Listening As an Act of Creativity
To anticipate. To attune. To open.
I’m writing a novel called “The Listener,” so I’ve been thinking a lot about how we listen (or don’t listen) to each other, to the world, to ourselves. I’ve also been thinking about the role of listening in creativity.
“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories,” wrote Eudora Welty. “Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.”
I like this image of attentiveness, how listening for stories is different than listening to stories, how the world is a place of anticipation, attunement. To listen for stories is an art unto itself. You have to practice listening with a curiosity that goes beyond yourself. You have to listen with wonder and receptiveness and perhaps even awe.
You listen for the past’s murmurings, to what the tongue can’t, or won’t, say. You listen for a story in the way a broom sweeps across a floor or the way thin chords of rain strike a window. There is always a sound, a story, in the air. The loop of a song curling into the dark of the night. The churning crescendo of cicadas in the thick air of summer. The sound of a distant lawnmower.
But to listen is different than to hear. When you’re really listening, you don’t expect anything and you don’t want anything. You simply take in what the other person is saying, the timbre of their voice, the rhythm of their speech, not judging, not commenting, just absorbing, paying them the honor of being heard and recognized. You relinquish control. You move beyond yourself.
Think about how you listen. It can’t be asked enough. Do you listen with your projections, with your desires, fears, or ambitions? Do you listen for what you want to hear? Do you listen to only your own voice? Do you listen in order to reply?
The psychologist Erich Fromm said that listening “is an art like the understanding of poetry.” Think about the careful attention a poem requires — how a poem’s meaning only unveils itself after several close readings, how words need to be scrutinized and deciphered, how a poem speaks through its nuances.
The author Paul Beatty practices a skill he picked up while studying psychology: Listen to yourself listen. “Not listen to yourself thinking, or listen to yourself speaking, but to listen to yourself listening,” he says. “To think about what gets in and what doesn’t: what you missed, how you heard it.”
Listen to others, and you’ll discover their poetry. You’ll draw out their mysteries, you’ll feel the pulse of their truth, and you’ll be filled with their being. That is the gift to your creativity — to be infused with another’s spirit, another’s life, and to bring that energy to your art.
The irony is that only then will you be heard.
Photo Prompt
Use this photo as a prompt, as a random catalyst, as an igniter for any writing project you're working on. Or … simply write a story about this photo in less than 250 words and share it.
Because Quotes Are Nice
“True art, when it happens to us, challenges the ‘I’ that we are.”
~ Jeanette Winterson
Because A Haiku
A dying wasp
still a little fright
in its stinger
Whimsicality
Sometimes it’s good to scramble language. Play with this Dada poetry generator and see what “poems” you come up with.
Rejection Thought(s)
To live a rejection-free life as a writer is like trying to dodge bullets on a battlefield.
The best armor is to keep writing, keep submitting. And then to realize you're a superhero and you can deflect the bullets.
Something to Read
I just finished my good friend Meg Pokrass’s Spinning to Mars, an exquisite collection of tiny, linked stories about love and loss that haunt me.