Listening as a Pathway to Your Story
by Grant Faulkner
I’ve been thinking a lot about how we listen (or don’t listen) to each other, to the world, to ourselves. I’ve also been thinking about the role of listening in our writing.
“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories,” wrote Eudora Welty. “Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.”
I like this image of attentiveness, how listening for stories is different than listening tostories, how the world is a place of anticipation, attunement. To listen for stories is an art unto itself. You have to practice listening with a curiosity that goes beyond yourself. You have to listen with wonder and receptiveness and perhaps even awe.
You listen for the past’s murmurings, to what the tongue can’t, or won’t, say. You listen for a story in the way a broom sweeps across a floor or the way thin chords of rain strike a window.
There is always a sound, a story, in the air. The loop of a song curling into the dark of the night. The churning crescendo of cicadas in the thick air of summer. The sound of a distant lawnmower.
Listening is an art to practice. But to listen is different than to hear. When you’re really listening, you don’t expect anything and you don’t want anything. You simply take in what the other person is saying, the timbre of their voice, the rhythm of their speech, not judging, not commenting, just absorbing, paying them the honor of being heard and recognized. You relinquish control. You move beyond yourself.
Think about how you listen. It can’t be asked enough. Do you listen with your projections, with your desires, fears, or ambitions? Do you listen for what you want to hear? Do you listen to only your own voice? Do you listen in order to reply?
The psychologist Erich Fromm said that listening “is an art like the understanding of poetry.” Think about the careful attention a poem requires—how a poem’s meaning only unveils itself after several close readings, how words need to be scrutinized and deciphered, how a poem speaks through its nuances.
The author Paul Beatty practices a skill he picked up while studying psychology: Listen to yourself listen. “Not listen to yourself thinking, or listen to yourself speaking, but to listen to yourself listening,” he says. “To think about what gets in and what doesn’t: what you missed, how you heard it.”
One thing I know: we’re a nation of talkers, but not of listeners. To the point that I sometimes wonder who, if anyone, is really listening.
A big part of why I write is to explore these gaps between people—what we say and don’t say, what we hear and don’t hear (or hear wrongly). This is where so much of the drama of life resides.
That’s why I was excited to talk with Elizabeth Rosner on the Memoir Nation podcastearlier this year. Elizabeth recently wrote Third Ear, titled for the concept of “third-ear listening,” which was developed by Theodor Reik, a protege of Sigmund Freud’s.
If you listen with a third ear, you hear what is expressed beyond merely hearing it. You pay attention to what is unspoken and what people “only feel and think.” You also listen to the voices within that can be “drowned out by the noise of our conscious thought processes.”
Reik said a good analyst hears with a third ear. As does a good author.
Listen to others, and you’ll discover their poetry. You’ll draw out their mysteries, you’ll feel the pulse of their truth, and you’ll be filled with their being. That is a gift to your creativity —and your memoir— to be infused with another’s spirit, another’s life, and to bring that energy to your story.
The irony is that only then will you be heard.