back to index Excerpts from two of the essays in The wave in the mind: Talks and essays on the writer, the reader, and the imagination, 2004, Shambala I. This book takes its title from a letter from Virginia Woolf's to her friend Vita Sackville-West. As for the mot juste, you are quite wrong. Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words. But on the other hand here I am sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas and visions, and so on, and can't dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it. But no doubt I shall think differently next year. Woolf wrote that eighty years ago, and if she did think differently next year, she didn't tell anybody. She says it lightly, but she means it: this is very profound. I have not found anything more profound, or more useful, about the source of story ­ where the ideas come from. Beneath memory and experience, beneath imagination and invention ­ beneath words, as she says ­ there are rhythms to which memory and imagination and words all move; and the writer's job is to go down deep enough to begin to feel that rhythm, to find it, move to it, be moved by it, and let it move memory and imagination to find words. She's full of ideas but she can't dislodge them, she says, because she can't find their rhythm ­ can't find the beat that will unlock them, set them moving forward into a story, get them telling themselves. A wave in the mind, she calls it; and says that a sight or an emotion may create it ­ like a stone dropped into still water, and the circles go out from the center in silence, in perfect rhythm, and the mind follows those circles outward and outward till they turn to words but her image is greater: her wave is a sea wave, traveling smooth and silent a thousand miles across the ocean till it strikes the shore, and crashes, breaks and flies up in a foam of words. But the wave, the rhythmic impulse, is before words, "has nothing to do with words." So the writer's job is to recognize the wave, the silent swell, way out at sea, way out in the ocean of the mind, and follow it to shore, where it can turn or be turned into words, unload its story, throw out its imagery, pour out its secrets. And ebb back into the ocean of story. What is it that prevents the ideas and visions from finding their necessary underlying rhythm, why couldn't Woolf "dislodge" them that morning? It could be a thousand things, distractions, worries; but very often I think what keeps a writer from finding the words is that she grasps them too soon, hurries, grabs; she doesn't wait for the wave to come in and break. She wants to write because she's a writer; she wants to say this, and tell people that, and show people something else, things she knows, her ideas, her opinions, her beliefs, important ideas but she doesn't wait for the wave to come and carry her beyond all the ideas and opinions, to where you cannot use the wrong word. ... Prose and poetry ­ all art, music, dance ­ rise from and move with the profound rhythms of our body, our being, and the body and being of the world. Physicists read the universe as a great range of vibrations, of rhythms. Art follows and expresses those rhythms. [pp.280-282] from The question I get asked most often, pp.261-282   II. When I was young, I used to know that I had a story to write when I found in my mind and body an imaginary person whom I could embody myself in, with whom I could identify strongly, deeply, bodily. It was so much like falling in love that maybe that's what it was. That's the physical side of storytelling, and it's still mysterious to me. Since I was in my sixties it has happened again to my great delight, for it's an active, intense delight, to be able to live in the character night and day, have the character living in me, and their world overlapping and interplaying with my world. I still find embodying or identifying most intense when the character is a man ­ when the body is absolutely not my own. That reach or leap across gender has an inherent excitement in it (which is probably why it is like falling in love). My identification with women characters is different. There is an even more sexual aspect to it, but not genital sexuality. Deeper. In the middle of my body, where you center from in t'ai chi, where the chi is. That is where my women live in me. ... When I had a hysterectomy, I was worried about my writing I was able, with some pain and fear but not dreadful pain and fear, to think about what the loss meant to me as a writer, a person in a body who writes. What it felt like to me was that in losing my womb I had indeed lost some connection, a kind of easy, bodily imagination, that had to be replaced, if it could be replaced, by the mental imagination alone. For a while I thought that I could not embody myself in an imagined person as I used to. I thought I couldn't 'be' anyone but me. I don't mean that when I had a womb I believed that I carried characters around in it like fetuses. I mean that when I was young I had a complete, unthinking, bodily connection and emotional apprehension of my imagined people. Now (perhaps because of the operation, perhaps through mere aging) I was obliged to make the connection deliberately in the mind. I had to reach out with a passion that was not simply physical. I had to 'be' other people in a more radical, complete way. This wasn't necessarily a loss. I began to see it might be a gain, forcing me to take the more risky way. The more intelligence the better, so long as the passion, the bodily emotional connection is made, is there. Essays are in the head, they don't have bodies the way stories do: that's why essays can't satisfy me in the long run. ... Up there I said 'be' somebody, 'have the person,' 'find the person.' This is the mystery. I use the word have not in the sense of 'having' a baby, but in the sense of 'having' a body. To have a body is to be embodied. Embodiment is the key. My plans for stories that don't become stories all lack that key, the person or people whose story it is, the heart, the soul, the embodied inwardness of a person or several people. When I am working on a story that isn't going to work, I make people up. I know their function in the story. I write about them ­ but I haven't found them, or they haven't found me. They don't inhabit me, I don't inhabit them. I don't have them. They are bodiless. So I don't have a story. But as soon as I make this inward connection with a character, I know it body and soul, I have that person, I am that person. To have the person (and with the person, mysteriously, comes the name) is to have the story. Then I can begin writing directly, trusting the person knows where she or he is going, what will happen, what it's all about. This is extremely risky, but it works for me, these days, more often than it used to. And it makes for a story that is without forced or extraneous elements, all of a piece, uncontrolled by intrusions of opinion, willpower, fear (of unpopularity, censorship, the editor, the market, whatever), or other irrelevancies. So my search for a story, when I get impatient, is not so much looking for a topic or subject or nexus or resonance or place-time (though all that is or will be involved) as casting about in my head for a stranger. I wander about the mental landscape looking for somebody who will begin telling me their story and not let me go until it's told. The times when nobody is in the landscape are silent and lonely. They can go on and on until I think nobody will ever be there again but one stupid old woman who used to write books. But it's no use trying to populate it by willpower. These people come only when they're ready, and they do not answer to call. They answer silence. ... It is better to hold still and wait and listen to the silence. It's better to do some kind of work that keeps the body following a rhythm but doesn't fill up the mind with words. I have called this waiting 'listening for a voice.' It has been that, a voice. ... But it's more than voice. It's a bodily knowledge. Body is story; voice tells it. from Old body not writing, pp.238-288