I had a consultation with a writing coach recently because I recently wrote myself into an impasse and needed help. I published this person’s work many years ago, and while I don’t know her well as a person, I see that she has skills and sense, and this is what I wanted, especially from someone outside my field.
During our conversation, I remembered that I had entered my Sea of Intimacy with a very different frame of reference, and sometime between then and now it shifted without my noticing (hidden currents probably), giving me, in effect, two voices, two styles, and this impasse. Something similar happened with my last book, so maybe it’s a pattern. When I look back at that, I see some chapters in one voice, which is probably scholarly at heart, and another more essayistic and free-ranging voice. It made the book hard to pull together, and I had trouble finding a publisher, probably because those professionals saw something inconsistent in the voice as well.
Not making a conscious choice about what I want the voice to be here is probably why I ended up at this red light that refuses to change.
One voice marshals the stuff I know, what I’ve studied and accumulated over many years. It’s rather insistent on its authority. I suppose that’s the professor. The other is a person, someone with whom you’d like to sit down over a glass of wine (very helpful image from writing coach — thank you, Kim!) and have a nice long conversation. It’s not really the same guy, at least not in terms of a reader’s willingness to come along. Readers generally want to sit down with a person, not with the professor.
It’s not about trust so much as the person, or (my scholarly self reminds me) the persona. More than that, I think, it’s about an invitation. Do you want to come along to listen to the professor? Sounds like work. The person though, that could be nice, if the person (okay, persona) is interesting. And don’t forget that glass of wine.
I remembered in this context the different motivations I’ve noticed inside when writing scholarship versus when translating artistic texts. In the former case, I select from what I’ve read to make an argument of my own, ignoring the parts of the text that don’t help with my argument. In a sense, this is more about me than about the work. Building my authority, my qualifications as a scholar, and so on.
In the latter, with translations, my desire is to share. I want to pick this whole thing up and hand it on to you, so you can experience its magic the way I have. (My scholarly self recognizes all the problems with this way of putting it.) Translating to me is not so much a critical enterprise as an act of sharing, an invitation to take part in sharing. It’s a gift, or at least an invitation to engage together over a gift.
Realizing that the gift is the primary motivation behind this book has helped me out of my impasse. It’s what I want to maintain throughout. For that, perhaps a more personal voice, something closer to memoir, is what’s called for. Generally, one would think of memoir as more about oneself than about whatever the ostensible subject might be (childhood, let’s say, or coming of age, or coping with grief). But I’m thinking here that maybe that’s not true it all, maybe it’s the opposite. Especially when the motivation is a gift.
Not a gift of oneself (this makes me laugh) but of a place, a time, a way of thinking, experiencing the world and its many interconnections, savoring it in all its richness.
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Russell Scott Valentino 