Daily Nourishment for November 29, 2024: When the Writer Becomes a Lover with Guidance from Lauren Winner
Daily Nourishment Read Time: 60 seconds
Pause/Prompt/Practice Time: 15 minutes
A Note from Lauren: This week's invitations will each consider a writer or visual artist with a late November birthday. Today is the birthday of Madeleine L'Engle (1919-2007).
Pause.
As you slow your breath, linger over these words and phrases from L’Engle’s poem “Word”
I, who live by words, am wordless
all language turns to silence
take my words
reveal their emptiness
the stilled voice
adoration
this strange patterned time of contemplation
silence
healed and mended
returned to language
I see through words
Prompt.
“The approach to each book is different, as your approach to each person you speak to is different. If you’re a teacher, your approach to each child is different. But you have a basic approach, which is the same no matter what you’re writing. I have slowly emerged into my approach. When I was first writing, I was much more conscious of what I was doing. I was much less willing to relinquish my control. And here, of course, we get again into this incredible paradox of control and letting go, of having to have technique—because because if you do not have technique, nothing can speak through you—but then letting go so that the spirit of the work can move through you.”
What do L’Engle’s words about approach help you see about your own writing life?
Practice.
In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, L’Engle was asked “Have you read the Harry Potter books?” Her reply:
“I read one of them. It's a nice story but there's nothing underneath it. I don't want to be bothered with stuff where there's nothing underneath. Some people say, ‘Why do you read the Bible?'’I say, ‘Because there's a lot of stuff underneath.’”
Write an account of your past week with nothing underneath; then rewrite with a lot of stuff underneath. Or, realize that something you’ve lately written has an insufficient undercarriage, and rewrite it with more underneath.
Or
“It's a nice story but there's nothing underneath it”: L’Engle damns with faint praise and then makes a stinging criticism. The criticism is insightful—it shows us something about the novel being criticized. And it is generative—it shows us something about what’s important, what’s good, what we might look for in our own reading as aspire to in our own writing.
Think of something you deem really useless and lame, and write a sentence that formally imitates L’Engle’s; that is, damn with faint praise, and then make a specific, insightful criticism.
Postscript:
“In the end, the real writer becomes a lover.”
Want More?
Two rich books:
Madeleine L’Engle Herself: Reflections on a Writing Life
Listening for Madeleine: A Portrait of Madeleine L’Engle in Many Voices by Leonard Marcus
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Today’s Daily Nourishment was provided by Lauren Winner. Lauren Winner is a writer, professor, Episcopal Priest, & spiritual director.
Read Lauren’s full bio here.
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