A good writer is always listening.
She listens to the voices of the long-dead, straining to hear writerly wisdom that only time and tide can reveal. She leans a little closer to Hemingway to discover the curious power of understatement and word economy. She plops down next to Dostoyevsky with her moral compass in hand and looks for truth in the floating needle that only points north when Fyodor tells it to.
She listens to the voices of the successful. Stephen King raises an eyebrow in reply when she removes a dozen sharp objects from her purse and asks, “which would you use to kill a clown?” James Patterson and his twenty-seven clones answer with a unison smile when she mutters the word “prolific” as both question and expletive. She eavesdrops on someone else’s conversation with Stephenie Meyer, then casually bumps into her on the way out, waiting until the elevator door closes before anxiously examining her coat sleeve for sparkly vampire dust.
She listens to the voices of the experts. She goes to Nathan Bransford’s place and comments generously and often, hoping for a karmic space kapow of the writerly kind. She’s certain the Query Shark can smell her coming, so she only visits when someone else is already bleeding in the water. Seven days a week she wanders the library-like halls of Rachelle Gardner’s comfy-chair home on the web. “It smells like books and coffee here.”
She listens to the voices of struggling peers. She shakes her head at the complainer who hasn’t written a decent word apart from his biting (if misguided) rant about the dearth of good novels being published today. She steps aside and allows a crit group partner the floor to dance her “Oh, why did I ever think I could be a writer?” pavane. She cries a little when her bestie reads from a heartbreakingly brilliant w.i.p., then schedules her own pavane for next crit group.
She listens to the voices of the underheard and the overexposed.
She listens to the voices of the broken and the perfect. The certain and the lost. The sellers and the buyers. The front-tablers and the remainders. The winners and the losers. The dreamers and the realists.
And as she listens to these voices, she nurtures and refines the most important voice of all.
Her own.
Instinct is a learned magic.
Comments
9 responses to “Listen”
This made me smile. Thank you, Stephen.
You’re welcome. Always happy to elicit a smile.
Damn. I wasn’t going to comment on this, because I comment too much here, and am trying to revert to a dignified lurkdom. And I thought I was going to be alright, after clicking the various links and reading the several paragraphs. I was about to get on with my day. But you went and did it again with a last line. Stop with those bloody beautiful last lines reaching out to hook my heart, okay?
Okay. I’ll stop with those bloody beautiful last lines reaching out to hook your heart.
I’ll put them first from now on.
(You don’t comment too much here. You comment just right here. I look forward to every word.)
On the nose again. I consider listening to be a writer’s most important tool, certainly more critical than grammar or spelling or fast typing (although that one’s nice to have too). More important than metaphor or imagery or plot. Of course, if you’re really listening, most of the rest falls into place as if of its own accord.
Yup.
Pavane? Pavane!
I love this.
I agree. A good writer is always listening…and observing, and eavesdropping in a good way, and reading and dreaming at the same time. 🙂 Thank you for this post.