The Weekly Atticus (02/09/2019)

How Can We Make Our Writing Less Vague? | The Weekly Atticus

February 09, 2019

A recap of the week at Atticus Review, along with some extras.

I read something from a writer on social media recently which was very prettily worded and poetic. And while it hinted at some deep personal pain and vulnerability which I could relate to, it did so without actually revealing much of anything. 

I showed the short fragment to a friend of mine and she came up with a name for it:

It’s like vague lyricism

, she said. And I was like:

Yes! That! Vague lyricism is exactly what it is.

I know the conversation with my friend may sound condescending, but it was done in the spirit of relating to it. Vague lyricism — poetry and nonfiction that sounds really good, but tends to avoid revealing anything too personal — is pretty much all I wrote in high school and college.

Vague Lyricism

could’ve been my grunge-rock band name. If it were a sport, I would've lettered in it. I think vague lyricism is often a defensive mechanism, but it can also be a tool, a way into writing that is more revealing and more deeply reflective.

I haven’t outgrown this particular defense mechanism yet: I’ve used vague lyricism in my recent writing, too. In my defense (holy moly, vague lyricism really

loves

to defend!), sometimes I use it to achieve a noble purpose. Really! 

For instance, sometimes I struggle with the desire to protect or please the people in my life who do not want me to write about the thing I'm aiming to write about. Other times, though, I've used it to protect myself from public judgement, avoid deeper self-reflection, or simply to mask a pain. 

But vulnerability is where the good stuff hides. 

So the question for us as writers becomes: How do we get there? How do we dare move from vague lyricism to something deeper? From vague to not vague?

Sometimes it’s kind of out of our control. Sometimes it's our life circumstances that allow it to happen. 

In some of the essays in my memoir,

This Is Not A Confession

, I wrote graphically about being molested and explored the shame that came from that. I couldn’t have imagined writing about it, much less as graphically as I did, before my mom died. Those stories were kind of stuck inside me until that event. It took that outside life circumstance, itself a trauma for me, to be able to address that other earlier trauma. But then I found that when I starting writing those stories, it didn’t feel right to use pretty words or phrases.

The essays in my book where I hung out in the territory of vague lyricism were the ones having to do with my marriage, sex, and not having children. (These were probably the essays one reviewer was referring to when she wrote that the writing in my book was "at turns eloquently self conscious, wry, and lyrical" but “defensive and unfinished.")

I'm working on my next collection of essays. And the thing I've been struggling most with turns out to be

vague lyricism

! I want to be more direct and more vulnerable. But I am still somewhat afraid.

One recurring symbol that links the essays together is water. Specifically, bodies of water. Landmarks. Crater Lake. Loch Ness. The essays will also weave in my standard threads of time, entropy, and physics. These are the easy parts. The fun parts. The harder, more paralyzing content is what I left out of the last collection: the termination of pregnancy, adoption, the loss of the hope of having children, the painful dissolution of a 20-year marriage in which my wife and I were increasingly unhappy during the last several years, even though we both still cared very much for the other. These are still things I continue to shroud in vague for a number of complicated reasons — reasons familiar to many writers, I’m sure. There are many of us who are eager to artfully explore the pain and pleasures of our lives, but are afraid to hurt and defy others in the process.

But as with much of life,

change

— good or bad, wanted or unwanted — can open us up in an unanticipated way. I have seen in many of my friends who are writers that their way away from vague is accepting and diving deeply into change.

As you find your way, consider sharing your most vulnerable writing with us. Maybe in a poem for our

.

David OlimpioPublisher and Editor-in-Chief

ATTICUS NEWS

Our Poetry Contest judged by Paul Guest is underway!What are you waiting for?

THIS WEEK AT ATTICUS

FERAL TOWN by Adam Gustavson

BOOK REVIEW: PLAYFUL PROSE AND SURPRISING REVELATIONSA Review of HETERODOXOLOGIES by Matthew James BabcockReview by Brian Wallace Baker"This collection is about giving life our full devotion, even the parts that are mundane, unorthodox, or just plain heart-breaking."READ ON

FICTION: KANGAROO BABYby Julia Strayer"After a year, the baby asked to be born, but I said the world wasn’t ready yet, what with all the pollution, war, rising oceans."READ ON

POETRY: LEAVES, TREES, SYCAMORE BARKby Rita Chapman"every richness is pinched offin faith that it willrise again..."READ ON

CNF: BRIGETTE'S LOVE, TIPPINGby Lisa Sellge"One day she will know that systems that do not follow the laws of energy must invariably fail. That love that is not balanced becomes heavy, burdensome, until seeking its own equilibrium, moves into entropy."READ ON

FILM: HEXAPODA film by Ian Gibbins"HEXAPOD was conceived as a response to climate change and its associated ecological damage."READ ON

FILM: A ROMANCE WITH SHIFTING BORDERSA review of Pawel Pawlikowski's COLD WAR by Emily Moeck"...a breathtakingly melancholic tale of two star-crossed lovers caught in the political turmoil of postwar Soviet-influenced Poland"READ ON

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