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Tell all the Truth

January 22, 2013/0 Comments/in Commentary, Writing Lesson/by Katherine Cowley

I first encountered what is now one of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems in a class I took on memoir writing. Here’s the short, two-stanza poem: Tell all the Truth but tell it slant — Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth’s superb surprise As Lightning to the Children […]

Writing is Like…

January 20, 2013/0 Comments/in Writing is Like, Writing Lesson/by Katherine Cowley

The idea wasn’t originally mine–as is common in the writing classroom, I borrowed it from another teacher. Every semester, on the first day of class, each of my students has to complete the metaphor “Writing is Like…” I’ve now heard hundreds of metaphors, many of them involving pain and suffering–for freshmen taking a required general […]

Tell all the Truth

January 22, 2013/0 Comments/in Commentary, Writing Lesson/by Katherine Cowley

Writing is Like…

January 20, 2013/0 Comments/in Writing is Like, Writing Lesson/by Katherine Cowley

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Tell all the Truth

January 22, 2013/0 Comments/in Commentary, Writing Lesson/by Katherine Cowley

I first encountered what is now one of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems in a class I took on memoir writing. Here’s the short, two-stanza poem:

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant —

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth’s superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind —

I’ve found that “tell it slant” has been great advice for me as a writer.

In argumentative writing, it means I don’t always come out with my argument from the gate. If you start with your argument (i.e. we need strong gun control) you can sometimes lose all hope of persuading an audience who doesn’t always agree with you. From the start they already know they disagree with you, whereas if you use a point last structure, you can start on common ground and at least get your audience to listen to you.

In creative writing, to me “tell it slant” means to focus on craft and character and dialogue, to not be overly didactic with whatever “truth” I think I know, to let both characters and my readers figure things out on their own, and allow them to learn their own lessons, which may or may not be what I had originally intended.

The book Tell it Slant takes its title from Emily Dickinson’s poem, explaining, “she meant, we think, that truth takes on many guises; that the truth of art can be very different than the truth of day-to-day life” (2). The authors go on to quote Salman Rushdie:

Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart. (3)

I hope that I can learn to tell the truth in my writing, to speak to the imagination and to the heart.

Writing is Like…

January 20, 2013/0 Comments/in Writing is Like, Writing Lesson/by Katherine Cowley

I’ve now heard hundreds of metaphors, many of them involving pain and suffering–for freshmen taking a required general education writing class, writing is often like opening a jar full of cockroaches. Or writing is like wandering, endlessly, in a maze that, well, never ends.

For me, writing is like a great many things, and I’ll share some of these metaphors over the coming weeks. But first, I’ll start with the one I share on the first day of class every semester.

Writing is like walking on a bed of coals, and then finding oneself on a tropical beach.

Yes, writing can be painful. I force out words and sentences that frustrate me–they’re poorly built, they’re not headed in the right direction, and sometimes, they’re simply the wrong words for the situation, a defilement of the empty page. Sometimes I burn myself while writing.

But my metaphor is more complex than that. According to Wikipedia, firewalking has been seen “as a test of an individual’s strength and courage”; this too is true with writing. And just like firewalking, in practice writing is not as painful as it looks: while I’ve never tried firewalking, apparently “the amount of time the foot is in contact with the ground is not enough to induce a burn” and “embers are not good conductor of heat.” In other words, writing doesn’t have to be painful.

Last February I watched a show featuring firewalking near the beach in Oahu, Hawaii. In the same way, when I’ve finished writing something, especially something that challenges my skills and creates something of worth, I feel like I’m vacationing on a tropical island.

What do you think? Is writing painful for you? Do you find anything redemptive about it?

Photo Credit: Aidan Jones, Creative Commons license

This page called Metaphors about Writing has links to all the other posts I’m writing in this series.