Set the Writing FREE ~ Guest Post by Brenda Leyland

"In every block of marble

I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me,

shaped and perfect in attitude and action.

I have only to hew away the rough walls

that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it

to the other eyes as mine see it."

*

"I saw the angel in the marble

and carved until I set him free."

MICHELANGELO

Quotes found on AZ Quotes

I have been a long-time admirer of Michelangelo’s works of art and often have been inspired by his quotations, including the two above. I see more than a faint parallel between his craft of sculpting and our craft of writing. When I began this post a few weeks ago, I looked forward to exploring why these quotes speak to me so. I imagined asking Michelangelo how he came to decide what to sculpt from a block of marble. He must have been asked that a lot - we still have his answer all these centuries later: ‘I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me… I have only to hew away… and carve until I set him free’.

So, how do we as writers set our writing free? Pondering over Michelangelo's words, I came to see three points as crucial:

✦ We need a FIRST draft. 

There are times when I feel carving a marble statue might be easier than writing a novel, memoir, essay, or even a simple blog post. At least the sculptor has a chunk of marble in front of him, unlike the writer who faces a blank screen while her mind scurries to find ideas that are fresh and alive with truth and beauty. There can be no hewing of words until there’s a block of them in front of her. In the writing world, we know it as the garbage first draft.

For me, it’s usually a dumped-out collection of thoughts and impressions of what I want to write about. It might be a quote that sparks an idea. At this embryonic stage, it's barely coherent. We might have a beginning, but we can’t see how it ends. Or we might know where we want to end up but have no idea how to get there from here. And there’s no getting anywhere until we fill the blank screen, or page, with that first block of words. Then, and only then, can we begin hewing away what doesn’t belong. Chipping paragraphs that don't convey what we mean, chiseling off ill-fitting words, shaping sentences to describe the indescribable.

✦ We need FRESH vision.

Michelangelo was able to envision what he wanted to sculpt. He saw his figures as plain as if they stood in front of him. He deftly used his imagination. Like him, we must have eyes to see what is not yet there physically. We need a vision of what we want to accomplish with our words. We use the imagination God gave us to see the novel, memoir, song that’s imprisoned within our faltering first draft(s). American author Amy Tan once said that when she sees a visual image in her mind, she tries to capture it in words, making constant revisions to capture it more and more clearly. In the words of another, we write the vision and make it plain. 

✦ We need FAITHFUL perseverance.

In the early days of my writing life, I believed that writing a first draft should come out almost like the polished magazine articles and books I'd read. Sure, I knew that it couldn’t be perfectly perfect the first-time round, but something in me thought it should not be so hard. If it was that hard, I wasn’t really a writer. Not understanding that all writers start with their awful first drafts, even New York Times bestselling authors. I had no trouble believing that sculpting a statue from marble would take weeks, months, even years of intense, hard work. When I finally came to understand that creating a polished manuscript takes no less effort, time, or creative patience, I was able to relax and just do the work. And quit worrying about whether I was a ‘real’ writer. On those impossible days, I put my head down and by the grace of God stay with it.... sculpting, sculpting my word pile into something lovely and true.

*

The other day, I came across an article by author/editor Nils Parker. Here was another writer who not only saw a parallel between sculptors and writers, but he learned Michelangelo himself made such a connection in a letter dated 1547. Parks wrote, "Michelangelo not only summed up the critical distinction between sculpture and painting, but he pinpointed the essence of the editing process in the context of the written word. Sculpture, like editing, is about chiseling away at the unnecessary, at the external, in pursuit of the truth and beauty within. Painting, like writing, is the process of adding layer upon layer to a flat surface until there is something where before there was nothing." [emphasis added]

I look at Michelangelo's beautiful angel and long to touch the smooth marble surface. What a gift God gave that man. That he could envision such beauty inside a hunk of earthen marble and be so skilled, so committed, to sculpt, chisel, and shape until the ‘apparition’ was set free.

That's our job as writers: to envision what we want to say; to acquire the skills needed to make something lovely from that block of text in our draft; to learn the art of faithful stick-to-itiveness, persevering until our writing, too, is set FREE for this world to see and enjoy.

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(Top) Photo credit: Angel (1494) by Michelangelo on the Shrine of Saint Dominic, Basilica of Saint Dominic, Bologna, Italy. By James Steakley - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, httpscommons.wikimedia.orgwindex.phpcurid=5442648

* Nils Parker, "The Angel in the Marble, Modern Life Lessons from History's Greatest Sculptor". Link to article HERE.

Inspired by the beauty of God's world around her, Brenda Leyland writes from her home in northerly Alberta, Canada. She writes on her blog It's A Beautiful Life and occasionally posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Her writing has appeared in FellowScript as a former columnist and contributor as well as in InScribe's Christmas anthology. Passionate about books, Brenda's favourite sport is reading and is always up for sprints, 100-metre dashes, and marathon reads. When she doesn't have her nose in a book, Brenda also enjoys her flowers, walking, being in nature, and having afternoon tea in the garden.