February | 2015 | Writing From The Heart

My friend Katherine’s thoughtful and provocative comment on my previous post deserves another post, not just a comment that will get lost at the bottom of the page. She makes a strong case for living from the heart, not the head. I certainly wasn’t trying to suggest that all writers are rational; for many creative people, quite the opposite case might be made!

There is no question now – science seems to be bearing this out – of the strong connection between heart and mind. The heart, in fact, contains about 40,000 neurons which help to regulate, by way of the limbic system, many brain functions. Fascinatingly, the experience of heart transplant patients suggests that memories and feelings are also stored in the heart (as well as throughout the nervous system). So the wisdom of the ancients that Katherine refers to was wise indeed.

Defining the role of heart in the creative process is a daunting challenge. It’s something we feel more readily than we can describe. The first time I felt it was at the piano – the Schubert Impromptu Op. 90 no. 1. After almost 10 years of piano study, I played this piece very well, so well in fact that I felt I personally could bring something to the interpretation. But there was one evening when I was sitting at the piano in the darkened living room – with just the light over the keyboard – when I became so profoundly involved in the music that it felt for one magical moment as if Shubert were playing through me and I lost all sense of who I was; my heart was full. I now understand this as living in the moment – heart, mind and soul all perfectly synchronized with something much larger than myself.

Some would describe such experiences as divine, but I don’t think it’s necessary to insist on the divine nature of the human creative process. What we do need to recognize, however, is that without that capacity to get inside the moment – the moment of heart, if you will – our art will be missing an important component in our communicating with others; something of the potential connection between writer and reader will be lost.

Photo by Marten Jager

When I read this line, I said to myself, “Doesn’t everybody?” and I’ve been puzzling over it ever since. The writer* did not elaborate.

If it means that writers have more lively imaginations (sometimes even lurid, often doomsday, but occasionally just fanciful), I can understand that. I find myself making up stories in my head all the time, and certainly not fairy tales, although often just as unrealistic. And I’m sure I spend far more time doing this than is good for me (the Reality Angel on my shoulder will whisper, “Oh cut it out, for Heaven’s sake).

If it means that writers spend a lot of time writing in their heads, I can identify with this too. Not all, but much of my experience gets “written up” without benefit of computer or pen and paper. When I was in Intensive Care a few years ago, this writing in my head about what was happening around me probably saved my sanity. Under normal conditions, it’s good practice to play around with words in one’s head, test out how they sound, curl them up on the tongue, imagine how they would look on the page or how an invisible reader might feel them. And, as I’ve noted elsewhere, writing about your experiences (even in your head) places you more squarely in the moment, adds to its savor.

But perhaps most of all – and this should be true of everyone, not just writers – a lifetime of past experiences lives inside our heads, some of them conveniently visible on shelves, some tucked between the leaves of books, some in dusty boxes, old recipe files or bottom dresser drawers. Music evokes many of these for me. Others I have to go digging for, hidden treasures richer for the remembering. It’s the exercise of poking around through these, as we age and contemplate writing them down in some coherent, painful, lyrical or funny way, that I believe is the real living inside our heads. It is not an unhappy place to be.

*I read this recently, but am now unable to find the source. I think it was in Hippocampus Magazine, so if anyone knows who wrote it, please let me know. I dislike leaving quotes unattributed. Thanks. SSH

Photo by SSH

Writing From The Heart

by Sandra Shaw Homer

Monthly Archives: February 2015

“Writers Live inside their Heads”: Further Reflections

“Writers Live Inside Their Heads”