All Writing Is Relationship!

'Always Connect' is more than the E.M Forster quote

Photo by Luwadlin Bosman on Unsplash

---

Only connect… —E. M. Forster, Howard's End

Hello Loreates!

It’s been awhile since I dipped back into my teaching archives to pull an MFA lesson for you. Current events keep yanking me sideways. But there’s one lesson that I do want to share today, because it’s as imperative for all of us as literary citizens as it is for us as creative writers. E.M. Forster summed it up succinctly in his epigraph to Howard’s End: “Only connect..”

Forster’s message from 1910 operates on a quasi-spiritual level as a caution against Cartesian reductiveness and as a plea to link the head to the heart, both in directing one’s own life and in relating to others across such chasms as class, religion, and politics. This is still— clearly— vital advice in today’s world.

But I raise this line for another reason, because connection is essential, too, to most aspects of creative writing. For new writers, especially, the notion of connection can drown in seas of solipsism, meandering, grandstanding, or hyperactive physical plot. I’d hate to tell you how many pages of student work I’ve read in which the writer is sitting in a room alone thinking about herself thinking. Or in which the protagonist is charging through space for no other purpose than to generate the illusion of Action! In both cases, the characters spend line after line in similar states of disconnected isolation. And the reader feels nothing.

I get it. Believe me. We writers are an introverted lot. We work in rooms or closets or cubicles alone, locked in our heads for hours on end. It’s easy not only to feel removed but to convince ourselves that disconnection is interesting. It’s really not, though. Disconnection in writing is usually self-indulgent, if not downright lazy. And it’s false. No matter how alone or lonely we may feel, everyone on this planet is connected, not only to each other but to space, time, nature, and to everything we’ve ever felt or experienced deeply enough to remember. Those connections are what make writing powerful.

I should say that there’s a crucial line between introspection and self-absorption. Introspection is not the bogeyman here. Introspection can lead to worlds of connection through memory, musing, and imaginative curiosity and invention. Introspection is often the most efficient vehicle to get from the head to the heart.

Self-absorption, on the other hand, is navel gazing, watching oneself in the mirror, reporting one’s moves and thoughts simply because “they really happened.” Many journals are filled with this kind of self-absorption, which is why so few journals are worth publishing. They do not connect with readers.

Okay, so what can I offer to counter this common tendency to write yourself into oblivion? A game, of sorts, to play as you write and again as you edit and again as you polish, and also as you read and ponder other writers’ essays and stories. Let’s call this game Always Connect!

For rules and details, read on.

---

---

Always Connect!

All writing is relationship. I’m not sure exactly when in my writing career I realized this fundamental truth, but I can assure you it took awhile. The impatience to tell a story, to get the basic idea down and out and published, made this truth inconvenient. Relationship takes time. It’s multi-layered. It’s complicated and often difficult to understand. Relationship can be a pain. And to think of everything in writing in terms of relationship can be overwhelming.

All writing is relationship. What does that even mean, anyway? Rather than explain, I’m going to lay this principle out for you as a daisy-chain that you can apply to any story, fiction or nonfiction, that you’re reading or writing.