The Keys to the Submarine
“All you can give us is what life is about from your point of view. You are not going to be able to give us the plans to the submarine. Life is not a submarine. There are no plans.” – Anne Lamott
The two guides for life that have made the most difference to mine, I hadn’t read either of when they first made that difference.
The first of the two came via my physiotherapist, Neil, and the (gently disputed) original source of the quote, Einstein: “If we always do what we always did we will always get what we always got”[1] in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R Covey. Neil hadn’t read it either, way back in the mists of 2007 when he first quoted it to me, but he saw the truth of it every workday with his patients. Like all the advice we’re capable of taking, this quote doesn’t set up any uncomfortable us-and-thems; any sense that seeing the truth being offered means admitting a failing in ourselves. Which is exactly why expert mindset is best avoided even when we, technically and against the evidence of our own impostor syndrome, are an expert. Neil never once intimated he knew more about my knees, mindset or dyspraxia than I did. As a result, there are days now I forget that walking without pain was once an impossible dream: because Neil supported me in turning it through an incremental process into a realisable goal. He discovered what I was capable of alongside me, just as I try to do alongside the characters in my stories. I hold the space; they make their discoveries.
The second, Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, came as an image rather than a specific quote and has been central to my development as a writing, communication and confidence coach. It’s about seeing one emotion at a time: recognising it; naming it; acknowledging what it is as separate to what it might represent to us. “Say the thing”, as John-Paul Flintoff and I discussed recently in Connection Through Imperfection. That kind of emotional bird-spotting is vital in working with writers (oneself first and most of all). It’s the best and arguably only way to stay friends with our instincts; to not believe it would be more efficient to overwhelm them with logic and tidy sentences instead of letting our early drafts run free to discover themselves: the siren song of perfectionism.
But it’s the submarine that’s on my mind today, or more specifically why we try to have so much less fun and so much less discovery than we’re capable of by looking for the plans (or, as I imagine it, the keys) and indeed for someone to give them to when we convince ourselves we’ve found them.
The worst thing I ever wrote – or, at least, the worst thing I ever wrote that saw the light of day – was a radio play about kidulthood. That term was just catching on when I had (alright, yes, lived) the idea in my early twenties. The main problem was I didn’t know the difference between using your life experience as fuel for your creative writing as opposed to using your life experience as fuel for a police report (except that, had I been writing a police report, the action would have been far less trivial than this was).
It wasn’t all bad – very few things are without enough positive elements for the people we entrust our work for feedback not to construct a meaningful shit sandwich[2] –indeed, one of the actors quoted me a line from it just the other day which I’d completely forgotten I’d written – but I was so obsessed with looking for (and then telling you all about) the key I’d found to my submarine that the action was a vehicle for the preaching. And that’s not how human beings live their transformations. Stories need to show us what happens, not just tell us why it’s important that it happens. Textbooks are great, reviews and academic responses to creative works are great, but you need to know when you aren’t writing one.
What I hadn’t done, in trying to give my audience my keys to the submarine, was the brave, meaningful, true thing – give them what life is about from my point of view. We want to be, Lamott reminds us (and reminding is what all the best advice feels like, chiming so delicately and unselfconsciously within you that you barely notice the thoughts weren’t yours to start with), in the company of characters. We want to see faults we identify with, fears and resultingly suboptimal behaviours we understand the causes and effects of and so identify an aspect of ourselves in the other. The more specific the life circumstances, the more vulnerable and clear the thoughts and feelings – and fears, prejudices, impostor syndrome, etc – the more we feel seen. We don’t have to idealise the character, or want to like be them, any more than we need our friends and loved ones to be right all the time (just as we’re all probably easier to love when we don’t need to be right every time). But we do want to be like their creator, in as much as their creator has focused on their own creativity long enough to get that character’s story into the world. That person who we don’t know (even if the author is a friend, the writing self is not the one we truly get to know) focused long enough, stayed with the still, small voice of curiosity under the siren scream of perfectionism, to finish this book that is now a part of our reality. So, they have certainly done something we either want to do (if we haven’t published yet) or want to continue doing (if we’re already published and so have learnt the most important writing lesson of all: that publication does not change your personality or your struggles as a writer, so better to make friends with them now, one emotional bird at a time).
Fiction, drama and even memoir are not like writing a police report. What the police need is the dialogue as it was literally said, the action as stage-directed as close to how it was in life as possible. Emotional truth is deeper and vaguer – and, as I’ve said – truer than literal. It’s not a speech for the defence (us) or the prosecution (them); all of those are legitimate examples of when it’s our literal job to get across the most convincing argument for why we’re right and someone else is wrong. But that’s not the writer’s job. We’re not informing someone of the instructions for how to live life. We are part of their discovery of exactly that, though. Every time they identify with one of our characters. Because it’s their life, like my knees and mindset and dyspraxia are mine alone and not my physiotherapist’s. That’s the beauty and the magic of why we do what we do and why I’m a nicer person when I journal every morning than when I don’t (I’m also a more productive freelance writer when I journal every morning than when I don’t – the water only flows when the Fawcett is turned on as Louis De L’Armor, has so retweetably said. It doesn’t wait for you to be in control: it waits for you to not be.
When control and perfectionism whisper their sweetest notes, that’s when to stop looking for the plans to the submarine and start listening to the quiet voice beneath all that fear self-consciousness – and we can hear it. Not pedantic and police-reportish, but curious, focused, flowing from our experience and our questions about the world as it’s been and as it could be, and that’s when writing becomes something so much more helpful than a moral message, a set of plans, or anything else we might try to hide behind in expert mindset. When instead we’re showing up whole, in beginner’s mindset, writing is about finding what we’re curious about and having the courage to ask our questions honestly, without deciding what the answer should be. Then the answers come the way any meaningful answers come to a human being: through action and interaction. Through story.
[1] and, more directly “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them”
[2] Good thing, ‘even better if’ thing, good thing. How to develop writers to go on developing themselves.