There's something to be said for serendipity.
Here's Dictionary.com (really, the American Heritage Dictionary, if you read the website's fine print) on the word and its origins:
n. pl. ser·en·dip·i·ties
- The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.
- The fact or occurrence of such discoveries.
- An instance of making such a discovery.
ser'en·dip'i·tous adj., ser'en·dip'i·tous·ly adv.
Word History: We are indebted to the English author Horace Walpole for the word serendipity, which he coined in one of the 3,000 or more letters on which his literary reputation primarily rests. In a letter of January 28, 1754, Walpole says that "this discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word." Walpole formed the word on an old name for Sri Lanka, Serendip. He explained that this name was part of the title of "a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of."
Now, as readers of this blog know, I'm not a fan of waiting to write until your muse communes with you. Or until you start channeling genius. No, indeed. I'm about embracing routine, habit, and doing the work. Do it, and the words will come. Eventually. They won't all be good ones, but once they're down on the page you can start tweaking and revising. Through the practice of your craft, it can become art, if that's what you want. If it's not, and if you're satisfied with a damn fine piece of well-crafted prose or poetry, well, then, that's fine, too. Absolutely nothing wrong with that; in fact, that's what this summer's writing is all about for me.
But I don't want to overlook the phenomenon of serendipity. First, it's a fabulous-sounding word (it's right on up there with "zephyr" and "halcyon," about which I've blogged before). Second, it's a kind of magical notion: the idea that through a happy coincidence of time, place, and circumstance -- through "accidents and sagacity" -- unanticipated moments of clarity and discovery can and do occur.
For me, serendipity is a by-product of undertaking and engaging with the routine, practice and the hard work of writing. It feels magical but there's no magic about how it happens. No, the magic lies simply in the when of it. When I'm doing that work and when I'm lucky, I will have moments in which previously unanticipated moments of insight not only come to the fore but find expression on the page, almost ... almost like magic. In such moments, as I type words on the screen, they shape and form themselves in a way that they give form and voice to ideas I hadn't realized I'd had and that are, in fact, smarter and truer than conscious, vetted thought. Usually such moments burn themselves out in the space of a few sentences or -- more rarely -- in the space of a paragraph(for me, at least -- clearly truly great writers have periods of sustained composition of this kind), but that they exist at all feels like a precious gift to me.
When writing academic prose, I have to go back over writing produced in such moments and make sure that I truly believe what I've said. I have to make sure that the words themselves have not seduced me into claiming something that's beautiful but untrue or critically or theoretically unsound. I have to connect it to what went before and what comes after, to the more pedestrian moments that precede and follow.
But when I can do that -- through the hard work of self-assessment and revision? Those moments of serendipitous prose shimmer like jewels. And I am grateful.
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