Mystical Nonsense? Maybe. But…Maybe Not.
This first appeared as a post on 12/1/10.
There’s nothing like a good SFF panel discussion with other professional writers to get me thinking, because so often I find myself disagreeing. Case in point: how we come up with our stories.
I was surprised at the vehement reaction I see in many other authors when the term “channeling” comes up to describe the process; one related a story about Marion Zimmer Bradley getting very upset at the notion. “Do they think that I can’t come up with a good story on my own?” she apparently demanded. (Note: I don’t recall the exact words of the anecdote, so that’s probably off a bit. But I believe I have the essence right.)
That discussion has been turning over in my head these last few days, and I’d like to put out my thoughts on the matter.
I am a very spiritual person. I went through my reiki training some years ago, and am quite accustomed to the notion of serving as a channel for healing energies to come through into the world around me. I was taught to hold no ego in this process; the healing is there, and what the client does with it is up to him (or her), not me. The source, likewise, is vast and without preference in the matter. I am not doing anything but connecting two points for a brief period of time; there’s nothing particularly skilled in what I do during a reiki session, just practice at holding an honest, clear intention of do-no-harm, and even more important, the ability to listen deeply to what needs to be heard.
That attitude tends to carry through to my writing. Of course I sit down and puzzle out the pieces, and prod bits into the right shape, and make conscious, thoughtful decisions on what goes where, and what action or revelation would serve the overall goal best. Of course I have to use my brain and my intelligence and my wits and my skill with grammar and prose.
And yet … and yet….
At the same time, I sometimes sense a slow, ponderous river of story coursing through me, night and day; I know this sounds positively mystical, if not abysmally Jung-ian, but bear with me, please. Whether you consider the source of this river to be the morass of a lifetime’s collected knowledge roiling around in my own head, or a greater connection to something beyond ourselves, the end result is the same: I have found that when I listen to that river, when I trust the place of not-knowing, not-ego, and simply put out a hand to see what comes up, the piece I draw out always fits perfectly, just where I needed it to go. When I fight to impose structure and order and logic on my writing, it goes nowhere fast; when I sit back and ask what story needs written this day, words spill out in a flood over the page.
Is this channeling? It sure feels like it to me. Am I writing the story? Of course. Am I shaping it with conscious intent, skill, deliberation? Certainly. But there’s an intangible more-ness involved that I cannot claim responsibility for.
During a reiki session, I often see and hear and sense strange, disturbing, or frightening things; when I relay what I was shown to the client, I’m frequently dubious that I’m talking about anything in any way meaningful: “I saw an older man,” I said once. “He had an eagle-beak type of nose, white hair–” I went on in as much detail as I could, because this particular image had been startlingly clear, right down to the emotions and not-quite-words but thoughts/impressions I received. “He’s very proud of you,” I went on. “He’s there behind you every step of the way, and he wants you to know that he believes in you and that you can do anything.”
After a moment of silence, during which I thought, oh, crap, I blew this one big time, the client said, rather shakily, “That’s my grandfather. You described him perfectly. I never had a chance to say goodbye. He’s proud of me?” Her eyes filled with tears. “I always wanted to hear that.”
On the other hand, another client I worked with only once had been badly abused as a child; I knew it the moment I laid hands on her. She spoke of it herself, without prompting, five minutes into the session; rushed out at the end of the hour in a state of highly nervous agitation, despite my efforts to keep her until she sorted back to “normal” consciousness. She called me later, to complain that she’d had to pull over on the way home because she’d been shaking so badly. Clearly, I wasn’t ready to deal successfully with that level of trauma in a client, and I thank all the gods that she got home safely.
Stuff like that is why I don’t do reiki sessions very often. It wrecks me to see that deeply into another person; it terrifies me to have that kind of responsibility. I find it much safer to write, much easier to listen for the stories that need to be told, and tell them in a manner that allows the subject to be accessible without overwhelming the reader. Instead of the heavy-handed, gloomy approach of much “literary” fiction, writing fantasy allows me to drop in a bit of humor, a bit of the absurd, to balance out the horrible and the tragic. It allows others to hear the stories being told, as well; where hyper-realism might find a brick wall, a lighter approach worms through the cracks and widens them into gaps to let understanding come through.
One day, when I’ve told the stories that need me to tell them, I’ll turn my attention to that other path, that road I started down with my reiki master training. It’s still waiting for me to come back. I can feel it there, just to the side, patient, ready to carry me whenever I’m ready to walk it. But that won’t be today. Today … today, I’m still listening to the stories, and writing them down, and dancing them into forms that will get through the cracks and the crevices. Because I truly feel the Universe has told me that is what needs to happen right now.
And what readers do with the final result … with the stories I offer … is up to them … NOT ME.
