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The Work of Beautiful Writing

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This week, I got to teach one of my favorite poems, “Adam’s Curse” by William Butler Yeats. In the first stanza, the narrator complains to his lovely female companion about how hard poets work and how little their labors are appreciated.

A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.’

To this outburst, the woman quietly replies, “To be born woman is to know… / That we must labor to be beautiful.”

It’s a funny thing to say on one level, isn’t it? Beauty is natural, right? Yes…and yet, the $500 billion beauty industry exists for a reason.

The Work of Beauty

The narrator in Yeats’s poem describes the craft of poetry as more difficult work than laying stones or scrubbing floors. I’ve done both of those things…and if you have too, then you know that this comparison literally makes no sense.
 
Of course writing isn’t backbreaking work like that. But this doesn’t mean it’s not hard. It’s brain-wracking work. Exhausting. Emotionally draining. And there is the ever-looming threat of dismissal at best and ridicule at worst — to be judged as “idle” or a “time-waster” by the work-a-day world.
 
But there’s something else here too. The narrator talks of writing poetry as “stitching and unstitching.” This ties us (no pun intended 😉) back to the origins of the word “poetry”: the Greek word poesis, which means “weaving.”
 
We weave words together…and then we rip them out. You couldn’t see it, but I just deleted a whole line and a half there and replaced it with something else. These three little words sum up the writing and rewriting process.
 
That heartbreaking, liberating process of getting the $h!t on the page…and then deleting it and replacing it with something better.
 
The “better” — the bold, brilliant, and beautiful story that ends up on the page — that doesn’t happen by accident. It happens with intention.
 

Clothing the Story

The medieval writers of the arts of poetry had another metaphor for this process of “beautifying” the story: clothing. Comb the hair, put on the dress, choose the jewelry…give it style.
 
(Trivia: That’s why I call this site the “style blog” for writers.)
 
This is the process that’s done last, after all the major story elements have been properly composed. Main characters (protagonist/antagonist), plot, and world are the skeleton. The flesh on the bones are elements like genre-appropriate plot twists, secondary characters, and set pieces. Everything else is style: diction, description, the way you manage the white space on the page…even dialogue on a certain level.
 
Interestingly, often when we rewrite our stories, we want to start with this outermost layer first. We tweak words here and there, or we change out lines of dialogue. But we should know better.
 
There are all kinds of metaphors one could use for this mistake — like pigs and lipstick, or silk purses and sow’s ears. We have to fix the bones of the story first…and then we can dress her up and take her to the ball.
 

 

A Cinderella Story

We should listen to Yeats. This work is difficult. If it was easy, as the saying goes, everybody would be doing it. So we should go easy on ourselves a bit when the words don’t come out exactly as we want them too…or when we have to take our first draft and essentially toss the whole thing and start over.

I just recently had to do this with a project of mine — but the lessons I learned through taking that story through four different iterations was invaluable. No effort is really ever wasted.

But sometimes we need a fairy godmother to come in and do some serious bibbidi-bobbidi action. Wave that wand and make mice into chargers and pumpkins into coaches…and bedraggled servant girls into princesses.

But here’s the really beautiful thing about the Cinderella story — and if you’ve seen the new live action Disney version, this comes through perfectly.

Yes, the fairy godmother has to “dress her up” — but the only reason she can capture the prince’s heart is because that beauty was already there.

The labor to be beautiful is the labor of revealing the truth of the story — and of clothing it in the words that make everyone else see what has been there from the start.

 

But if you do find yourself in need a fairy godmother…I know a girl who does that sort of thing. 😉 You can find out all the details here.

Be bold + brilliant + beautiful!

Shannon

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