The best advice I was given for my writing was 2 years ago by Jeffrey Levine of Tupelo Press. He said “take risks on the page.” Call it growing up in a relatively sheltered environment, but there was a hesitancy in my expression, a timidity and self-consciousness that shied away from trusting my truths to paper. It felt too naked so I alluded to them indirectly in my work, cloaked it in evasiveness, clothed it in hangups of what I could, or could not say. I was not willing to let the reader in behind the veil.
I now see it left readers feeling like they were skimming the surface of a poem, disallowed from exploring its intimacy, its depth. It doesn’t matter how beautifully rendered a piece is, how viscerally descriptive – saying the unsayable is where the poem’s power lies. That’s where the stake is for the reader and the writer. It came to me gradually, after a lot of work on myself and my craft, but once I became open to it, it brought a fearlessness to my expression, a boldness in my work.
Oftentimes, when talking about risk-taking in writing, people reduce it to being experimental with structure, interrupting or disrupting established spatial or linguistic patterns. I’m am all for pushing the boundaries of form and technique, however, I am talking about taking your reader by the hand and inviting them into new, sacred space, carrying them somewhere they haven’t imagined, trusting them with your vulnerability, bringing them to a moment of stunning clarity.
Taking risks on the page builds trust with your audience, the reader gets invested, it makes for exciting writing that has depth and nuance, and saying the unsayable is a liberating act of courage.
Here are some ways to take risks on the page:
1) Explore the discomfort
In writing, it behooves us to explore where our mind feels uncomfortable going. When we start skirting around the topic, looking for euphemistic word choices and indirect ways to say what we want to say is exactly when we need to roll up our trousers and wade into the guts and gore of it. I had such a moment with my poem “Dress Code.” It starts with a girl’s account of strictures on her clothing and body, which she follows but still gets molested. I was having a hard time saying it. The risk on the page was beyond her rape. It was addressing the charged issue of blaming women for being molested because of what they wear. Writing that is what gave the poem its power.
2) Slip under the moments
Your writing piece, unless it is dispassionate, clinical research has emotional beats. Put your finger on that pulse. Delve into the emotion, expand it, examine it, inhabit it. Probe the inner conflict, the dramatic tension. I feel a great example of this is Emily Dickinson’s poem “I Felt A Funeral in My Brain.” The way she inhabits the moment of despair, madness, the collapse of the mind and communicates it with her trademark spareness is beautiful. A poem about the loss of sanity and reason rendered with metaphorical precision.
3) Exterior-Interior
The exterior images in your piece have to speak to its interior life. You can set them to harmonize or you can set them at odds with each other. Either way the image-emotion correspondence/discord has to split open the piece by throwing up associations, realizations, connections. What’s at stake in the piece? What’s the underlying story that generates the pivot, the turning point? Sometimes, when we are afraid of exploring the underside of the poem, we can ask the images to do far more work than they are capable of doing. Pull back the curtain of images and let the reader inside.
Keep writing. Until next week!
Zakia R. Khwaja
DRESS CODE
After my thirteenth birthday, Mother puts all my shorts
and skirts and sleeveless shirts in the giveaway bin while
I am shoved into a training bra with biting straps.
A woman must not move beneath her clothes.
The leftover trousers and jeans are sanctioned, provided
I wear them baggy with tent blouses that square my slight curves.
A woman must be hidden from the lustful gaze of men.
Under fabric, I dissolve – a snail, coated in salt.
My brother – shirtless, flaunting shorts, is indifferent.
A woman must not invite attention.
Between neckline and hemline, men pinch me in the bazaars.
We do not speak of my reddened parts.
A woman must observe decorum.
Behind the school wall, the police find my shalwar.
They find me gagged with my own dupatta.
What was I wearing at the time of the incident?
— Zakia R. Khwaja