Writing From the White-Hot Center

Writing From the White-Hot Center

This last year I discovered a new writer that I love, the novelist, Lily King. In an essay in the back of one her novels, she tells about doing a reading at an Ivy League college in which, during the Q and A afterwards, she was asked “what factors determine your authorial distance from the narrator?” She responded that “I don’t think when I write. I am like a blind worm on the ground.”  I love that! “A blind worm on the ground.”

She goes on to relate how she loves English literature classes and has been an English teacher herself. How she’s discussed and taken great interest in English-teachery things such as themes and yes, authorial distance. But that when she writes, she doesn’t use her “English teacher brain.” Not in the first draft of writing, “What you need,” she writes, “all you need, is your creative, sensual, wide-open brain.”

The White-Hot Center

Later she came across Robert Olen Butler’s book, From Where You Dream, in which, she said, “he articulates exactly what I was trying to say that day (of the Q and A.)” Butler wrote: “Art does not come from ideas. Art does not come from the mind. Art comes from the place where you dream. Art comes from your unconscious. It comes from the white-hot center of you.”

Reading his words, we can feel the right-ness of this statement. Its truth. You sit down to write and scrawl out a sentence, then look out the window, and scratch it out. You sigh. Scrawl down another line. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, it seems, the lines can’t flow quickly enough from your pen. You are not thinking these sentences, these lines. You are just writing them. If you’re lucky, this goes on paragraph after paragraph, page after page. And then, after the wave of writing ceases, you go back to read what you’ve written. And it’s good. Not perfect. But it is authentic writing. It is alive and breathing. Writing that seems to come from inside of you.

In all my years of what I consider “serious writing” (which is about thirty years now) this is what I’ve been trying to get at. To experience more of. Those moments of “dropping down” into that source from where my best writing comes. To access that white-hot center of myself and write as I did not think I was capable.

But how to do that?

Ah, to discover that! The answer is multi-faceted and complex, and probably different for each one of us. For me, I believe it revolves around the “dailiness” of writing. Writing that is not a big deal, but writing because that is what you do. It involves being faithful to the practice of writing. Allowing playfulness to creep in and telling the inner critic to “back off.” You move your hand across the page, focus on that, and learn to recognize those moments when you feel you write from your heart. When you write from the white-hot center. Recognize them and when you do, more of these moments will come.

–Lucy Adkins

Writing Exercise:

• Think about what it is you love. Love deeply. Make a list of these things. Maybe you love roses or horses. Walking on a spring day. Think about what you loved as a child and include these on your list. Maybe you want to include a person you loved and lost.
• Choose something from your list and jot down what it is you love about that thing or being.
• Title your piece “Why I Love _____________” (the thing you choose)
  Or begin with the line “How I love _________________” and go on from there.
• Now write, keeping pen to paper, honoring first thoughts, answering the question of “why you love horses or roses or how you loved horses or roses or whatever you it is that you love.” Enjoy!

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