Film still from “Barbara Rachko: True Grit,” directed by Jennifer Cox, Moto Films LLC

*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

One of the great paradoxes of the writing life is that our words – chosen carefully, so thoughtfully, with deep focus and concentration – those words once on the page go dead on us. Language is ours only when we are forming sentences, moving elements around, grappling with punctuation, speaking words aloud, feeling them on our lips. While we are shaping a scene into something we can hear and touch and see, that scene lives and breathes. We are inside language like painters, we are working in our medium: the tempera, the thin line, the wet oil on canvas, still in process, still alive.

But once we commit – once those words dry like paint, are affixed to the page – it becomes nearly impossible to see them. This? We think to ourselves. Our most loathsome critic emerges with a swirl of her cape. Really? What the hell is this? The sentences appear to have been written in another language – a dark dream language, tucked into some musty, inaccessible corner of our psyche. Attempting to discern its meaning is a bit like looking at our own face in the mirror. It is at once so familiar as to be invisible, and so intimate that we turn away, baffled, ashamed.

Can we ever see ourselves, really? Can we read ourselves?

It is a powerful conundrum because without the ability to see our writing afresh we cannot do the necessary work. How do we know whether a problem lies with the work, or with our inability to enter it? We need clarity, but not coldness. Openness, but not attachment. We want optimism, but that optimism must not go hand in hand with discernment. We’re not looking for a cheerleader, nor a fault-finding judge. We want to read ourselves with equanimity.

Dani Shapiro in Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life

Comments are welcome!