Lesson 4: Shaping the Feelings
Writing as healing..
Introduction
Lesson Four, Section One: Introduction
Now that you have had some experience of the process of writing and gained some knowledge of exaggerating feelings in writing and life along with some perspectives on the potential healing qualities of writing, we are ready I think, to start putting it together into healing through what you have done or shaping it so that you can heal.
As Metzger says, “The image, the myth, the story, the gesture, the ritual, the ceremony - they are similar; all events of the imagination.” (Writing for Your Life)
In a sense a poem is life, or can be. You have made the gesture of expressing a feeling in a poem. You have learned ways of deepening and owning it. You have hopefully discovered ways or altering it (the gesture and the poem) and different forms to give it. I would invite you right now to take a few minutes and consider those ways of writing that you personally felt comfortable with - just as there are certain pens that you feel comfortable using. “Fix” those ways in your mind and body so that you keep them in awareness as we move through this lesson.
Something that might help if you are having difficulty here is a story DeSalvo tells about Eudora Welty reshaping her work into stories. According to her Welty took a typescript of her work, cut it into sections, and shuffled the sections around until they made narrative, artistic, and emotional sense. Then she used pins to fasten the pieces she felt belonged together like the pieces of a dress. This was a way of assembling or shaping a story that Welty felt comfortable using.
As you may be aware, shaping a work is very much an individual thing. There are really no guidelines for this any more than there are guidelines for becoming a great artist - everyone in the end has to blaze his or her own path. The hope here is that I can provide a few suggestions that you might want to incorporate into your life.
The shaping of a gesture has two major components which we will take up in the next two sections: 1) the shaping or refining of a gesture and 2) it's communication function.
