When I think of where my ideas come from, when I consider how stories appear in my head uninvited, when I delve into the mysterious process that begins with a tiny thought and ends up as a 400-page novel, I think of a great productive force that pervades the Universe.
I’ve never decided what I believe religiously, and I’m highly suspicious of people who think they have it all figured out, whether they’re atheists or Wiccans or Christians (No doubts? Really?). But if pressed, I’d have to say that I think there is probably something in the Universe that is creative. The force that has given rise to hundreds of billions of galaxies, each containing hundreds of billions of stars. That has generated life, in all its astonishing diversity. That has led, even, to the inventions of human beings—societies, buildings, languages, arts, philosophies, science. The birth of the universe, the birth of a child, the growth of crops, the creation of art. They all seem to be to be part of a process of constant productivity and growth. And that includes the words that come out of my pen, and yours.
We humans love to personify things, and so we’ve created gods. In ancient Greece, the creative force appeared as Gaia, who emerged out of the great chaos at the dawn of creation. To the prehistoric Indo-Europeans, it was Danu, goddess of beginnings and generation. It appears as the Egyptian god Khnum and the Native American Kokopelli. And, in Africa and the Caribbean, it emerges as Oshun, the goddess of fertility, abundance, healing, and art, whom I’ve been exploring this week.
It’s fascinating to look at how often we writers link fertility of land, body, and imagination. Again and again, writers talk about their work as if they were raising crops or children: They continually use metaphors of gardening, farming, harvesting, conception, pregnancy, childbirth.
On bookstore shelves sit literary anthologies with titles like In a Fertile Desert, Fertile Ground, and Late Harvest. One storytelling website has children “pick” leaves from a “story plant” guided by a friendly pink dragon fly. “Eventually your writing will turn from healthy green to an ugly shade of brown if you do not take regular and proactive steps to fertilize [it],” writes Michael A. Stelzner, author of Writing White Papers: How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged. Author and writing teaching Milli Thornton offers her students exercises called “Fertile Material.” The metaphor of fertility is found in everything from websites for children, such as “Story Fruit” to academic articles like “How Does a Story Grow?”
Writers turn also to human fertility as a metaphor for the writing process. Screenwriter Sandy Eiges’s film Hollywood Scriptwriting bears the subtitle How To Birth Your Idea Into A Bankable Screenplay, and Louis Begley referred to the film version of his novel About Schmidt as “my baby—reborn.” One journalist described the lengthy time it took Harold Brodkey to pen his novel The Runaway Soul as a “twenty-seven year gestation.” Even greeting cards use the metaphor: One sold by Writer’s Marketplace reads aptly, “Writing is like giving birth: you forget the pain when someone says your baby is beautiful.”
So maybe we should fill our writing rooms with plants, throw rice over our desks, perform rain dances, and pay homage to Gaia. As for me, I’m putting up an altar to Oshun, as the embodiment of that creative force that works through me and in me every time I write.