Paid Forward

[polymath]

A seasoned veteran of writing workshops, discussions, etc., I've benefitted greatly from paying forward. Until recently, I felt paying forward was as much altruism as obligation as self-serving. Writers of the past have paid forward to the present by their works, their advices, their discussions of narrative methods and aesthetics. We owe no less to the future. Workshops and other critiquing venues pay forward in the present, contributing to fellow poets progresses. The entire critique paradigm depends on a self-serving human failing, fault-finding. We all too easily see others' faults and too readily overlook our own. But in critiquing there's purpose and growth and beauty from learning about ourselves from the failings and frailties of others.

I find my writing skills grow stronger by vivisecting narratives, others' unpublished and published works and widely acclaimed classics and popular works. I am first and foremost a reader. After all, isn't writing a glacially slow form of reading? One signficant difference between writing and reading is when and whose creative vision is paramount. Writer's writing or reader's reading? Writer's when writing and reader's when reading.

Anyway, after a particularly fruitful vivisection done or critique received, I find my next round of writing adopts new skills intuitively, skills I wasn't studying in the first place. I'm doing whatever before I'm conscious of doing it. I explore the new skills more closely, master them, and then can incorporate them deliberately, artfully, timely.

However, the really biggest growths I've experienced have come from sharing what I've learned. Thought processes have a strange tendency to happen in a different time sense, quality and quantity, than spoken or written expressions of those thought processes. Say plot to me and my mind goes into overdrive interpretting what is meant. My tongue can't keep up with my thoughts any more than my fingers can. But I understand what's meant. I've encountered a dozen or more distinctly different interpretions of what plot is. For some it's a structure, for others it's a causal situation unfolding, for others it's a causally connected series of events and personas, for a few rarified others a plot is a symbolic discourse of character and setting coding circumstances that cause revelations in readers. Whichever, I find they're all part of a whole in different, partial guises.

What I'm getting at is paying forward serves me more than I'd first thought. Altruism and obligation withstanding, I've believed it's a writer's duty to pay forward because we are recipients of paying forward, unwitting or conscious recipients. Atruism and obligation aside, I learn more by expressing out loud or in writing what I'm studying than I do by study and application and thought exercises. Learning processes involve intake from visual and aural sensations, listening to lectures and reading written discourses and such. But it's in the application through tactile and kinesthetic out-fluxing learning processes that barely understood or amorphously grasped concepts become fully mastered.

I know how to use a hammer as a result of childhood and continuing tactile trial and error learning. I haven't tried to teach a beginning hammerer how to use a hammer. My three-year-old nephews and neices learned how on their own as part of developing their eye-hand coordination through play and mimicry. I can give kinesthetic pointers on how to best use a ball peen hammer for metalworking, or a framing hammer for nailing up a stud wall, or how to use a halfheavy sledge hammer for pursuading a reluctant object to give, a forge hammer for welding iron, a jeweler's hammer for closing a finding's links or expanding a ring's diameter. But hitting something with a hammer is a basic skill most if not all people learn in childhood. Like writing.

So here's my thanks for being an openminded audience for me to learn from by sharing with you. I appreciate you-all's patience and forebearance. I've learned more than might be imagined from paying forward. I've learned what I sought and then some. My learning hasn't come to an end, though. Like life, there's new horizons to explore. C'est la vie.

[Bryan Russell/Ink]

Polymath, I completely agree. I think, sometimes, we're explaining as much to ourselves as to others. It's the process of communication that helps us clarify, helps us make connections and pull things together. And, for me at least, that goes for fiction as well as non-fiction. I don't write to impart knowledge of something I've discovered so much as to explore it myself. Writing, I think, is my way of trying to understand something, of taking it into myself. It's a way of processing the world, and yet that act of processing also shapes and delineates the world as I understand it.

Plus it's nice to have an audience. :)

[Quill]

A wonderful topic, and fine words already spoken. Indeed where would we be without those willing to give without direct recompense. I mean, look at Nathan, on whose forums we speak. The hours of moderating, answering questions, blogging, and holding contests that put the biggest burden on himself. And that is just one example of what many agents and editors and writers are doing to help lift the entire writing game, to foster whole new generations of writers, and to move the all genres forward into greater sophistication of written storytelling.

I see these forums and the writers and blogs to which it links as one great pay it forward effort of many people at many levels of craft helping each other through technical and inspirational words. Yes there is learning and promotion also involved, but giving seems to be a very large part of the gestalt.

[polymath]

Thanks, Ink and Quill. I guess what I'm saying is I followed the pay it forward maxim out of a moral obligation, but found that I got more out of it than I put into it. It's almost become second nature, even if counterintuitive.

[J. T. SHEA]

You hit the nail right on the head, Polymath! And I don't mean fingernail. Your metaphor 'Vivisecting narratives' startled me a little until I told myself that's a lot better than a post-mortem!

Writer's versus reader's creative vision is a question that's long fascinated me too. Long ago I decided all stories are like movie scripts and all readers like movie directors, running a movie of the story through their minds while reading. And that has always been the case, even thousands of years before the cinema was invented.

When primeval bards sang tall tales around campfires the listeners made 'movies' in their heads. Let us continue the tradition, but not be too proud. Each reader's 'movie' may be different, both from another reader's, and from what we may have intended. It may also be BETTER than what we intended. Just as movies of novels as often improve on the book as disimprove, in my opinion.

Thanks, Polymath, and Quill, and Sheriff Ink, and Mayor Bransford, who runs his town with a light hand, and all contributors.

[polymath]

Well, yeah, J. T. Shea, dissecting stories might imply postmortem examinations. Sure, you know, vivisection traditionally has a checkered past. But there's nothing like dissecting a living narrative for bringing it more alive. For that matter, I don't know of many destructive testing processes where a specimen survives the experience let alone becomes more whole and vital.