on listening to the silences.

I have been teaching a lot lately — a day-long workshop for Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, a month-long program for my beloved Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown —and, more than ever, the issue of negative space, and of listening to the silences, has become harder and harder for my students to grasp. In my Maine workshop, I talked about Andrew Wyeth, about the concept of there/not there, and resisting the urge to show absolutely everything absolutely all the time. In my estimation, no visual artist does this better than Wyeth, and whenever I am in Rockland and Portland, and have a chance to see his work, I find myself staring long and hard at the exuberance of quiet space, and how it is rendered in watercolor. In my workshops, I talk a lot about economy of language, curation, hierarchy, and word breath: we don’t have to always say it (whatever it is), and even when we don’t, we have to trust that it will be known, and understood, and seen. It requires skill on the part of the writer (like knowing what piece of jewelry to take off, which is what my grandmother always told me to do when I got dressed for an event) and close attention — close listening — by the reader.

“The more distance we put between ourselves and our actual work only results in one thing: less work. ”

Why is this so hard? Why does it seem so damn complicated right now, at this place in time? Because, as writers, we are fighting a lot of noise, like never before. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter —- ugh; Twitter, that burbling cesspool of venom — pit us against each other. This person is doing this, but not with that person. This person is doing that, but with someone else. Someone’s hydrangeas are nicer than mine, and why does so-and-so have to look so damn good in a hat that, if I wore it, would make me look like a thumbtack. I need to be taller. If I was taller, I’d be a better writer.

When Virginia Woolf wrote On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points, she wasn’t kidding.

But at the same time, every publisher wants to know when they think about signing an author to a contract: what is their platform like? How many followers do they have? How hard will they work at promoting themselves? So the burden falls on our shoulders to do a lot of the heavy lifting which — let’s be frank — makes most authors want to throw up. We’re generally a quiet people, usually pretty shy, often wildly insecure. We’ve learned to do what we have to do, like speaking to large audiences (which is something I actually love), but The Dance of the Social Media Butterflies? I need an Advil the size of a Volkswagen. And the more distance we put between ourselves and our actual work? It only results in one thing: less work.

I remember reading somewhere that Elizabeth Strout left Manhattan for Maine because she didn’t want to get sucked into a social vortex that would pull her away from the craft of writing. In one of my favorite books, Doris Grumbach’s Fifty Days of Solitude, the author writes,

Every ounce of acknowledgement of one’s worth, however little by the outside world, each endorsement of what I have become (no matter how insignificant), puts me in danger. In order to move forward in my work and deeper into the chambered nautilus of the mind that produces it, I need to retreat from praise from the world, from the arena of critical recognition.

Which is not to say that we should never pay attention to the noise, and that acknowledgement isn’t important. For God’s sake, we’re only human. And it’s imperative that we understand the world in which we create: how it works and how it doesn’t. (Mea culpa: I’m guilty as charged, at least on Instagram). But it also seems to me that the work of the writer demands a level of silence, of focus on the page and the language, the negative spaces and the quiet, and the humility that it takes to understand: this is craft. You can compete and jockey for position all you want, but if the humility that goes hand-in-hand with actually doing the work instead of talking about doing the work is missing, the words will be too.