“Well, I’ll try my best. I figure I have to give it a shot, and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. I’ll just accept it.”
Roshi responded, “That’s the wrong attitude. If they knock you down, you get up. If they knock you down again, get up. No matter how many times they knock you down, get up again. That is how you should go.”
The same is true in writing. For every book that makes it, there are probably thousands that don’t even get published. We must continue anyway. If you want to write, write. If one book doesn’t get published, write another one. Each one will get better because you have all the more practice behind you.
Every other month I am ready to quit writing. The inner dialogue goes something like this: “This is stupid. I am making no money, there’s no career in poetry, no one cares about it, it’s lonely, I hate it, it’s dumb, I want a regular life.” These thoughts are torture. Doubt is torture. If we give ourselves fully to something, it will be clearer when it might be appropriate to quit. It is a constant test of perseverance. Sometimes I listen to the doubting voice and get sidetracked for a while. “I think I’ll go into sales, open up a café so other writers can go there, sip cappuccino and write, or get married, have babies, be a homemaker and make wonderful chicken dinners.”
Don’t listen to doubt. It leads no place but to pain and negativity. It is the same with your critic who picks at you while you are trying to write: “That’s stupid. Don’t say that. Who do you think you are anyway, trying to be a writer?” Don’t pay attention to those voices. There is nothing helpful there. Instead, have a tenderness and determination toward your writing, a sense of humor and a deep patience that you are doing the right thing. Avoid getting caught by that small gnawing mouse of doubt. See beyond it to the vastness of life and the belief in time and practice.
A Little Sweet
IN JUDAISM THERE is an old tradition that when a young boy first begins to study, the very first time, after he reads his first word in the Torah, he is given a taste of honey or a sweet. This is so he will always associate learning with sweetness. It should be the same with writing. Right from the beginning, know it is good and pleasant. Don’t battle with it. Make it your friend.
And it is your friend. It will never desert you, though you may desert it many times. The writing process is a constant source of life and vitality. Sometimes when I come home from work and feel disjointed and blue, I say to myself, “Natalie, you know what you need to do. You need to write.” If I’m smart, I listen. If I’m in a destructive or very lazy space, I don’t, and the blues continue. But when I do listen, it offers me a chance to touch my life which always softens me and allows me to feel connected with myself again. Even if what I write about is the details of rush hour that morning on the freeway, living them again usually gives me a sense of peace and affirmation: “I’m a human being; I wake up in the morning; I drive on the freeway.”
Gore Vidal has a wonderful quote: “As every author—and every reader—knows, writing well is the best trip of them all.” Don’t even worry about writing “well”; just writing is heaven.
A New Moment
KATAGIRI ROSHI OFTEN used to say: “Take one step off a hundred-foot pole.” That’s pretty scary, isn’t it? Finally you arrive at the top, which is precarious enough, and now you can’t stay there. You have to go ahead and step off the edge. In other words, you can’t rest on your success. Or your failure. “I have written something wonderful.” Good, but it is a new moment. Write something else. Do not be tossed away by your achievements or your fiascoes. Continue under all circumstances. It will keep you healthy and alive. Actually, you don’t know for sure that you will fall when you step off the hundred-foot pole. You may fly instead. There are no guarantees one way or the other. Just keep writing.
Tulips come up in spring for no reason. Of course, you planted bulbs and now in April the earth warms up. But why? Because the earth spins around the sun. But why? For no reason except gravity. Why gravity? For no reason. And why did you plant red tulip bulbs to begin with? For beauty, which is itself and has no reason. So the world is empty. Things rise and fall for no reason. And what a great opportunity that is! You can start writing again at any minute. Let go of all your failures and sit down and write something great. Or write something terrible and feel great about it.
Tony Robbins, who teaches workshops in walking on 1,200-degree coals, told a story about a contract that was supposed to be signed. In the past, every time the workshop was scheduled in this particular city, the contractor haggled about the price, schedule, etc. This time Tony decided to change the energy of the interaction. He bought a water pistol, filled it with water, and put it in the inside coat pocket of his thousand-dollar suit. When the argument about money came up, he pulled out the pistol and began shooting it at the contractor across the large office desk on the tenth floor of an executive suite. The contractor was so surprised he began to laugh, saw in a flash that they had been through the same haggle every year, took out his pen, and signed on the black line. Every moment is fresh. Just because a water pistol hasn’t been used before at business meetings doesn’t mean there is a rule that it can’t be used.
Step through your resistances right now and write something great. Right now. This is a new moment.
Why Do I Write?
WHY DO I write?” It’s a good question. Ask it of yourself every once in a while. No answer will make you stop writing, and over time you will find that you have given every response.
Because I’m a jerk.
Because I want the boys to be impressed.
So my mother will like me.
So my father will hate me.
No one listens to me when I speak.
So I can start a revolution.
In order to write the great American novel and make a million dollars.
Because I’m neurotic.
Because I’m the reincarnation of William Shakespeare.
Because I have something to say.
Because I have nothing to say.
Baker Roshi from San Francisco Zen Center said, “‘Why?’ isn’t a good question.” Things just are. Hemingway has said, “Not the why, but the what.” Give the real detailed information. Leave the why for psychologists. It’s enough to know you want to write. Write.
Yet it’s a good and haunting question to explore, not so you can find the one final reason, but to see how writing permeates your life with many reasons. Writing is not therapy, though it may have a therapeutic effect. You don’t discover that you write because of lack of love and then quit, as you might in therapy discover that you eat chocolate as a love substitute and, seeing the reason, stop (if you’re lucky) eating Hershey’s chocolate bars and hot fudge. Writing is deeper than therapy. You write through your pain, and even your suffering must be written out and let go of.
In writing class painful things come up—the death of a husband, throwing the ashes of a dead baby into a river, a woman going blind. The students read the pieces they just wrote and I tell them they can cry if they need to but to remember to continue to read. We pause when they are finished and then go on to the next person, not because we ignore their suffering—we acknowledge it—but because writing is the aim. It is an opportunity to take the emotions we have felt many times and give them light, color, and a story. We can transform anger into steaming red tulips and sorrow into an old alley full of squirrels in the half light of November.
Writing has tremendous energy. If you find a reason for it, any reason, it seems that rather than negate the act of writing, it makes you burn deeper and glow clearer on the page. Ask yourself, “Why do I write?” or “Why do I want to write?,” but don’t think about it. Take pen and paper and answer it with clear, assertive statements. Every statement doesn’t have to be 100 percent true and each line can contradict the others. Even lie if you need to, to get going. If you don’t know why you write, answer it as though you do know why.
Why do I write? I write because I kept my mouth sh
ut all my life and the secret ego truth is I want to live eternally and I want my people to live forever. I hurt at our impermanence, at the passing of time. At the edge of all my joy is the creeping agony that this will pass—this Croissant Express at the corner of Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis, a great midwestern city in mythical America, will someday stop serving me hot chocolate. I will move on to New Mexico where no one knows how it feels to be here with the sudden light of afternoon, the silver of the ceiling, the half-smell of croissants baking in the oven.
I write because I am alone and move through the world alone. No one will know what has passed through me, and even more amazing, I don’t know. Now that it’s spring I can’t remember what it felt like to be in forty below. Even with the heat on, you could feel mortality screaming through the thin walls of your house.
I write because I am crazy, schizophrenic, and I know it and accept it and I have to do something with it other than go to the loony bin.
I write because there are stories that people have forgotten to tell, because I am a woman trying to stand up in my life. I write because to form a word with your lips and tongue or think a thing and then dare to write it down so you can never take it back is the most powerful thing I know. I am trying to come alive, to find the distances in my own recesses and bring them forward and give them color and form.
I write out of total incomprehension that even love isn’t enough and that finally writing might be all I have and that isn’t enough. I can never get it all down, and besides, there are times when I have to step away from the table, notebook, and turn to face my own life. Then there are times when it’s only coming to the notebook that I truly do face my own life.
And I write out of hurt and how to make hurt okay; how to make myself strong and come home, and it may be the only real home I’ll ever have.
This was written at the Croissant Express, April 1984. If I wrote it now, a different response might come up. We write in the moment and reflect our minds, emotions, environment in that moment. This does not mean that one is truer than the other—they are all true.
When the old nag in you comes around with “Why are you wasting your time? Why do you write?,” just dive onto the page, be full of answers, but don’t try to justify yourself. You do it because you do it. You do it because you want to improve your handwriting, because you’re an idiot, because you’re mad for the smell of paper.
Every Monday
EVERY MONDAY LAST winter my dear friend Kate and I wrote together. We met at nine in the morning and wrote until about two or three in the afternoon. Sometimes she showed up with an idea: “Let’s write about divisions. Okay? Go for an hour.” Because there were only the two of us, when the writing sessions were over, we read aloud to each other the whole of what we wrote. It was a lot, with hands moving the whole time.
We tried out writing in different cafés, once even driving an hour south to Owatonna, Minnesota, so I could show her the bank designed by Louis Sullivan that I was in love with. We wrote in the coffee shop across the street. I was unemployed then, looking for a job. She was on a writing grant.
I tell you this because it is important. We were willing to commit ourselves to a whole day of writing each week because writing, sharing, and friendship are important. And it happened on a Monday, the beginning of the work week. Remember this. Remember Kate and me on Mondays when nothing in your life seems worthwhile but earning a living and you find yourself worried about it.
When I was in Jerusalem for three months I had an Israeli landlady in her fifties. Her TV was broken and she called the repairman. It took him four visits to fix the screen. “But you knew even before he came the first time what was wrong. He could have brought the correct tube and fixed it immediately.” She looked at me in astonishment. “Yes, but then we couldn’t have had a relationship, sat and drunk tea and discussed the progress of the repairs.” Of course, the goal is not to fix a machine but to have relationships.
That is good to remember. What is important is not just what you do—“I am writing a book”—but how you do it, how you approach it, and what you come to value.
A friend living upstairs from me once said, “Natalie, you have relationships with everything, not just with people. You have a relationship with the stairs, your porch, the car, the cornfields, and the clouds.” We are a part of everything. When we understand this, we see that we are not writing, but everything is writing through us. Kate and I wrote through each other and through Mondays and through the streets and the coffee. Like bleeding one color into another.
There are many realities. We should remember this when we get too caught in being concerned about the way the rest of the world lives or how we think they live. There is just our lives and how we want to write and how we want to touch the rain, the table, the music, paper cups and pine trees.
A good warm-up or awakener is to write for ten minutes, beginning with “I am a friend to . . .” and only list inanimate objects. It helps to bring those things into the scope of our lives. The toaster, the highway, the mountains, the curb, live with us too. Doing this exercise and writing with a friend remind us to step outside ourselves when we are stuck too deep into ourselves.
More About Mondays
I WANT TO talk more about those Mondays with Kate. One time we met at her house on the first floor, her husband asleep upstairs and the children at day care, a space heater on the massage table—not helping my cold hands much. We smoked cigarette after cigarette, not inhaling but “playing smoking.” Kate had a scarf wrapped around her neck like they do in New York.
We talked about our voices as writers—how they are strong and brave but how as people we are wimps. This is what creates our craziness. The chasm between the great love we feel for the world when we sit and write about it and the disregard we give it in our own human lives. How Hemingway could write of the great patience of Santiago in the fishing boat and how Hemingway himself, when he stepped out of his writing studio, mistreated his wife and drank too much. We have to begin to bring these two worlds together. Art is the act of nonaggression. We have to live this art in our daily lives.
We spent the whole day mostly talking, only getting around to two twenty-minute writing sessions and a beautiful poem by Kenneth Rexroth, but that was okay. The whole day was a good poem. Friendship, cold feet, feeding the cat, filling the ashtray with cigarette butts. And if we were smart it would have continued into Monday night when we left each other and were alone in our separate worlds.
Katagiri Roshi says, “Our goal is to have kind consideration for all sentient beings every moment forever.” This does not mean put a good poem on paper and then spit at our lives, curse our cars, and cut off someone on the freeway. It means carry the poem away from the desk and into the kitchen. That is how we will survive as writers, no matter how little money we make in the American economy and how little acceptance we get in the magazines. We are not writing for money and acceptance—although that would be nice.
The deepest secret in our heart of hearts is that we are writing because we love the world, and why not finally carry that secret out with our bodies into the living rooms and porches, backyards and grocery stores? Let the whole thing flower: the poem and the person writing the poem. And let us always be kind in this world.
Spontaneous Writing Booths
DO NOT FEEL left out when your school, church, Zen center, daycare center has a bazaar, carnival, rummage sale. Don’t think you have nothing to contribute. Simply set up a spontaneous writing booth. All you need is a pile of blank paper, some fast-writing pens, a table, a chair, and a sign saying, “Poems on Demand” or “Poems in the Moment” or “You name the subject, I’ll write on it.”
I did this for three years for the Summer Festival and Bazaar at the Minnesota Zen Center. I timidly began charging fifty cents a poem, but by the next year it was up to a dollar. There was a waiting line throughout the day. I let my customers give me any topic. Some were “the sky,” “emptiness,” “Minnesota,”
and of course “love.” Kids wanted poems on purple, their shoes, bellies. My rule was that I filled one side of a piece of standard-size paper, did not cross out, nor did I stop to reread it. I also didn’t worry about putting what I said in poetic stanzas. I filled a page like I did in my notebook. It was another form of writing practice.
In Japan there are stories of great Zen poets writing a superb haiku and then putting it in a bottle in a river or nearby stream and letting it go. For anyone who is a writer, this is a profound example of nonattachment. The spontaneous poetry booth is the twentieth-century equivalent. It is practice in unselfconsciousness. Write, don’t reread it, let it go into the world. There were several times when I felt I really hit home in the writing, but I just handed the sheet of paper over to the customer across the table and went on.
Chögyam Trungpa has said that you have to be a great warrior to be a business person. You must be fearless and willing to lose everything at any moment. With the writing booth there is the opportunity to be a great warrior: you must let go of everything as you write and then in handing it over to the customer. When you work that fast there is a real loss of control. I always said much more than I wanted to say. I feared a child would ask me to write a sweet piece about jelly beans and I’d zip over to how your gut turns green, red, or blue depending on the particular bean you are eating.
Writing Down The Bones: Freeing The Writer Within Page 10