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Carved By Water | Unknowing on the Path to a Pushcart Nomination

By Jeannine Ouellette · Writing in the Dark · · 13 min read
Excerpt from Writing in the Dark

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The gist of this post is “curiosity —> attention —> discovery —> meaning.” And the reason (at least, one of the reasons) this gentle, iterative process is so creatively propulsive is that it works in relation to the lived and remembered experience as much as to the so-called unknown (because it’s all unknown, or should be, to the creative writer; as Stephen Jay Gould said, “The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best—and therefore never scrutinize or question”).

This path originating from curiosity requires us to cultivate a state of unknowing in our writing, which is easier said than done. In today’s post, I describe how other writers cultivate this state and write from and through it, including how Billie used it iteratively over time to develop and publish an essay that was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

I tell these writerly success stories not to place pressure on our own work—that’s the opposite of what I want to do. I tell them to help us learn to hold at least two and ideally three seemingly contradictory truths at the same time:

  • We want our writing—and ourselves while we are writing—to live inside a world of unknowing, free of pressure, control, and premature expectation

  • We want to trust that the time we are spending in this world of unknowing is valuable regardless of whether it “leads to anything”

  • We want to hold ourselves open to the possibility that what we are working on might in fact become something true, meaningful, and real

To note, this week’s simple but potent multistep prompt/exercise can be used with any work in progress for which you’ve reached a sticking point—or, it can be used as a bridge between drafts of any work, with the idea being to push forward only that which is essential. It’s a deeply useful prompt.

However, before we dive into this week’s work, a quick announcement!

Our next write-in on Zoom is tomorrow, Thursday March 5, at 11 CT!

The link to join is here, and I’ll send it out again tomorrow morning. Hope to see you for a productive hour of communal writing. I’ll offer an optional prompt to kick us off!

Back to “curiosity —> attention —> discovery —> meaning.”

When we pay very close attention to the world (a skill which requires practice), the world reveals itself to us in ways not otherwise ...

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The full article by Jeannine Ouellette is available on Writing in the Dark.