So I spent several hours today in a delivery room.
I was not, myself, having a baby. At the age of 38, with no romantic prospects in sight, I have high hopes that I have dodged this whole business of babymaking for this lifetime. It’s never appealed to me, and I’m finally old enough that random strangers have stopped telling me “Oh, you’ll change your mind.”
Keep smoking the crack pipe, people. I am immune to the pressures of your social norming.
My role today was as labor coach, which is a fairly awful job, but it isn’t a patch on actually laboring. There’s a reason they call it labor, bearing, being delivered. It’s hard, awful, terrifying, exhausting, painful work.
And it reminded me of something important about the art and craft of writing, as so many things do.
It’s that writers often have to write about things we haven’t done. In my case, that includes bearing children. I’ve never done it. I’ve watched somebody else do it, but that’s hardly the same thing.
So how the heck do you handle something like that?
The facile answer is “any way you can.” In reality, it boils down to asking good questions, being open to new experiences, and being alert to what you can learn by observation. You find an expert on the topic and ask; you try it for yourself (if it’s reasonable to do so); you watch somebody else do it.
Of course, taken too far, that can lead to asshole artist syndrome. We cultivate a certain detachment as artists: we seek to observe. But there are things you cannot stand back from and observe, not and retain your humanity. It’s a major conflict for journalists: when do you stop taking photos and try to intervene? Entire books have been written on the ethics of the situation.
And of course with artists, we’re always turning everything into art, whether we mean to or not. Whatever happens to us gets reprocessed and rolled out again. Even if we try not to use it, it’s there under the surface–every heartbreak, every love affair, every loss of faith. It all comes burbling out again.
It’s a wonder anybody will be in a room with us.
“… we’re always turning everything into art” — well, that’s the fun for me. Any experience (mine or someone else’s) that I can begin to wrap my paper thin skull around is fair game for conjugating into all the possibilities. Insight, empathy — call it what you will — seeing everything and anything as a stem cell for the imagination is why I bother trying to put invention into words. Another core subject you brought to life this month, Elizabeth…thanks.
– Sully