Hannah Clague

To know myself

In my application cover letter to the Minor in Writing, I wrote this:

There is something about the act of writing, of putting my fickle, ungrounded thoughts down onto paper that makes them seem more tangible, like they are true and real. Through creative nonfiction… I’ve found a way to puzzle out and understand my feelings… leading to huge amounts of unexpected self discovery.

Good job, me! I definitely gave myself an imaginary round of applause upon writing this, and here’s why: it felt true. Writing that paragraph, I was doing exactly what it says I did; I was using the act of writing as a means to find out exactly what I was feeling deep down inside me, as a way to unveil what I hadn’t yet gotten around to consciously thinking. I finished writing that paragraph, rejoiced in the meta-ness of my work—I figured out why I write while actively carrying out the exact reason for writing!!—submitted the application, and consequently was admitted into the program. Again: good job, me!

Looking back, I’m a little embarrassed of my self-righteous attempt to woo the Sweetland faculty with such cookie cutter/white bread insights into my writing process. As it turns out, what I’d thought was my own unique reason for writing is, in one form or another, everyone’s reason for writing. Everyone. Orwell, Didion, most likely every kid in my Writing 220 class—we all write to know our own thoughts. The fact that my motivation for writing is shared doesn’t make it any less true. It just makes it all the more boring.

Thus, my attempts to write about why I write have brought to the forefront this dilemma: I have a hard time believing in originality. Or, rather, that it still exists, that it is still possible to create something that is entirely new, which has never been conceived of or attempted before. My original plan for this essay was to go step-by-step through the creative nonfiction piece I refer to in my cover letter, unraveling my process of self-discovery paragraph by paragraph. Chenille meant a lot to me, I wrote it a long time ago, and it could stand further emotional analysis from this wizened temporal distance. Had I written about it, though, I would’ve only pointed out a disparity between what is respectively “right” for the Writer and for the Audience: the resulting essay would have been true to me, but you’d have heard it before.  

Sometimes, that’s okay. Maybe basing Why I Write unoriginally on Chenille would have worked; sameness is not a good enough reason not to do something. But here, measured directly up against the other writers, my sameness made me want to think a little harder. So, instead of about Chenille, I thought about this: there are over 7 billion people in the world. I am not unique. Originality doesn’t exist. I cannot think anything that has not been thunk before (thanks, Dr. Seuss, for originally inventing that word). 

So that you may know me

Despite my sanctimonious proclamation that it would be impossible to come up with an original, creative idea/structure for this essay, my next step was to try to do just that. I decided I was ready to think big-picture thoughts about writing and what motivates me to do it. I hemmed and hawed for awhile, trapped between my knowledge that I wouldn’t be able to create anything wonderfully special and my biting desire to do so. Finally, around page 673 of Norton’s Anthology of Western Music (9th Edition), I found my inspiration: I would attempt to form a metaphor that combined my own brilliant analysis of all I’d learned in Musicology 240 with my budding idea that I write as a way to translate my locked-up thoughts into a form accessible to an audience. Buoyed by my endless access to primary source resources, my draft read as a long version of something like this:

In the Romantic era, composers of music formed two camps of artistic ideology. One side believed in the superiority of “absolute” music—music that is not intended to represent or illustrate something else, which refers to nothing but itself—above all else. Most often, “absolute” meant music without text, pure sound without interference of poetry.

Franz Liszt, the piano virtuoso whose swooning fans treated him like a Romantic-era Elvis, believed that music should be accompanied by text, by a “program,” that gave context to music in a way that made it more meaningful, at that that clarity of meaning made it more accessible to audiences. The music of Team Absolute only misleadingly seems more concrete, hard and definable in its titular absoluteness. It’s not, though. Beethoven added voices to his ninth symphony not for the sake of beautiful vocal sounds, but so that he could add text to his piece, add context and through it, specific meaning. By adding words, he took his already-lauded work from something purely beautiful for the sake of beauty to something meaningful, using the power of the beauty to carry his musical thoughts into the ears of his listeners.

Wow, I’m so smart, right?! Needless to say, this research-heavy second attempt, while appropriately conscious of its unoriginality, tried too hard. It alienated everyone who isn’t a music major, who doesn’t share my wrath against musicology papers and recognize my attempt at analytical irony. This draft served as a vehicle to display my cleverness more than it was actually useful. Again, I had a problem of Writer vs. Audience: just as my Chenille analysis essay would’ve been true to me and fulfilled the prompt for this essay in describing why I write, my musicological argument wasn’t good for you, the reader. 

But, if you take away all the archaic terms and heady analysis, my underlying reasoning is still there, presenting a crucial part of why I write. Maybe I tried too hard to overcome my unoriginality through extended metaphor, but my musicological conclusion stands true: Writing my thoughts down helps me see what they are and understand them, but, more importantly, it allows my readers to do so. They’re not in my mind, they’re not in my brainspace, so they can’t magically glean through some sort of intellectual osmosis what I’m trying to say. Translating my thoughts into words, into a language which other people know and can understand and relate to, is the only way they can see me. I write to know my own mind, but also so that you, my theoretical audience, may know it.

As a claim to my own self-worth

There was a point in this drafting process where that last sentence was the heart of my essay. For the reasons addressed above, I’ve now removed it from its original context, but even as I cut the music, I couldn’t bring myself to cut the reason behind it. It’s a good reason, one that is true to me and that really does inspire me to write/inform my relationship with the written word.

The problem is that it rests on a huge assumption, one that I find extremely tenuous and can’t quite get all the way behind: if I write to give audible voice to my thoughts, I am assuming that my thoughts deserve to be heard, that I deserve a voice. We know by now that I have serious doubts as to my own uniqueness, and about the existence of originality. Who cares that I write to show you my thoughts, if my thoughts are not worth listening to? I’m finding it hard not to come to the conclusion that—since I cannot offer a unique voice to the world’s discourse, only repeat from a very limited world view what has already been said—I could very well stop trying now. I’ll drop this class and my daydreams of producing an essay that matters and go live a regular life, exactly the same as before save its new lack of words, and let someone else say what I was going to, probably just as well or better. Why on Earth am I spending so much time and effort not only writing my unoriginal thoughts down for you, but reading Norton’s History of Western Music (9th Edition) thoroughly enough to prove to you across genres that this is what I’m doing?

I don’t think I have an answer as to whether or not I have the right to write. And yet, my whole writer-ship rests on that baseless assumption: there is a part of me that believes—despite my lack of uniqueness and my disbelief in originality and my knowledge that I am writing from a place of extreme privilege and my fear of being called “naive” or “girly” or “idealistic”—that I have a voice that should be heard. Writing, for me, is an act of declaring my own validity, defying my lack of uniqueness, assuming self confidence and love and that I have a place in this world, whether or not I deserve it. It is assuming that I do. Writing is a claim to power. It’s deciding, despite it all, that I have a voice, a way to do something for the world, a way to change someone’s opinion. It is me giving myself permission to matter, if only just for a moment, only in this document. For me, writing is an act of preemptive defiance; choosing to write is my declaration that I have a voice and, whether you think it warranted or not, I am going to use it. 

To be heard

Sometimes, though, this proclamation isn’t enough. Yeah, I’ve pulled myself up, pushed down my doubts, and made what feels like a radical declaration that I have something meaningful to say. Now, what if no one listens? If I stood on a street corner or a roof somewhere and yelled my beliefs and ideas and poetry into the world, I worry people would either tune me out entirely, or, worse, pick up their pace to pass by more quickly, acknowledging my presence only in their attempts to avoid what I’m saying. Because maybe my voice, the stuff that comes out of my vocal chords, is too high or bright or feminine or annoying for anyone to listen to me.

But, when I write, when I put my thoughts down onto paper, into the same size-12 Times New Roman font* as everyone else, I immediately have legitimacy. I follow conventions and grammar rules so that now that I’ve claimed by voice, people don’t disregard what I have to say. My written words stick around, all lined up in a straight line, demanding to be read. There’s something impermanent about unrecorded speech, about how fast the sound waves diffuse and are gone, lost out in the world, inaudible. The physical act of writing catches my thoughts as they fall out of me, freezes them in time, and presents them in a medium that will stand up to inattention, refusing to move for as long as it takes for someone to acknowledge them. Now that I’ve claimed by voice, writing gives me a way to be heard.

Because words are pretty

In the end, maybe as an afterthought, I have for you another piece of musicological knowledge I don’t want to cut out entirely: Eduard Hanslick, a Romantic-era music critic, believed that musical beauty is “a beauty that is self-contained and in no need of context from outside itself.” Substitute “words” for “music,” and his thoughts become mine: the beauty of words is a “beauty that is self-contained.” I don’t always need higher meaning in my motivation to write. Sometimes, the words themselves are all that it takes. They are powerful in and of themselves. They make me powerful when I wield them, but sometimes I ignore that power, and write them for the sake of seeing them there on the page. There exist in the  world beautiful turns of phrase and cleverly crafted syntax and literary images and I’m learning how to make them. Sometimes, I write in practice of the art of writing.

Probably, everyone else does too. That's okay; they should.

*This is Avenir Light. The titles on this site are Georgia. That was a metaphor.