Office Hours

Head vs. Heart

Hi everyone,

First, a word about our story from last Sunday, which was “The Dwarf Pine,” by Varlam Shalamov.

I asked my dear friend Mikhail Iossel (the dazzling Russian-born author of the recent story collection, Sentence) what Shalamov sounds like in Russian, and he replied:

“Very simple, almost brutally austere sentences, no adornments, no Solzhenitsyn-esque passion, much less his anger or propensity for sweeping indictments and global pronouncements; a toneless, dispassionate chronicler of hell harboring zero illusions with regards to the remotest possibility of one's spirit remaining unbroken for any length of time in Gulag. Yes, an absolutely brilliant writer, in some inexpressible, heart-breaking, otherworldly way.”

Thanks, Mikhail. (Check out this spectacular review of Sentence, in The Seaboard Review of Books).

Thanks to those of you who read and were kind enough to comment on my recent New York Times Opinion piece.

Now, on to our question of the week.

Q.

Thanks so much for your generosity of time and of spirit that makes Story Club an incredible, enlightening place. The example you set, the attitudes you model, are an inspiration in a world that needs so much more of that. Talk about being the change you seek…That’s you…..

This question is a bit long. I blame the shower. There is something about all that water around me that solidifies ideas, answers and heavy questions. I also apologize if I am repeating, or stealing, some words already said in SC by you or a clubber. I’ve been floating around in SC for years, have absorbed quite a lot, and might be mirroring some of it.

I want to ask you about connection - heartfelt connection - as a kind of truth in art. I strive in my writing and I seek in the work of others, a sense of connection that I feel in my heart rather than, or in addition to, knowing in my head. People speak of knowing something vs feeling something. When I know it, the logic holds together and the pieces fit, or build upon one another; there is structural integrity, and I might accept a story’s events and conclusions. But when I really feel it, there is not much logic needed. It’s like a door that opens so smoothly I forget I had to turn the knob. I am transported, swept in, delivered. I believe the story because it resonates. It shortcuts to my heart, where a different kind of P/N meter resides. I have also heard this described as the difference between form and spirit. Good or even great technique - elaborate vocabulary, descriptions and clever POV changes - does not capture me for long. Sometimes I even have trouble appreciating the masters. But insight into a situation or character’s spirit and emotions grabs me. However, it takes good writing to deliver that insight, so perhaps this is a chicken vs egg problem.

Right now the example on my mind is the much-discussed dogs in the excerpt from Tisma’s ‘Blam'. I was reading along, sort of appreciating the clean and effective writing while shielding my heart from the ending I already knew. Then those dogs showed up and pried me open. They snuck around my guard, engaging my emotions and instincts. I could not remain on a strictly rational plane. For me, it was very effective writing, and I fell in love a little with this new-to-me writer. Another example, though a bit from left field, is when a singer I am only half listening to kicks into a note or phrase that comes from deep inside them and I feel it go deep inside me, running up my spine. I’m not sure if that depth of expression or connection can be taught. It seems more like the result of the artist excavating their soul and sharing it.

I am hoping you might have something to say about this head-heart dichotomy. The things you describe in Story Club transcend writerly form and technique. Even though you do cover mechanics throughly, you often delve into the spirit of a story we are reading or a vulnerable question that comes into Office Hours. Your perception and intuition about the struggles of honestly expressing oneself, are remarkable. I think you help us to recognize and to do writing that is great, not just good. (Actually, this will sound like stroking the teacher too much, but you help me live better, not just write better.)

I am also thinking that your writing career may have progressed along a head to heart path? You have described the journey from technical writer in cubicle world, to freelance writer imitating famous authors, to finally finding (excavating?) your own true voice. (Maybe that E.M. Forster quote ‘Only Connect’ applies here.)

Perhaps you have some cautionary wisdom to offer as well, since the same intimate, authentic writing that shortcuts to the heart can be manipulated into propaganda, into un-truth, which is something we are seeing more these days. And I’m not just talking politics. Advertising, social media and too many smarmy things I read lately use performative authenticity to connect. It is the writing of imposters. And AI is getting better at this too. Humans are empathy machines and that vulnerability can be exploited. But I sure wouldn’t give it up for a life of guarded logic, stuck in my head but ‘safe.’ Perhaps the key is honing one’s skills to recognize when the connections are real, in our own work and in what we read. Instead of P/N meter it could perhaps be a True/False meter. How do you navigate this?

Anyway, thanks in advance if you feel this head-heart topic deserves some SC attention.

A.

Well, this is such an interesting question. And thanks for all the generous compliments which, you will note, I didn’t edit out.

At all.

I can only answer with what is true for me – functionally true – which is that I can’t get a story to have “heart” unless I work through the mechanics of it properly.

We can’t respond to a moment (in a story, or a song, or a movie, or a poem) in the abstract. We have to have a feeling for where we are, for what hangs in the balance at the moment in the piece.

There’s good writing, and there’s good writing experiencing the updraft of being exactly the writing needed at that artistic interval.

We should aspire to the second, I think.

Most of my writing, in early drafts, is kind of blurry in this respect. The language is fine but the import isn’t clear yet; it’s not clear what’s at stake, what that particular moment “is.”

The story itself isn’t sure yet what it is, which means that the moments within it haven’t been sorted out. Some will need to be eliminated. Others will come into sharper focus. Eventually, I’ll have a gut feeling of what, say, a certain scene is building toward, and will hone in on it and…suddenly that feeling of what you’re calling “heart” comes into the room (the room that is that moment in the story).

But the room had to be prepared first.

To pick up on your example from singing – regarding that moment when a singer “kicks into a note or phrase that comes from deep inside them” – we all know, from watching shows like American Idol or The Voice, the feeling of a singer doing that “kicking up” thing gratuitously, before the song has “earned” that moment. This can feel empty, show-boaty, merely performative. Sometimes the crack in the voice, or the allegedly emotive run comes too early, or these are happening too often, seemingly at every moment of the song.

In the kind of moment you’re talking about, there’s a feeling of spontaneity, a true moment of presence – of being aware, at that moment, of what that moment is – what it represents, in the song, and in the room.

In writing it’s different, of course.

But it’s also the same.

This thing you’re calling “heart” is, I think, a moment of real connection between reader and writer. But for that to happen, both parties need to be in agreement regarding where they are. They are in a state of mutual clarity about that.

And that sort of clarity, in my experience, has to be worked at. Clarity might be understood as a kind of mutual agreement.

We’re on a trip together; it’s late, we haven’t eaten, the day was a disappointment, it starts to rain. For one of us to turn to the other and say, “This sucks” – well, that’s clarity, that’s connection, because of the shared (and acknowledged) truth in it.

But it’s only felt as truth because we both know where we are.

You are right, by the way, dear questioner: my career did start out concerned with “the head” and progressed into the land of “the heart.” But my experience was not that I decided that or willed that change. I wanted it, for sure – the stories that were written more analytically, usually in overt imitation of someone else, were noticeably lacking in heart and I could feel that, and it made me sad. So I had the intention of writing more heartfully, for sure. But the way this happened had more to do with….well, initially, with voice.

I got free of my imitative tendencies and found a way to, a little bit, sound like someone new who, it turned out, was me.

The benefit of this was that I was no longer writing stories that should have been meaningful (because of their similarity in structure or voice or “theme” to the published stories that had moved me) but was suddenly writing stories in which I had some investment – stories that had something to do with me (my concerns at the moment, my sense of life).

These stories often froze up midway, because I was being puzzled by some question at their core, a question that would turn out to be answerable only by way of intense revising. That revising often felt like its purpose was to clarify: clarifying the stakes of the story, clarify the different options the character might have, to get out of the jam I’d put him in.

And this – this “clarifying” – is what allowed the story to feel like it was “about something” which, in turn, made it feel heartful.

It’s kind of like…if each of us Story Clubbers was required to stand up and make a five-minute (beautiful!) speech. One approach might be: find some nice passage from, say, Shakespeare, and read it. Or we might “decide” what was meaningful to us, and talk about that. Or – best of all, in my view – we might do a bunch of rehearsing beforehand, with the goal of sounding authentic (trying to make a rich and original language) and, in this process, eventually discover what the best and most interesting (surprising, unleashed, rowdy, vital) part of ourselves had been longing to say all along.

That’s how writing a story feels to me: discovery, discovery, yielding to discovery, going off in search of more discovery.

Not knowing, seeking density, speed, and zing in the language…

And “heart” – the feeling of connection between reader and writer — is, somehow, mysteriously, a natural by-product of that.

Finally, you allude to the dangers of propaganda, when one has prioritized “heart” (i.e., feeling) and right you are about that. I don’t trust pure emotion in writing – someone laying it all out for me, from the gut, and so on. This often has a feeling of oppressiveness; it only involves the speaker, and not the audience. True connection happens when the speaker is in a mode of high sensitivity to her audience. In writing, of course, this involves that whole sticky topic of how to imagine one’s readers (which we can talk about another time).

But: I try to be aware of where the emotion resides. Sometimes it’s just in me. I’m typing away, transported by myself – by my passion, my certainty, by how damn poetic I’m being.

And that’s fine…but the result has to bear re-reading.

To paraphrase David Foster Wallace, a real writer isn’t concerned with how she felt when she wrote something, she’s concerned with how her reader feels when he reads it.

So, “heart” is, of necessity, a shared experience between reader and writer.

P.S. I know many of you admired the excerpt we read from The Book of Blam, a novel by Aleksandar Tišma. If anyone wants to buy a copy, Skylight Books has it as their Pick of the Week and has copies available here.