Be Not Afeard

I will confess, I am no longer in love with drafts. Early in my writing life, I used to love that heady feeling, used to throw myself into drafts with reckless glee. Now I distrust them, or maybe I distrust myself. I know they contain some bright sparks that will remain, but I also know that there will be other bits that will mislead me into thinking they're the story, embodied, when they're nothing of the kind. Or at least, not yet. These days, I find myself wanting only to be finished with a draft so I can begin to do the real work of revision.

Philip Pullman's Daemon Voices is one of those books on craft that I keep on my shelf to refer to from time to time, when I need to focus on a work in progress and am in danger of being distracted, or when my writing seems to be flattening out and I'm losing confidence in my ability to plow through. All of which is likely to happen in the middle of a draft.

That's when I need to be reminded of what matters to me about this work I'm struggling to find words for, and why it bubbled up for me in the first place. Only I'm not ready to show the work in question to anyone yet. It feels too fragile, too easily capable of being questioned to pieces. But look. Pullman's telling me exactly what I need to hear right now.

It knows very firmly what it wants to be, even though it isn't very articulate yet. It'll go easily in this direction and very firmly resist going in that, but I won't know why; I just have to shrug and say "OK--you're the boss." And this is the point where responsibility takes the form of service. Not servitude; not shameful toil mercilessly exacted; but service, freely and fairly entered into. This service is a voluntary and honourable thing: when I say I am the servant of the story I say it with pride.

So there. I have to remind myself that this business of letting an idea in and finding the way to express it isn't about me. It's about serving the story. How many times do I have to learn and relearn what it takes to be a good servant? An infinite number, it seems. Service, free and fair, a "voluntary and honourable thing." Better yet, later in that chapter, there's this:

Art, whatever kind of art it is, is like the mysterious music described in the words of the greatest writer of all, the "sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not." To bear the responsibility of giving delight and hurting not is one of the greatest privileges a human being can have....

Those quoted words, from Caliban in The Tempest shine a light for me that Pullman might not intend, coming as they do from a character whose very being is fraught with torment, who has been interpreted and reinterpreted across borders of time and race and politics. As Marcos Gonsalez writes:

Shakespeare was a man of his time, a worldly man. Molding a character through the writings and images and culture he lived in, Shakespeare put down on paper a composite of Africa, of Asia, of the Americas, and his Prospero boldly affirms the authority over such a composition near the play’s end about Caliban, “this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine,” though all these things of darkness in the world he could never acknowledge his, because they never were his to begin with.

Caliban was never Shakespeare’s creation.

Caliban is ours.

So yes, I too take those words of Caliban's. In making them mine, I, a brown woman, inheritor of a fractured history--I give myself permission to "be not afeard," to listen for the "sounds and sweet airs."