7. The (Artistic) Devils Are in the Details: Writing Anxiety and Environment

Writing, Predators, Genetic Group Selection, and Changed Spots

Preface

In the last newsletter on writing and teaching, I said it’s the singer, not the song, meaning the subject being taught is in some ways beside the point. It’s teaching that matters. The focus should be on how we know what we know, not just on what facts we know about T-rex or inertia or whatever head-fake topic you’re trying to cover. Understand, when I say it’s the teaching that matters, I’m not talking about the genius/hero teacher and not asking anyone to stand on top of a desk like Robin Williams and dramatically recite some of the worst lines Whitman ever wrote. I’m talking about the Mr. Feynmans of the world, a man who sold military uniforms for a living but who understood how knowledge is discovered and produced and how to transfer that type of knowing to a child. Mr. Feynman represents what I aspired to be. He’s my hero. (Remind me to tell you the very analog story of how I managed to get my hands on a transcript of that interview circa 1983.)

Before moving ahead, here’s a look back at some things the writing and teaching-centered newsletters have covered so far:

• Habitual patterns can block your progress and are an issue whether you are teaching or learning.

• Opening/Building pathways provides a way to break free from patterning.

• Adopting a “make a change; see the results” approach and stealing from the “bags of tricks” of the pros will help with pattern-breaking and pathway-building.

• Reflecting on your concepts makes change possible: It’s not what you are doing but what you think you are doing that matters.

• You don’t need to be gifted: It’s not what you’ve got but what you do with what you’ve got (which, coincidentally, helps grow what you’ve got).

• Evolution studies can teach writers and writing teachers about the properties of revision that help your writing and your writing-self evolve and about which environments allow writers and writing students to thrive.

• What we learn, good or bad, gets written in our brains, and realizing this can provide us with new approaches to teaching and learning and help us break free from anxiety-based writer’s block.

The (Artistic) Devils Are in the Details: Writing Anxiety and Environment

The Book of Jeremiah asks whether a leopard can change its spots, and the answer is a resounding No! Your spots are what you are. When we think about our writing ability, many agree with Jerimiah. We can tinker with it, but mostly, it’s fixed. It turns out, however, that our spots are also about the where not just the what. Genetic group selection—What? More evolution? Blame Walker Percy’s dogfish in the Shakespeare class which we may get into later—examines how environment, in tandem with genetics, is in play as a vehicle of change in determining some characteristics, and this provides a glimpse into how to foster other kinds of change.

As we saw earlier, Jonathan Weiner’s, The Beak of the Finch follows the work of Peter and Rosemary Grant who documented natural selection at work in real time among Galapagos finches. Around the same time, John Endler was studying South American guppies. Weiner says, “What the Grants are to Darwin’s finches, Endler is to guppies.”

Endler studied guppies living in South American mountain streams. He noticed that many of these streams had isolated segments because of waterfalls and that in the different sections, the guppies had different spot patterns. He found that the color and size of the spots correlated with the number and type of predators in each particular stream segment.

High up near the headwaters of each stream, the only enemy the guppies have is the comparatively mild-mannered Rivulus hartii. But moving downstream, section by section, the population of guppies lives and dies in the company of more and more of its enemies, until down near the base of each mountain, the stream is loaded with all seven of the guppy eaters. So a graph of risk and danger runs with the current. For the guppies, the higher the stream, the lower the risk. In stream after stream the intensity of natural selection is graduated in the same way: gentle pressure among the guppies at the top, violent pressure among the guppies at the bottom.

The male guppies faced dueling selection pressures, the need to be seen by potential mates and the need not to be seen by enemies and eaten. To extend his observations in the wild, Endler experimented with guppies in artificial environments with regulated numbers of predators and varied streambed types, and he later did controlled transplants in the wild, moving guppies from one part of the stream to another. His controlled studies supported his earlier observations: Colorful guppies became dull over the generations when in high predatory environments, and the dull ones, once freed of predators, became more like The Summer of Love with each generation.

These adaptations are determined by what David Sloan Wilson, in Darwin’s Cathedral, calls “local selection pressures.” The focus here is not on individual guppies or “star” guppy specimens but on groups. How groups act, think, what they produce, how smart they seem (as seen in my undergraduate workshop) are the result not just of individual genetic makeup, but also of the surroundings that help shape characteristics.

In his Ted Talk, “Be an Artist Right Now!,” novelist Young-ha Kim says we face environmental pressures against creativity and that natural “artistic impulses inside us are suppressed” due to pressures from society. He considers these discouraging, negative forces “artistic devils”—in other words, predators. The way he deals with these devils is to have his students write without pausing to think.

You must write like crazy. Like crazy! I walk around and encourage them, "Come on, come on!" . . . . The reason I make them write like crazy is because when you write slowly and lots of thoughts cross your mind, the artistic devil creeps in. This devil will tell you hundreds of reasons why you can't write: "People will laugh at you. This is not good writing! What kind of sentence is this? Look at your handwriting!" It will say a lot of things. You have to run fast so the devil can't catch up.

In What It Is, cartoonist and writing and drawing professor, Lynda Barry asks students to write by hand because “There is a state of mind which is not accessible by thinking. It seems to require participation with something physical we move like a pen or a pencil.” The state of mind she refers to is the moment when you cast worries aside and become absorbed in the work. Writing by hand activates different parts of the brain, she says, which helps tap into that state of flow as long as you keep your hand moving. Barry also talks about a kind of predator/artistic devil that inhibits such flow and stops the pencil from moving. For her, it’s what she calls the “Two Questions,” which are “Is this good?” and “Does this suck?” These predator-like questions stopped her from drawing for a long time. They “held me hostage,” she says. It wasn’t until she stopped listening to the two questions that the “strange floating feeling of being there and not being there came back,” and she could draw freely, freed from anxiety.

The implications from Kim and Barry are that change is possible, despite what Jeremiah says. Like Endler, we can influence outcomes by resetting parameters. What kind of spots do your guppies have?

School, unfortunately, can be a highly predatory environment, but school isn’t the only culprit. Who are the predators in your pool? (Teachers? Parents? Friends? Your inner voice? All those perfect-seeming creative types on Instagram?) Want brighter spots? Then pack up your guppies and move them downstream upstream.

Easy for you to say, you think. “How am I supposed to do that?”

Let us count the ways. Beyond writing like crazy, we’ll dig deeper into avoiding traps, breaking patterns, rethinking talent and intelligence, and examining the spot-changing aspects of using images and description, the exponential results of simile and metaphor use, the game-changing properties of revision, the utter importance of copying and remixing, and more.

Notes

About notes—in the search engine age, how necessary are works cited-like things? The practice feels outdated to me, so I may abandon it (hey, it’s my Substack) and make sure to put necessary names and titles in the newsletters themselves. I have research on this as a backup. Maybe I’ll share it sometime in my notes. (See, I’m not a Luddite, despite the typewriter evidence.)

I’ll reserve this space for occasional additional comments, like these.