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Letting the
CraZy CHild
w r i t e
an interview with
CLIVE MATSONby D. PATRICK MILLER Thirteen years ago I introduced Clive Matson as a “journeyman poet” to the readers of my erstwhile print newsletter, Presumptions: A Letter at Large. At the time I lauded his lifelong dedication to an art that almost never yields the conventional rewards of our society. Since that time, Matson has not only continued his work as a poet, but also established a solid reputation as a popular and inspiring teacher to thousands of writers who have attended his private workshops or classes available through the University of California Extension in Berkeley.
The author of six poetry volumes and a contributor to many literary journals, Matson holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. He distilled the wisdom of his experience as a writer and writer’s helper in the book Let the Crazy Child Write (New World Library). A staunch advocate of the unconventional notion that the best writing is not done in solitary confinement, Matson here discusses the importance of listening to many voices in the development of one’s writing — including several significant voices within the writer’s own consciousness.
You talk about three interior characters that every writer should get to know. Who are they and what do they do?
MATSON: The “Crazy Child” is a friendly name for the creative unconscious, for that urge or itch in our bodies that wants to get out — the sensation that means something is bursting to be written. The “Writer” is the conscious, organizing voice. The Writer plans the day so writing can happen — so a few minutes or hours are free for that itch to write itself down. The Writer helps us get in that creative psychological space, too, which is a different place for everyone. Some people need to brew a cup of coffee, or to go for a walk, or to meditate, or to pick a beautiful flower.The Writer also needs to train the “Editor,” who is often too quick in making judgments. The Editor has a mean side we know very well: a critical, parental voice that’s gained too much respect. It’s like a student who gets As by tearing papers apart brilliantly, the scholar who has exalted tastes, the rigid professor who publishes in all the right journals — that person can become a very ornery figure in our minds.
The Editor needs to be taught how to allow the creative unconscious to do messy first drafts from beginning to end. Those messy drafts are not likely to fit the Editor’s idea of good writing, either. The Editor can help, however, if the Editor first takes the time to feel out the intrinsic energy of a piece. After that, the Editor can be very helpful in developing the intent and the power of the material.
It’s a surprise to many that the Writer does not do the writing — other than mechanically recording words. The primary impulse to write comes from somewhere else, somewhere energetic, passionate, forceful, idiosyncratic, immensely wise, immensely impulsive. Somewhere close to strong emotions, somewhere the Writer may have an inkling about, and maybe not much more. We call this the Crazy Child, or the creative unconscious.
Why is the writer’s inner child “crazy”?
MATSON: The writer’s impulsive voice was called the “child” in David Wagoner’s original exercise, and it evolved through my workshops until it became “Crazy.” The “Child” by itself was often taken by students in a naive, romantic fashion; the concept promoted too much candy and bubblegum, and too many balloons.I tried encouraging the unconscious voice to express more depth by calling it the “inner child,” and that worked well until “inner child” began receiving a lot of attention in the general culture. We started having workshops that were more about releasing emotions than about writing. “Wild child” gave interesting results, too, but seemed a little safe. There were too many scenes of young people running freely over beautiful landscapes with their hair blowing in the wind.
We named it the “crazy person” and got more edge, definitely, but that term puts people off. It sounds too close to mental institutions, straight jackets, and overdosing on Prozac. In its favor, it gives the creative unconscious a scary quality. Why evoke a scary quality? Because these powerful parts of our psyche are generally banned from everyday life; psychologists recognize the creative unconscious as part of the “excluded self.” When that self appears, the conscious mind wants to reject it by calling it “crazy.”
When we give it the name “Crazy Child” and honor it, instead, we reverse that judgment. I’ve found, over the years, that this phrase elicits the most varied and most honest responses. “Let the Crazy Child Write!” is an invitation for whatever real stuff has been brewing underneath the surface — all the passion and joy and anger and gripping insight — to come out and make itself known.
What is the role of “image detail” in setting a scene? How do you know a good image detail from a not-so-good one?
MATSON: We know where we are in the world through details — they are all-important. When we read and write, we know where we are through our imagining of details. Making images from words is an automatic process of the nervous system. If we’re going to read about characters and feel they are as vivid as in life, we need details so our senses can receive and create them as vividly as we do people in life.You don’t know which detail works, and which doesn’t — not at first.Writers can have a wonderful feeling about details, and still need a workshop to discover which ones work. After a while you get a sense of what kind works well for you, but the workshop is still helpful. Different sorts of details will fit different subjects and styles, and which ones will fit best is simply not predictable.
We have guidelines for powerful details: small, odd, dissonant, sensory, related to the body, and particular. These are pointers for the creative unconscious. When the Crazy Child goes for a romp, searching out those details can involve it more and more, resulting in more and more gripping images.
What do you mean by “slow motion”?
MATSON: “Slow Motion” is a way of conveying image detail in an action scene, and it’s also much more. It works the same as slow motion in film. In our exercise you report the action frame by frame, or split second by split second, and the reader makes images of those same split seconds — recreating the scene bit by bit.What happens, in addition, is that you discover undreamt of levels of experience. They’re all happening: thoughts, responses to thoughts, responses to actions, dialogue running in the background, a static layer of detail behind the action — I can only begin to list the things that come up.
They appear because we are looking at experience more closely than usual. They are evidence for a rich discovery. Much more is happening at any moment than we imagine. We may think we are walking to the market, but we are also swimming in an ancient sea, and a present sea, of feeling and insight. The next thing to happen may be the corner of a great mystery.
What are “plot germs” — and are they communicable?
MATSON: Plot often grows out of a small feeling or a tiny insight, and its burgeoning growth can wake you up in the middle of the night, or surprise you mid-thought on a boring day.How does this happen? I think the insight might be like the tip of an iceberg. The plot could have been brewing in the unconscious for days, or months, or years. That small, twinkling feeling is its first penetration into the conscious mind. It seems like a germ. It seems to multiply, and become some huge organism very quickly. But it might have been large to begin with, and only shows us small glimpse at first.
We also use the term “germs” for a group exercise where each person writes down intriguing thoughts on separate scraps of paper, each thought the kernel of a plot. Then we put those scraps in a hat, and pass it around. Everyone takes one from the hat without knowing what it is. Then we write. Freely. We let that germ multiply, and flow wherever it wants, taking over arms and legs and gardens and interior towns, ending up as an animal we have never seen or heard of before.
James Hillman writes in his latest book that “character died in the 20th century.” How is character faring in writing at the turn of the century? How do you advise writers to develop their characters’ characters?
MATSON: Is James Hillman noticing that those rich, full-blown characters we used to read about — people with wisdom and moral conviction — are no longer prominent in fiction? He’s right. Writers today are often interested in conveying the oddity or strangeness of modern life, and a flawed or twisted character can do this most effectively, especially when Western culture has contributed to the flaw.But fine characters haven’t disappeared entirely. Read Jim Harrison’s Brown Dog and you’ll meet a wonderful character, and those ogres in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale are as compelling as they are scarily close to real. More refreshing are Barbara Kingsolver’s women, who do have moral conviction and plenty of righteous energy. The world justifies every bit of their indignation and requires every bit of their resourcefulness in staying alive and healthy.
I encourage authors in my workshops to try either strategy. Take a very extreme and twisted character, and run that character into a strange world. With this approach the character sometimes gets stranger and stranger. Or formulate the plot in such a way that a student-athlete, for instance, or a Rhodes scholar, takes on the problem and solves it. A healthy person triumphing is very refreshing these days, though difficult to make believable.
Writing character is easy, once you get the hang of it. You start by dreaming into the character — literally daydreaming. What would this person eat? Or think? How would this person tie shoelaces, or put on clothes? Anything is possible, and the evidence of world literature supports the notion that our psyches can easily dream up a character everyone believes and honors. This holds true even when the character is very different from the author, from a different time for instance, or of a different gender or a different race.
What are the most common problems that writers bring to your workshops?
MATSON: By far the most common problem is lack of chutzpah, and second is too much regard for the Editor’s negative judgments. Writing is play, is daydreaming, is serious play, is loose thinking — at least at first.Another common and damaging belief is that writers become competent on their own. I suppose it’s not quite impossible, but most writers I know leave that isolation behind. They bring their work into workshops, and deal with the feedback — and accepting positive feedback might be the most important thing they do.
Besides practice, what helps writers grow the most?
MATSON: Feedback that is sympathetic to the primary impulse of the writing. Other feedback, from people who do not understand what you are trying to do, is not helpful. A writer needs none of that. The poet Galway Kinnell asks: If someone brought you a newborn child, would you criticize it? Say it’s head was the wrong shape, or its feet were too small? A first draft should elicit the same caring, delicate regard as a baby.Other than that, you hit it: Practice, practice, practice. And it also helps to regard everything you do as practice. If it’s practice, and it gets snarled up, you can just put it behind you and go on to the next enthusiasm. Practice eventually clears the pathways and great material will bubble up as a matter of course. We do learn how words go together, and we do create wonderful things.
Do you ever counsel students that they shouldn’t be writers?
MATSON: If people screw up enough courage to call me and ask about joining a workshop, it’s usually because their talent is pushing to be heard. My job is to bring out that talent. It’s not my place to tell someone not to write. I think no one is in that position. Herman Hesse’s “Letter to a Young Poet,” in his collection My Belief, outlines how the confines of one’s time and one’s aesthetics make it impossible to judge what will become of someone’s urge to be creative, especially someone who is young.We hear of that judgment going awry far more often than of its being correct. It’s commonplace for editors or agents to tell writers to quit, and then for the writer to go on and become a success. Joe Quirk, author of The Ultimate Rush, reports that an editor wrote on one rejection, “Give it up, Pal.” Dramatic, isn’t it? Even more dramatic when you consider the numbers: Joe got more than a hundred rejections, one acceptance, and now he’s a successful author. There are too many people around who think it’s their place to tell someone not to write.
How have the interests and inclinations of your students changed over the years? Do people always want to write the same kinds of things, or do they have different goals than ten or fifteen years ago?
MATSON: There was excitement about short stories a while ago, and then the fashionable thing was writing a “grid.” Along came personal essays, and now we have memoirs as the “in” thing. These marketing booms and changes in fashion do influence what people want in my workshops, of course. But something stays the same.The impulse to write hasn’t changed. If anything, it’s grown more widespread over the years. More people seem interested in writing and all the grappling with the power of creating that writing entails. This may reflect a growing homogenization of culture, which would naturally create a yearning for personal truth. There’s something fulfilling, a mysterious joy, to writing. Especially when we’re letting that Crazy Child say whatever it wants.
At Clive Matson’s website you’ll find his current workshop schedule.
