Wrestling with The Dragon
By Tracy Ross
Okay. I have an idea. I want to convey it to others. The dragon swoops down out of the heavenly abyss and tries to bite my head off. Its nostrils and mouth are flaming and its tail is lashing violently, threatening to shred me to ribbons. I take hold of its horns and pull, twisting and turning, until I sit atop the creature, trying desperately to tame its thrashing so that I can ultimately harness the animal to my will and direction.
Language is a dragon you have to wrestle with. With words, I create a bridge of meaning between my own experience and someone else's understanding of that same experience. Knowledge bases are different, and each person has by default, an arsenal of experience and references to draw from to attribute meaning to language. Often, we get it wrong, creating gaps in our word usage so that the true meaning of what we want to convey isn't transferred over from writer to reader. We get it wrong and create only misunderstanding and a gulf between individual and collective belief.
Yet, what if I were to tell the reader that writing is not about my imagination but how successful I alter the perceptions in the reader to the extent that new epiphanies and understandings are made? To transfer meaning from inert words to present world reality is to initiate leaps of intuition in the reader that involve altering individual reality through books and the written word. As a writer, I might have a talent for conveying the transfer of human experience through symbols on the page. It is not my vision as a writer that should be prized, but my ability to impart the abstractions of the human condition through the power of metaphor and analogy, description and action.
When I finish a writing project, I always experience the beautiful let down. This means that after all is said and done, after the outlines, characterization, plot strategies, and poetry, the trip, the quest of the writer ends with the completion of the book, story, or project. A profound malaise settles in for a short time and I realize as a writer that the attainment of perfection is ephemeral, fleeting, and impermanent. The artifice of the written word, the book, is temporal and not quite real. It is not a constant. It is a variable with different identities depending on who picks up the book. This is why the vision of the writer is not individual, he/she is tapping into the collective consciousness of the hive of humanity to bring to light shared truths about life, death, love, and living. Often, we use the same words, the same vocabulary, the same limited definitions to explain the physical objects and emotional dramas of the world. The words, like the writer, are not unique. What is unique is the fact that everyone is a vessel of the great unknown. This unknown can be tapped into successfully so that sometimes we don't feel so alone and afraid when faced with the unknown, the abyss of uncertainty and impermanence.
Unlike what you have been told about writing being a craft, it is not. A craft speaks of artifice and product. It speaks of proven tools that work that can be applied over and over. Yet, putting words to paper is an exercise in transformation. Instead, writing is a process, an exercise in working out the problem of the meaning of reality through the use of symbols and ideas as communication to create other worlds one might not be privy to off the page. When I write, I am balancing an equation, trying to find the right chemistry between beginnings and endings so that I alone learn in the process of translating ideas to ink. Writing is transitional, it is a process, it is an exercise in being in the here and now where you work through cerebral possibilities. Often, the beautiful let down occurs once the sentence is down on paper, out of the head, and starts to morph a life of its own in the reader's perceptions and mental ruminations. Often through writing we learn what we don't know, what we need to know, and what happened in the past to us. The written word survives as a living document of existence to be shared and debated.
The catharsis is in the process, not in the end result. Often the end product is a pale comparison to what it took to get there. Hence, artifice, the book, the poem, the story told, even though it is preserved on paper as if etched in stone, it is fluid, pliable and takes on different faces when different people choose to read the text and ingest the meaning in their own way. A book is a hero with a thousand faces and to prescribe a mask of artifice on it does the art of writing a disservice.
When someone says to you, this is a good book, what are they actually saying? The tenants of something being well written is totally contingent on its accessibility and successful interface with the reader of the text. This is truly the only measuring stick of what makes a good book, and it varies from individuals to critics, to scholars, to children reading Dr. Seuss.
Language is a dragon you have to wrestle with. By default, this is its nature—to make one think in the process of translating ideas into symbols for the benefit of sharing the human condition. It you aren't struggling with the usage of language, you are not writing mindfully. You are writing to fill up the page with letters. So, despite what the myth of being a writer has told you for centuries, writing isn't about the writer, it is about the reader. The writer may use the tools of the trade, but the trick to using the tools of the craft is knowing how to tell the truth, even through the language of deception and the lies of fiction, the escapism of fantasy and science fiction.
The writer must know how to show the reader the moon, the epiphany of truth, despite only having a pointing finger to show the way. The writer must jump through hurdles of reality to create that intuitive leap of imagination for the reader that transforms identity and point of view. Hence, overall, it is not about me, it is about a story told. Writing is ultimately wrestling with the dragon until I get it right, the truth as a beacon to guide my way through the mud and muck to the shared illumination of existence.
Tracy Ross is a poet and writer. Shanti Arts will be releasing her third poetry collection Relics & Rituals in late 2022 and Between the Lines Publishing will be coming out with her first book of short stories Binary Logic this year as well. She lives and works in Minnesota and is a graduate of Augsburg University's MFA program. She also holds a MS in Education from Bemidji State University. You may learn more about her and her work at rosspoet.org