As soon as I hear the word about in someone’s writing, it is an automatic alarm. “This story is about life.” Skip that line and go willy-nilly right into life in your writing. Naturally, when we do practice writing in our notebooks, we might write a general line: “I want to write about my grandmother” or “This is a story about success.” That’s fine. Don’t castigate yourself for writing it; don’t get critical and mix up the creator and editor. Simply write it, note it, and drop to a deeper level and enter the story and take us into it.
Some general statements are sometimes very appropriate. Just make sure to back each one with a concrete picture. Even if you are writing an essay, it makes the work so much more lively. Oh, if only Kant or Descartes had followed these instructions. “I think, therefore I am”—I think about bubble gum, horse racing, barbecue, and the stock market; therefore, I know I exist in America in the twentieth century. Go ahead, take Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic and get it to show what he is telling. We would all be a lot happier.
Several years ago I wrote down a story that someone had told me. My friends said it was boring. I couldn’t understand their reaction; I loved the story. What I realize now is that I wrote “about” the story, secondhand. I didn’t enter it and make friends with it. I was outside it; therefore, I couldn’t take anyone else into it. This does not mean you can’t write about something you did not actually experience firsthand; only make sure that you breathe life into it. Otherwise it is two times removed and you are not present.
Be Specific
BE SPECIFIC. Don’t say “fruit.” Tell what kind of fruit—“It is a pomegranate.” Give things the dignity of their names. Just as with human beings, it is rude to say, “Hey, girl, get in line.” That “girl” has a name. (As a matter of fact, if she’s at least twenty years old, she’s a woman, not a “girl” at all.) Things, too, have names. It is much better to say “the geranium in the window” than “the flower in the window.” “Geranium”—that one word gives us a much more specific picture. It penetrates more deeply into the beingness of that flower. It immediately gives us the scene by the window—red petals, green circular leaves, all straining toward sunlight.
About ten years ago I decided I had to learn the names of plants and flowers in my environment. I bought a book on them and walked down the treelined streets of Boulder, examining leaf, bark, and seed, trying to match them up with their descriptions and names in the book. Maple, elm, oak, locust. I usually tried to cheat by asking people working in their yards the names of the flowers and trees growing there. I was amazed how few people had any idea of the names of the live beings inhabiting their little plot of land.
When we know the name of something, it brings us closer to the ground. It takes the blur out of our mind; it connects us to the earth. If I walk down the street and see “dogwood,” “forsythia,” I feel more friendly toward the environment. I am noticing what is around me and can name it. It makes me more awake.
If you read the poems of William Carlos Williams, you will see how specific he is about plants, trees, flowers—chicory, daisy, locust, poplar, quince, primrose, black-eyed Susan, lilacs—each has its own integrity. Williams says, “Write what’s in front of your nose.” It’s good for us to know what is in front of our nose. Not just “daisy,” but how the flower is in the season we are looking at it—“The dayseye hugging the earth /in August . . . brownedged, / green and pointed scales / armor his yellow.”7 Continue to hone your awareness: to the name, to the month, to the day, and finally to the moment.
Williams also says: “No idea, but in things.” Study what is “in front of your nose.” By saying “geranium” instead of “flower,” you are penetrating more deeply into the present and being there. The closer we can get to what’s in front of our nose, the more it can teach us everything. “To see the World in a Grain of Sand, and a heaven in a Wild Flower . . . ”8
In writing groups and classes too, it is good to quickly learn the names of all the other group members. It helps to ground you in the group and make you more attentive to each other’s work.
Learn the names of everything: birds, cheese, tractors, cars, buildings. A writer is all at once everything—an architect, French cook, farmer—and at the same time, a writer is none of these things.
Big Concentration
OKAY. TAKE SOMETHING specific to write about. Let’s say the experience of carving your first spoon out of cedar. Tell us all the details. Penetrate that experience, but at the same time don’t become myopic. As you become single-minded in your writing, at the same time something in you should remain aware of the color of the sky or the sound of a distant mower. Just throw in even one line about the street outside your window at the time you were carving that spoon. It is good practice.
We shouldn’t forget that the universe moves with us, is at our back with everything we do. And if you throw a line in about it, it reminds the reader, too, that though we must concentrate on the task before us, we mustn’t forget the whole breathing world. Tossing in the color of the sky at the right moment lets the piece breathe a little more.
If you are on a Zen meditation retreat, between forty-minute sittings you do kinhin, walking zazen. Very, very slowly, in a standing position, in coordination with your out-breath, you begin the motion of taking a step. You can feel both knees slightly bend, your heel lift off the floor. Very slow. On the in-breath, you actually lift the ball and toes of the foot and step forward about one inch. Then you repeat the process with the other foot. Kinhin lasts about ten minutes. In the act of slowing down that much, you realize you don’t take isolated individual steps. With every step you take, you feel the air, the windows, the other meditators. You become aware that there would be no step without the floor, the sky, the water you drink to stay alive. Everything is interconnected, interpenetrated. Even the season we step in supports our step.
So when we concentrate in our writing, it is good. But we should always concentrate, not by blocking out the world, but by allowing it all to exist. This is a very tricky balance.
The Ordinary and Extraordinary
I WAS CAMPING this weekend in Abiquiu among fantastic pink cliffs and bare hills. It is the place that Georgia O’Keeffe chose to live. The weekend before that, I was in Hopi land in Arizona to see the snake dances. There were complete moonscapes that you could look out over from atop First and Second Mesa. The snake dances were for rain. Snakes were caught, all kinds—bullheads, rattlers, blue racers—and medicine men sat with them for four days and nights before the dance. During the dance the men of the village put them between their teeth and moved rhythmically back and forth. When the dance was completed, the dancers ran down the long mesa with the snakes and let them go in all four directions, the same directions where they had collected them.
I looked and looked in wonder. “How could I ever write about these vast expanses and mythic rituals?” A friend who had been with me asked: “Look at this huge space, the hills and mesas and the sky. You can feel God here. How can you just use the original detail that you talk about to capture this?”
We mistake detail for being picayune or only for writing about ants and bobby pins. We think of detail as small, not the realm of the cosmic mind or these big hills of New Mexico. That isn’t true. No matter how large a thing is, how fantastic, it is also ordinary. We think of details as daily and mundane. Even miracles are mundane happenings that an awakened mind can see in a fantastic way.
So it is not merely a materialistic handling of objects that is the base for writing, but using details to step through to the other shore—to the vast emptiness behind it all. For the Hopi Indians, who had always lived there, the large expanses around their village were very ordinary. They saw the huge mesas every day. Unfortunately, many of the young people want to leave to go to the city where it is more exciting.
Original details are very ordinary, except to the mind that sees their extraordinariness. It’s not that we need to go to the Hopi mesas to see greatne
ss; we need to view what we already have in a different way. It is very deep for the Hopis to have a snake dance, but it also is one of their festivals that has been performed every other year for their whole lives. Like any other dance, when it was over, they invited friends to their homes for dinner. If we see their lives and festivals as fantastic and our lives as ordinary, we come to writing with a sense of poverty. We must remember that everything is ordinary and extraordinary. It is our minds that either open or close. Details are not good or bad. They are details. How do you get to First Mesa? Go west one and a half hours from Window Rock on Highway 264.
The snake dance was made up of detail after detail with extreme concentration; it had to be that way—the snakes were in the Hopis’ mouths. We who watched thought it was unfathomable and fantastic because it was new and foreign. It was also ordinary and had been done for hundreds of years. In order to write about it, we have to go to the heart of it and know it, so the ordinary and extraordinary flash before our eyes simultaneously. Go so deep into something that you understand its interpenetration with all things. Then automatically the detail is imbued with the cosmic; they are interchangeable.
A friend of mine had a motorcycle accident recently. He had not slept the night before and left early for a long journey to Massachusetts. He fell asleep at eighty-five miles per hour and ran into a car. He was very lucky and didn’t have a scratch on him, though his bike was totaled.
I was shattered when I heard about it. If he had been killed, the balance of my life would have changed. We are all interwoven and create each other’s universes. When one person dies out of his time, it affects us all. We don’t live for ourselves; we are interconnected. We live for the earth, for Texas, for the chicken we ate last night that gave us its life, for our mother, for the highway and the ceiling and the trees. We have a responsibility to treat ourselves kindly; then we will treat the world in the same way.
This understanding is how we should come to writing. Then we can handle details not as individual, material objects alone but as reflections of everything. Katagiri Roshi said: “It is very deep to have a cup of tea.” Understand that when we write about a cup or a mesa or the sky or a bobby pin, we must give them good attention and penetrate into their heart. Doing this, we will naturally make those leaps that poetry talks about, because we are aware of the interconnection of all things. We can also write prose that moves from paragraph to paragraph without having to worry about those transitions we were taught about in high school. They will happen naturally, because we will be in touch with the hugeness of movement.
Talk Is the Exercise Ground
GET TOGETHER WITH a good friend and tell stories. Tell about the time you had your palm read in Albuquerque, how you sat zazen in a chicken coop in Arroyo Seco, New Mexico, with your friend Sassafras, how your mother eats cottage cheese and toast every morning.
When you tell friends stories, you want them to listen, so you make the stories colorful; you might exaggerate, even add a few brilliant white lies. And your friends don’t care if it’s all not precisely as it was ten years ago; it is now and they are entranced. A writing friend once said to me when I met him for lunch: “Tell me the best piece of gossip you heard in the last month. And if you don’t know any, make it up.” Grace Paley, a New York short story writer, said, “It is the responsibility of writers to listen to gossip and pass it on. It is the way all storytellers learn about life.”
It is good to talk. Do not be ashamed of it. Talk is the exercise ground for writing. It is a way we learn about communication—what makes people interested, what makes them bored. I laugh with friends and say, “We are not gossiping cruelly. We are just trying to understand life.” And it is true. We should learn to talk, not with judgment, greed, or envy, but with compassion, wonder, and amazement.
I remember sitting after a concert in the New French Bar in downtown Minneapolis with a writing friend and telling her about how I became a Buddhist. Because of the intensity of her listening, the story, which I had told many times, took on a great brilliance. I remember the light off the wineglasses, the taste of my chocolate mousse. I knew then that I had to write the story—there was great material in it.
Talk is a way writers can help each other find new directions. “Hey, that’s great; have you written about it?” “That’s a good line, ‘I lived here six years and can’t remember a thing, not a thing.’ Write it down and begin a poem with it.” Once I came home from a visit in Boston and said to a friend in passing, “Oh, he’s crazy about her.” She was in the process of writing a mystery novel in those days and honed in, “How can you tell he was crazy about her? Tell me what actions he did.” I laughed. You can’t make general statements around writers—they want me not to “tell” but to “show” with incidents.
Another friend told me about her father who left the family suddenly when she was twelve and became a born-again Christian and embezzled money from the churches of three states. It was her personal tragedy. I told her it was a great story. Her face lit up. She realized she could transform her life in a new way—as material for writing.
Talk is a way to warm up for the big game—the hours you write alone with your pen and notebook. Make a list of all the stories you have told over and over. That’s a lot of writing to be done.
Writing Is a Communal Act
A STUDENT SAID, “I’m reading so much Hemingway, I’m afraid I’m beginning to sound like him. I’m copying him and not having my own voice.” That’s not so bad. It’s a lot better to sound like Ernest Hemingway than like Aunt Bethune, who thinks Hallmark greeting cards contain the best poetry in America.
We always worry that we are copying someone else, that we don’t have our own style. Don’t worry. Writing is a communal act. Contrary to popular belief, a writer is not Prometheus alone on a hill full of fire. We are very arrogant to think we alone have a totally original mind. We are carried on the backs of all the writers who came before us. We live in the present with all the history, ideas, and soda pop of this time. It all gets mixed up in our writing.
Writers are great lovers. They fall in love with other writers. That’s how they learn to write. They take on a writer, read everything by him or her, read it over again until they understand how the writer moves, pauses, and sees. That’s what being a lover is: stepping out of yourself, stepping into someone else’s skin. Your ability to love another’s writing means those capabilities are awakened in you. It will only make you bigger; it won’t make you a copy cat. The parts of another’s writing that are natural to you will become you, and you will use some of those moves when you write. But not artificially. Great lovers realize that they are what they are in love with. That is what happened to Allen Ginsberg when he wanted to write so that Jack Kerouac could understand him: “. . . being in love with Jack Kerouac he discovered he was Jack Kerouac: that’s something love knows.”9 You are Ernest Hemingway on a safari when you read Green Hills of Africa, and then you are Jane Austen looking at Regency women and then Gertrude Stein doing her own Cubism in words, and then you are Larry McMurtry in Texas walking to the pool hall in a dusty town.
So writing is not just writing. It is also having a relationship with other writers. And don’t be jealous, especially secretly. That’s the worst kind. If someone writes something great, it’s just more clarity in the world for all of us. Don’t make writers “other,” different from you: “They are good and I am bad.” Don’t create that dichotomy. It makes it hard to become good if you create that duality. The opposite, of course, is also true: if you say, “I am great and they aren’t,” then you become too proud, unable to grow as a writer or hear criticism of your work. Just: “They are good and I am good.” That statement gives a lot of space. “They have been at it longer, and I can walk their path for a while and learn from them.”
It’s much better to be a tribal writer, writing for all people and reflecting many voices through us, than to be a cloistered being trying to find one peanut of truth in our own indiv
idual mind. Become big and write with the whole world in your arms.
Even if we go off alone to write in the wilderness, we have to commune with ourselves and everything around us: the desk, the trees, the birds, the water, the typewriter. We are not separate from everything else. It’s only our egos that make us think we are. We build on what came before us, even if our writing is a reaction to it or we try to negate the past. We still write with the knowledge of what’s at our backs.
It’s also good to know some local people who are writing and whom you can get together with for mutual support. It is very hard to continue just on your own. I tell my students in a group to get to know each other, to share their work with other people. Don’t let it just pile up in notebooks. Let it out. Kill the idea of the lone, suffering artist. We suffer anyway as human beings. Don’t make it any harder on yourself.
One Plus One Equals a Mercedes-Benz
I ALWAYS TELL my students, especially the sixth-graders, the ones who are becoming very worldlywise: Turn off your logical brain that says 1 + 1 = 2. Open up your mind to the possibility that 1 + 1 can equal 48, a Mercedes-Benz, an apple pie, a blue horse. Don’t tell your autobiography with facts, such as “I am in sixth grade. I am a boy. I live in Owatonna. I have a mother and father.” Tell me who you really are: “I am the frost on the window, the cry of a young wolf, the thin blade of grass.”
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