Dear Sarah,

Thank you for your lovely letter and questions about my creative process, questions that have asked me to ponder matters which, if I’m being honest, I have for some years now left, not unanswered, but unmeasured—because the older an artist becomes (or at least, the older this artist becomes) the more the work arrives via instinct, sailing forward with the help of stitched together fragments of (self) knowledge, so closely tied, so intimate, they don’t even have to be acknowledged.  It’s curious that I don’t often think about my process, anymore.  It’s more like a skin.  I breathe through it.  I’m nothing without it, truly naked and undone.  Yet I’m not aware of it until I look in a mirror—and then almost immediately just want to get back to scratching the underbelly of a story, and seeing what makes it wriggle or whine or howl with pain or coo with joy.  What I’ve learned over the years is that my process is simply doing.  And that what is honored when I remember to say the words “creative process” is the willingness to give up everything else for a period of time to do the work, to make art, and during that time to enter what is for me a trance-like state that cares for nothing but the story, nothing but the doing, as well as into a state of awareness that it is perfectly okay, even right, to do this.  There is no apology in creativity.  There is only immersion.  Steeping.

It’s easier to make these abstractions (“process,” “doing”) come alive if I describe for you how I go about sitting down to tell a story.  But first, you asked about ceremony in/and my work.  All story is a form of ceremony, in my world, and all ceremony is a form of story.  Narrative is a formula by which human beings divide time into attentive chapters (or chapters of attention), which is to say, into organized units of imaginative yet intense, real and conscious experience.  I often tell my students that the goal of a story is not simply to entertain, but to arrest.  To make the world around us stop long enough so that we can feel our humanity pounding through us, while at the same time being connected to something outside our discrete individuality.  Most of us, without meaning to, lose track of our humanity as we wade through the bog of everyday life.  We perform chores, our minds either on the chore or on something we hope for on the other side of the chore, and even the most interesting things can become chores—love, friendship, sex, food, travel—units of consumption rather than altars of attention.  The job of the artist is to halt the feeling of trudging through life, and make the heart balance and dandle again like a baby on an unfamiliar knee.  The job of the storyteller is to capture the possibility of narrative, a form of dangling . . . The story is a hole that opens up to truth, or danger, or longing, or laughter, or evil, or redemption, or simply the awareness that we are not alone in our suspended states: the same opening is underneath all of us.  Stories remind us that we share experience itself.

So, to my description of how I sit down to the ceremony of writing.

When I wake up in the morning, the world is for a moment flat, non-dimensional, unreal.  Whatever dream I was just dreaming was, confusingly, the real; the world has to woo me back to it.  But, amazingly, it doesn’t.  It just sits there, in all its angles, making certain kinds of hums and noises around my head.  It is not yet alight.  Something appears to be required.  Oh yes, I remember; something is required of me.

But first, there are chores I must perform.  I do not approach these with any reverence, although I suppose I could.  Instead, I resent them.  Trudge trudge trudge.  Yet I’ve noticed that by enhancing, even exaggerating this churlish chore-ishness I’m creating the kind of foil I need to get ready to be creative.  Everything, even the trudging, it turns out, has its place.

I make the bed.  I eat breakfast.  Do some desultory housekeeping.  Check my email.  All of this is to a certain extent very “life-like,” and because I am very lucky, and live in the United States of America, and am upper-middle class, I am aware that all of these actions belong to someone who is blessed, even if I can’t necessarily feel the blessedness, right then.  I take a shower.  I might walk the dogs.  But all the time, I know the work, the real doing, the practice, is waiting for me.  I know that most of what I have been doing so far is necessary in its own way—but that what I am about to do is necessary in a completely different way.  Necessary to me.  I have a story to tell.  I am aware of a responsibility.  But it is not a chore.  I sit at my desk.  I open the file.  It doesn’t matter if I am working on something very deep that day, or simply trying to describe how a particular stretch of California coastline looks to a minor character who needs to carry that part of the tale.  It doesn’t matter, in fact, that I am a minor character wandering along the long coast of the universe.  I know what my role is.  It is to carry this part of the tale.  I go back a few paragraphs to read what I wrote the day before, to sink into the rhythm and feel of the story again, but also to check if the writing has the power to hold, to arrest me, or if it’s slack and allows me to think about going outside to dead-head the petunias.  If it is slack, I begin to re-write.  If it isn’t, I plunge forward.  One word at a time.  Each word must bear the weight, or a piece of the weight, of the story. I enter the trance-state within seconds.  The room falls away, the dogs, the husband, the weather, the house melts off its bones, the floor opens up underneath me, I am aware of writing with my chin high and facing the screen, but actually it feels as if I’m looking down, as if my chin sits right on my chest, and the only duty is to the pound pound pound, to life, and to that feeling of a hole, what is called the imagination, waiting to be filled with something that is both solid and a trapdoor at the same time.

I do this for about four hours, or until I can feel the opening closing, my concentration slipping, my head and my back and my eyes tiring.  Each day, I wear the drum out.  Pound pound pound.  The skin comes off. I’m done.  The rest of the day, it’s back to various chores, but strangely, though tired, I am more alive now.  Attuned.  Many days I leave my story and end by sinking into someone else’s, the space that another artist has opened up.  I want the experience of what I myself am trying to create.  I want to be part of it. It’s no good making up stories alone.  Stories are by definition communal.  Not just in the sense of being shared, but again in the sense of being one piece of a larger story.  The story is complete only when it’s become part of community.  I don’t have much interest in celebrating myself, or by myself.  The community at the end of my sense of creativity, of ceremony, is a human one.  Sometimes that community can be non-human, too: a sense of connectedness with something larger than the human.  But when I take a long walk or hike at the end of a day of storytelling, I become aware of how human ceremony is, and that it is one of the things we bring to the natural world, drawn from its rhythms, yes, but uniquely our own.  I’m not saying swans don’t curl their necks ceremoniously around each other; they do.  I am saying we are a species that sometimes writes and paints and films and sculpts and dances and reads its way back into its sense of life, something animals and mountains do not have to do.  The ceremony of storytelling, both the writing and the receiving of story, is part of the larger process of trying not to lose the world, achieved by being willing to lose yourself in a highly constructed homage to the world.

There are other ways and other ceremonies that take us back to the world and to each other.  But storytelling is my preferred tunnel, my not-so-secret access, my near-daily ritual.

Daily, however, I don’t think about any of this.  I get up.  I brush my teeth.  I feed the dogs.  I sit down and get to work.  I don’t think about muses because I don’t have to.  The process is attentiveness, the muse itself.  I feel enormously fortunate that I get to spend part of every day attentively, embracing a routine that is anything but routine, which is perhaps the best description I can give of the ceremony that is my writing.  If I say anything to myself at all, these days, about my work, it is along the lines of: write until you are empty; fill and write again.  And each time, the experience is both predictable and nourishing, expected and exceptional.

I can’t live without it.

Warmly,

Mylène