Are you writing from the heart?

“Even in his heart the devil has to know the water level. Are you writing from the heart?”

This line is from a really lovely song by Sufjan Stevens. I won’t go into a lengthy interpretation of the song, but it’s basically in two parts. The first half is about the Chicago World’s Fair (the album is about the state of Illinois) and talks about how the inspiration for invention is often a tool of greedy consumerism. The second half is a personal reflection and describes a dream about the Illinois poet Carl Sandburg. I love this quote because it’s basically saying that it is of no consequence as to whether or not what you’re writing is good or evil, light or dark. What matters is that it is from your heart.

Are you writing from the heart? This is such a difficult question to approach with ourselves because it’s so hard to be objective. If words begin to flow with ease and the act of putting them on paper is simple, we may begin to belief that we are saying what we mean. But are these words coming from our brain, so intellectually sterile that it can produce mere thoughts? Or are they coming from our heart, the thing with which we can offer up not just what we mean, but what we feel?

When writers give advice on writing stories or novels, one of the most popular pieces of advice is to “write what you know.” Many people find this useless because if we wrote only what we knew, our stories would be mere autobiographies. The act of writing is to transport yourself into a new pair of shoes, a new life. So why write what you know? Why not write what you want to write? And I think both are okay. Because, in my life, my father has not yet died and I certainly haven’t stopped anyone from committing suicide and I certainly haven’t hated or caused the death of a sibling. These are not things that I know. But I feel that, when writing about these things, I do know. Because, in order to paint a picture of mere events, the most important thing to include is the heart of the matter. My father has never died, but I do know the pain of loss. In describing the event, I can take a certain night that really did occur where something bad really did happen and, rather than writing it exactly, I can fill in the major events with characters and situations. But the details remain the same. The lighting of the room, the sleepless night, the heart dropping rapidly in her chest. This is how to write from the heart, I believe.

It is so very frustrating to write of things I’ve never felt. In the story I’m working on now, I started writing of a little girl who hates. Perhaps, deep down, she doesn’t truly hate. For, in my opinion, hate is the deepest form of dislike and there is amount of common tolerance involved in it. But, at this point, this child is so immersed in her pain and anger that she can find no redemption from her hate. I don’t know her well enough to know her heart for sure yet. With this, I’m not really writing what I know. I’ve never hated anyone. I cannot understand hate. But she does and, in the beginning, that was going to be my whole story. But when I wrote, I found myself writing like a robot, my passion staying put. So I’ve begun to write about her finding life and learning to love. That’s what I can write about from my heart and really mean it. And do you know what? This is the longest story I’ve written and I actually know where I’d like to go with it.

In this story, I felt that I would like to include a mild sexual scene, but was concerned about doing so, since I intend to show the story to adults in my life and feared after their reaction if they should realize that I had created such a scene. However, in my mind, the scene is not just mindless mating, but has real passion and romantic context and is an important part of showing the evolution of the relationship between two people. I felt it would help to bridge a lot of the gap between the beginning of love and the real, trusting relationship that I wanted to see evolve between the two people. But, in the end, all it comes down to is where the story is in my heart. In my brain, I’m afraid to give anyone the opportunity to judge me for what I’ve written. But, in my heart, I know this is a part of the story that needs to be told.

My grandmother and I saw “The Soloist” on Saturday. I know I shouldn’t really discuss it until I’ve read the book, but some thoughts I had about it seem relevant to this, so I’m going for it anyhow. (I’m just going to leap straight into it, so if you don’t know what it’s about, Google is your friend.) Basically, Steve initially seems to see Nathaniel as a simple source of popular interest, someone the masses will be interested in, a prime subject for his column. As an outside observer, I feel that journalists often seem to adopt this mindset. They can write a beautiful piece about a beautiful person because they know people will like it, but are all of these sentimental words and lovely phrases coming from their desire to appeal to an audience, or really coming from their own hearts? Nathaniel would not appear, in person, to many people who probably smiled warmly throughout his column, to be very beautiful. He dresses in all kinds of odds and ends, carries around a grungy shopping cart piled high with junk, and probably doesn’t smell very good. His moods fluctuate rapidly and a normal conversation is hard to come by with him. To a person who had not met him in the flesh, Steve’s lovely little column about this lovely little homeless master cellist would not prepare them for the reality of who he is. Through the movie, Steve continually tries to transform Nathaniel into this functional person so he can become the master musician he was always meant to be, but it doesn’t work because that‘s not who he is. After we left the movie, rather than commenting on the musical aspect of the movie (which I had assumed she would, being the classical music guru that she is), my grandma said “Well, the moral of the story is that you can’t make a person who you want them to be.”

In my opinion, the rules of writing are rules for life. You don’t have to have experienced what another person has in order to offer them your sympathy, but if you can draw the basic feelings they’re having from your heart, then you can connect with them, just as you can connect with a character who is experiencing something you haven’t. Furthermore, sometimes you feel you need to do things that you fear, whether of the possible repercussions or of being judged, but, in the end, it is most important to follow your heart over your head. And, finally (and most importantly), you can’t make writing be something it’s not, or it’s insincere. Then it’s not written from the heart, but simply from a very creative head. Similarly, you can’t make a person into someone they’re not or else they’re fake. Just as you must write from the heart, you must also live from the heart.