Please welcome Elizabeth Huergo to Writer Unboxed today! Elizabeth is a new WU contributor, and we’re thrilled to have her with us. She was born in Havana and immigrated to the United States at an early age as a political refugee. A published poet and story writer, she lives in Virginia. She is the author of THE DEATH OF FIDEL PEREZ.
Please join me in welcoming her, and enjoy her first post–and her wonderful voice. Welcome, Elizabeth!
Writing as Tango
Perfection is stasis, and both dancing and writing require us to move in time, vulnerable to failure and limits, aware of the difference between where we are and where we wish to be, between love lost and love found. So when Estampas Porteñas, the Argentine tango company founded and directed by Carolina Soler, came to a DC-area venue, I was in the audience. I had to be. They were performing “Deseos,” the story of Margot and Charlo, who realize their love for one another only at the moment of parting, when Margot leaves her rural village for the big city, Buenos Aires. The rest of the dance is the story of their reunion, which ends with “Los Pajaros Perdidos” (“the lost birds”) finding each other again and an enormous celebration.
“In Spanish deseos means desires or longings,” I told my friends. “The tango is all about desire. It’s all about writing,” I insisted. They smiled and listened, the way generous friends do. To be clear, I’m not referring to the tango performed by a B-list celebrity in a televised competition, a distracted, melodramatic grimace stretched across his face as he counts the basic eight steps of the dance: slow, slow, tan-go close; slow, slow, tan-go close. I mean the tango as an expression of infinite desires against finite human limits. For despite the delusions imposed on us by Madison Avenue, (bodies sans wrinkles, age-spots, and any number of unresolved appetites), there is no perfection.
The night I watched Estampas Porteñas perform the earth rose through the dancers’ feet. I thought about the ghostly darkness, the duende that fascinated García Lorca, who described it as a rupture of form, a breaking away from the intellect, a moment when the artist is inhabited, consumed; and who liked to quote an old guitar master: “‘The duende is not in the throat [of the singer]; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.” While all art forms are capable of duende, for García Lorca the greatest expression of this haunting darkness occurred “in music, dance, and spoken poetry, for these arts require a living body to interpret them, being forms that are born, die, and open their contours against an exact present.”
Before the tango became bourgeois, the movements stylized and performed by the higher social circles of Buenos Aires, it was the milonga of the lower classes–loose, fast, and bawdy. It was an expressive process before it was either a form (the Tango) or a formula (slow, slow, tan-go close; slow, slow, tan-go close). However far-fetched it may seem at first, we can draw an analogy to the difference between drafting and revision: drafting as an expressive process that precedes and perhaps even resists formalization and revision as a delimiting process, one that requires us to “look again,” to judge our work as a performance, and to discern those points that need improvement.
I don’t mean to suggest that drafting is more important than revision or revision more important than drafting. Both are important and necessary–as separate intervals in the writing process. As writers, however, we move from drafting to revision too quickly. Too often we confuse revision with drafting, insisting that we are drafting when in fact we are polishing a handful of sentences that have barely had time to settle on the page. It’s a little like placing one foot on the accelerator and another on the brake and then berating ourselves for getting nowhere–and ruining the engine. We judge ourselves too soon, which is to say unfairly. Why?
I suspect it’s this dangerous business of dancing with the duende, of setting aside the fantasy of control and allowing ourselves to be possessed, consumed by our own creativity. Consider Susan Neville’s description of the writer as a tight-rope walker: “Every day begins like this for a writer: with the vain attempt to try to get to, in words, something that’s just beyond where words stop. This is your job—to throw the rope of words out and try to catch it, then to walk across the rope until the air gets tired of pretending to hold you up and the imaginary rope dissolves and you’re plunged into a canyon.” Neville describes the quotidian act of writing in relation to the infinite. She does not sit safely at a desk; she balances on a rope stretched over a canyon. Her life depends on her ability to “throw the rope of words” and “try to catch it.” And those attempts are contingent on something arbitrary, the moment when “the air gets tired” of pretense.
Drafting is the dangerous process of failing. It is intimate, close to the psyche, and frightening because to draft and to stay at this stage of the creative process for as long as possible is to welcome an intimate dance with the duende–the darkness of our personal limits, our mere humanity. We rush through, confusing revision with drafting, rigidly counting the eight basic steps of the tango when we have barely discovered the expressive possibilities of the milonga. I recognize this mistake because it is mine: I want to be done at the very beginning; I want the duende to move through me without the confrontation with my deseos.
Do you allow yourself to draft fully without judgment? What would that feel like? Better yet, do you have any tales to tell about meeting the duende?
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About Elizabeth Huergo
Elizabeth Huergo was born in Havana and immigrated to the United States at an early age as a political refugee. A published poet and story writer, she lives in Virginia. The Death of Fidel Perez is her first novel. You can learn more about Elizabeth on her website, and by following her on Twitter.
“I want to be done at the very beginning.”
Early in my writing career I composed seven novels on a typewriter. Revision meant rolling a fresh page around the platen and retyping existing words, changing the text according to my pencil edits.
After a while I realized that I was mindlessly retyping pages over and over, sometimes changing only one word. Two hundred seventy-five words retyped to make one correction! As if that one change would make a dull page suddenly dance the tango.
I learned. A first draft is just raw material, practice, a stab, a contemplation of the eventual novel. It’s a mistake to wish it perfect. Pride of accomplishment in finishing a draft should not be confused with pride in the novel itself. That novel doesn’t yet exist.
Still later I realized that challenge is not in getting the words right, or even plot, scenes, dialogue or anything. The challenge is in being in the flow, heart open, mind fired, dancing with the tale, both leading and following until you can’t tell the difference.
A novel is both wholly an expression of me and also something bigger than me. It takes two to tango, they say, and I think the same is true of novel and novelist. Your post reminds us that writing is not actually a solo performance. It’s a dance with a partner called a story.
Welcome. Lovely post.
Welcome to WU and congratulations on your debut!!! I loved your post and how I wish more of my writing were like a dance where you are swept off your feet. It happens only rarely to me, but when it does, I seize it and what’s interesting is that it needs very little editing. Most of the time, there’s a slow and steady writing, revising, rinsing and repeating until what I see in my head matches what’s on the page. But this takes time and as Benjamin says above, it’s a dance with story. And every new story is like having a new dance partner.
Lovely and freeing. Welcome to WU!
Gorgeous contribution — thank you and welcome! So true that finite and transitory accommodation of infinite duende is the most mysterious and wonderful surrender.
My limited experience of meeting the duende is remembering — coming back to my own consciousness after the fact. I just say thank you.
Welcome to WU. I enjoy the writing process. I haven’t thought about it as a dance, but maybe for me, it’s a tango with words, moving in one direction and then a switch, a change–the love of a phrase diminishing and the love of a new one in its place. Whatever it is, writing keeps me at the desk. And maybe too much–as an RN I also write about the importance of health, of moving one’s body. Walk, run, dance. Tango anyone?
You write: Consider Susan Neville’s description of the writer as a tight-rope walker: “Every day begins like this for a writer: with the vain attempt to try to get to, in words, something that’s just beyond where words stop. This is your job—to throw the rope of words out and try to catch it, then to walk across the rope until the air gets tired of pretending to hold you up and the imaginary rope dissolves and you’re plunged into a canyon.”
The one thing I would add to the description … sometimes when the rope dissolves the writer does not fall. Thanks for a beautiful debut and welcome.
PS: I dance tango … or better, tango dances me.
I read this post a few hours ago, and I found it lovely, beautifully-written. I can see that you’re going to be a great asset to WU, Elizabeth.
But I have to admit, when it came to commenting I found myself searching for something worthy of adding to the conversation after such a beautiful essay. Dance seemed too graceful for me to use as a metaphor for how I write (or do most anything). I also wasn’t solidly connecting with the high-wire metaphor, as I consider writing more of a process of immersion (after a reread, I see that I was splitting hairs – there are definitely similarities).
Anyway, the essay stayed with me through the morning. The concept of deseos, and of finding our way to the duende, made a solid connection, and I think are universal to artists.
Then, midway through the morning, I pulled up the doc for the WIP, and got myself ready to write… By picking out appropriate music. And I realized (duh) how central music is to my process – how I’d never find my way to immersion without the graceful and passionate art of others. Music is such a guide to emotional response, and dance is best when that emotion is apparent in the movement.
So, I thought that by passing along my epiphany, this graceless non-dancing geek of a writer would also have a chance to properly welcome a wonderful new voice to WU. Looking forward to your contributions, Elizabeth.
I echo the previous comments: Beautiful post.
I’m a pantser, so I enjoy first drafts because of the freedom. The most interesting experience I had with a first draft was when a character appeared, a detective in 1940’s San Francisco, and I followed him as he rat-a-tat-tatted down the steps of the police house, as he tossed a body over a cliff, as he hunted for his missing wife. At dusk every evening, no matter what I was doing, he would draw me to the keyboard. It was definitely a dance between us, with him leading. At the 3/4 mark I told him, “You better wrap up loose ends, or you’ll lose the reader,” and he disappeared. Never heard from him again.
Thank you for such a beautiful post. This phrase hit home.
“The duende is not in the throat [of the singer]; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of your feet.”
It reminded me of a piece of music I played while writing a difficult scene for my medieval novel set during the black plague. Even now if I listen to Frank Mills piano theme, “Mary Queen of Scots”, I see the carts rolling through the streets, men calling for people to bring out their dead, and then the doors opening, sobbing families carrying out dead children and parents. I can see those dying of plague throwing themselves out of windows in their delirium when they hear the toll of the cart bell. I feel their helplessness, their horror. When I wrote that scene I was fully engulfed in the duende.
It’s great to have your voice here at WU! Loved this post and the comparison of tango to writing. I am such a big fan of Garcia Lorca that I especially appreciated his mention in this post. Just the reference took me back to the night I saw Yerma performed in Barcelona. Thank you for resurrecting that memory.
Thank you for this powerful, stirring post. You gave me goosebumps. Like Vaughn, I’ve been reluctant to comment. “She who jumps out in the street to stop taxis” has been hiding her eyes from this post. Her heart. Partly because I’m at that place where I have to leave the wildness behind and make order from the chaos. Partly because my two protagonists are deeply flawed, haunted, and, at times, taken over by spirits. They first connected through music and the dance. The working title is “Prophets Tango.”
Welcome to WU, Elizabeth! Your thoughtful post uses two concepts that have been central to my creative spirit: dance and duende. Ever since I started dancing in my 20s, it has become a metaphor for everything I do: the process of learning the steps, the need to adjust and balance yourself with others, the glory of music embodied in movement, the moment when you forget the steps and become the dance. The transcendence of that moment defines duende for me.