Here is a thing I made, you have to say, like a child coming home from school, proud of their little pot despite its visible cracks. I want to channel that. I often don’t know how.
Luckily for me, I have a friend called Jenn Ashworth. She is much garlanded author, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Professor of Writing at Lancaster University. All of which means, she knows this feeling. We met when she came on The Sacred to talk about literature and her Mormon childhood (yes, the podcast is mainly a way of making friends) and have kept up a nerdy, metaphysically curious conversation ever since. She is wonderful.
I sent her a message trying to explain this mix of gratitude to even be in the process alongside moments of sheer, mortified exposure. I asked her how she deals with it. She replied with this:
Well - it’s very possible and even likely that people will read my books and find things wrong with them. Not because they didn’t understand it or they’re jealous or were in a bad mood but because there is actually something wrong with them. Because I made a mistake or didn’t finish thinking about something or didn’t know or got confused. Because I’m a limited person. And when they notice the thing I did wrong, a little light goes off and they’ll want to make something or think something or have a conversation or put something into the world. That is new! And will have something wrong with it! When I think of us all like children making these beautiful blundering things in relationship with each others limitations it makes me feel a lot of love. How wonderful to be in that mess rather than alone.
See? What a fabulous, liberating, tender way to think about it.
When I think of us all like children making these beautiful blundering things in relationship with each others limitations it makes me feel a lot of love.
This reframe of creative imperfections as part of the web of relationships helps me hugely. My mistakes will be in there, but they might be the stimulus for someone else’s story, someone else’s creativity. They are the seed of a dispersed conversation. This vision of Jenn’s goes with the grain of my trinitarian anthropology. I believe there is no such thing as an individual, especially not an isolated, perfect, artist, but instead only persons-in-relationships, defined by each other. Defined even by our critics, by how much generosity and open heartedness we can muster for our enemies.
It reminded me of one of the two essays which helped give me the courage to attempt to write a book at all, Ursula Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction1.
Le Guin gently mocks the general blueprint given to those who want to write any kind of narrative. This dominant cultural model centres one hero, striding out to battle a monster (or bad ideas, or idiots, or errors) in a linear, spear like fashion, with conflict an essential ingredient. When I set out to write a narrative non-fiction book, this was the script I had to tear up. I didn’t feel certain enough to write about why other people are wrong and I am right. I didn’t have a water-tight theory, or ten key principles, or a brand new analysis of something. I am not sure what my “value proposition is”, how to make sure I am taken seriously by seeming always intelligent and certain. I had some hunches and some doubts and some breadcrumbs of hard worn, entirely received wisdom and I wanted to share them.
Jenn Ashworth and Ursula Le Guin gave me the courage to see this as a legitmate aim. Le Guin takes issue with the heroes quest model, which I also see reflected in much of the Big Thinking/Smart Ideas dominant non-fiction genre (and also in too many theological books). She offers a roomier, more relational way of thinking about writing:
I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us……
[Writing] is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story. In it….there is room enough to keep even Man where he belongs, in his place in the scheme of things; there is time enough to gather plenty of wild oats and sow them too, and sing… and watch newts, and still the story isn't over. Still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars.
In Christian scripture, Ephesians 2:10 famously calls humans “God’s poiema”. This is a greek word usually translated ‘workmanship’ but from which we get poem and poetry. It’s much closer to saying we are God’s artwork than God’s economic output. Modern people who try and take this book seriously tend to take verses like these and apply them individually (I am God’s poem!), but most of scripture is doggedly, rigorously communal. If you believe this verse, it implies that we, you and me, all of us together, are a poem being written by Divine Love. As I send off my partial, imperfect proofs I remind myself that I am just a tiny part of a beautiful, painful, ongoing piece of poetry. I didn’t start it, I won’t finish it, but I can, with enough courage, contribute a few (shaggy, cracked, sincere) stanzas.
What else I’ve been up to
The most recent series of the podcast is coming to a close and there a few interviews I think might be of particular of interest to you lovely folk.
Following this post, I interviewed Dr Iain McGilchrist, and felt glad to connect to the man behind the very influential ideas.
This week we released an episode with John Verveake, who I know has been enormously helpful for many people who had rejected religion (and/or felt rejected by it) and are now taking a second look.
I wrote a review of a new book by Justin Brierly for Christianity Today.
Photo of pot by Mariana Beltrán on Unsplash
Photo of Jenn Ashworth by Martin Figura, used with permission
The other is Virginia Woolf’s A Room of her Own. I first read the Le Guin, I think, via
and returned to it this week after reading this beautiful piece by and being drawn to a comment by which shows how much Substack can be a place of relational, carrier-or-saddlebag like story telling (even when a lot of them are non-spear throwing men. I don’t know if Ursula would approve)
"Modern people who try and take this book seriously tend to take verses like these and apply them individually (I am God’s poem!), but most of scripture is doggedly, rigorously communal."
Twice in recent weeks, I've had my attention drawn to the translation of the opening of John's gospel, and the suggestion that Logos might better be rendered as "conversation" than "the Word". First it was Victoria Loorz from Wild Church who told me this, then I met it again in Andrew Shanks's Hegel vs 'Inter-Faith' Dialogue. And last night, reading Shanks's book and thinking of something Martin Shaw said recently, my mind leapt to Tyson Yunkaporta's Sand Talk and the way he has introduced so many of us to the Aboriginal English expression, 'yarning', to describe a way of being in conversation quite different to the point-scoring of modern public debate or academic discourse, and so a new translation offered itself: 'In the beginning was the yarn'. For, as Raimon Pannikkar said, 'We are knots within nets of relations.'
So true, Elizabeth - about faith and writing, which - at its best is a work of faith. I love Dougald's comments about the Word in John's gospel. I sense that when God spoke Creation into being, it was never a monologue. The light answered and everything else, ever since, has been in response. God allows the conversation, the improvised drama, the collective God-breathed story to keep unfolding. Every blessing to you as your first perfectly imperfect book comes into the world. I know it will invite so many others to join the work of Creation.