The Writing Warrior

by Laraine Herring

  Be realistic about your lifestyle. If you’re not willing to give up four hours of television at night, then be OK with that. Don’t curse the writing gods for not providing you writing time. You had the time. You made other choices. No harm, no foul. If you’re currently juggling three jobs and four children, be realistic about the odds of you getting a solid week off from everything to write (and if you had that, wouldn’t you probably crash on the couch for half of it?). Instead, find small blocks of time (a block of time can be five focused minutes) in which you maintain your relationship with your writing. Fighting with your life’s responsibilities is a bit like fighting with your body. Some of us get to be size three. Some of us don’t. Why fight what can’t be changed? If you’re raising children, you’re raising children. Work with that rather than against it. If a trust fund with a handsome butler named Sergio is not a part of your life, join the club and stop wishing for that scenario to occur before you start writing. Sergio, sadly, isn’t on his way. Work with your assets and liabilities. Wishing they were something other than what they are will cause you suffering. And besides, that handsome butler named Sergio is no doubt a capital D distraction anyway!

  Don’t worry about the end result. Don’t agonize over how to write a query letter until you’ve written and revised your book. It’s important to write a good query letter, but it’s pointless until you’ve written a manuscript. Don’t put publication concerns before craft concerns. Learn your craft. Write the best book possible. Then do the next right thing.

  Be cognizant of stagnation, which doesn’t always manifest itself in sloth. Think of stagnation as any behavior, routine, or pattern that has solidified. This can be anything, from what appears on the surface to be lazy (spending fifteen hours a day in bed on the weekend) to what appears to be very industrious (a disciplined writing schedule of 6:00 to 8:00 AM, Monday through Friday). Rigidity and stagnation block the flow of energy in your body, which will in turn block the flow of energy in your writing. The shaking practice I introduced you to will help you release these areas of stagnation and rigidity in your body.

  Know thyself. Remember, only you know in your heart of hearts if it’s the right time to watch that episode of Battlestar Galactica or if it’s the right time to finish that chapter. It’ll take some practice (I still work on this) to recognize what the truth of the moment is. Be gentle as your awareness deepens.

  You’ll find, as your relationship with your writing becomes softer and more consistent, that the voice on the other end of the 5:30 AM telephone call is your writing. Hey. How’s it going today? Send me some pages. Ciao.

  THE WRITING WARRIOR PRACTICE

  Failure happens all the time. It happens every day in practice. What makes you better is how you react to it.

  —Mia Hamm

  Part 3, Dissolving Your Illusions, introduced you to the Writer’s Wheel of Suffering. Perhaps many of the illusions on the wheel were familiar to you. Perhaps not. Please don’t agonize over whether or not you’re suffering enough to be a writer! That’s not the objective here. The intention of this section is to help you see common obstacles in a writer’s life. As a Writing Warrior, first you must see with clarity and compassion what is in your way. Only then can you make the best choices about what to do next. Awareness is a profound gift.

  As your awareness deepens, so might your resistance. This is common. Return to the practice: the breath, the shaking, the writing. Show up especially when you don’t want to. The work you’re doing may not be apparent to you right now, but it is occurring, breath by breath, word by word.

  INTERNAL CONVERSATIONS

  You can use these internal conversation exercises for personal work. The deeper your relationship with yourself, the deeper your writing becomes. Feel free to use poetry or prose to respond.

  The Illusion of Time: What is your relationship with time? Fill in the blank with a verb: “I am always ______ time.” Trust your intuition on this one. Go further and ask for clarification on that verb. For example, if you wrote I am always chasing time, ask yourself to be more specific about the word chasing. Don’t judge your word choices. Just notice. What can shift in your life to alter your current relationship with time?

  The Illusion of Thoughts: Spend ten minutes just writing your thoughts as they surface and pass through your mind. Can you catch one with no effort? As each thought appears, another one is forming like waves in the ocean. Don’t try to hold back the ocean. Merge with it instead.

  The Illusion of What a Writer Is: Ask yourself what you think a writer is. Free write as long as you need to until you reach a natural end point. Are these helpful beliefs or are they getting in your way? What beliefs can be rewritten? Can you see yourself as a writer? William Faulkner said, “Don’t be a writer. Be writing.” Spend some time journaling around that quotation. Remember, a writer is someone who writes. Nothing more. Nothing less.

  The Illusion of Identification: What areas of your writing do you overidentify with? You might try drawing a table and filling in the legs of that table with those areas. What is missing? Is your table lopsided? What areas of your writing are you afraid of or avoiding?

  The Illusion of Control: Free write beginning with this phrase: Losing control means . . . Then, Being in control means . . . How much energy do you spend trying to be in control and trying to avoid being out of control? What do you associate with being out of control? With being in control?

  The Illusion of Distractions: Make a list of everything that distracts you during the day from your tasks. (The tasks don’t have to be writing.) Practice self-observation without judgment. Simply being aware of what distracts you will begin a subtle shift in your ability to remain present.

  The Illusion of Publication, Success, and Fame: The more educated you are about the publishing process and the more knowledge and practice you have working with your craft, the better your chance of attaining publication. Research the blogs of agents, editors, and other writers. Be realistic and sensible. Don’t use this process as a substitute for actually writing. Writing comes first. Without that, there’s nothing to publish.

  The Illusion of Money: Money, like time, is something we have to learn to work with. What belief systems do you have around money? You might begin with this phrase: If I had enough money, I’d . . . Or, People who have money are . . . Or, My relationship to money is . . .

  WRITE NOW

  The following exercises can be applied to works in progress or used as prewriting. Feel free to use poetry or prose to respond.

  Write a scene in which your character betrays something or someone that is an integral part of his or her life. What are the consequences?

  Take a character you’re having trouble with. Examine the character’s relationship with control. Put that character in a situation where he or she is out of his or her element. What happens?

  Examine your characters’ relationships with money. You might start with describing the contents of a wallet or purse. What myths or stories does your character have around money? For example, does your character always have a twenty-dollar bill in his or her wallet out of fear that the ATM will be out of cash? Where does money fall on your character’s value scale?

  Make a list of all the things getting in the way of your character achieving his or her goals. What distraction does your character face along the way? What are the gifts of that distraction? What are the costs? How long has the distraction been a part of your character’s life? How did it begin? What need is it filling? What would it take to let it go?

  Choose a character who seems to be stuck in a current piece of your writing. Whose voice does this character wish to hear on the other end of the phone? Why? Write a dialogue between the character and the voice.

  PART FOUR

  Committing to Your Authentic Path

  CHAPTER 18

  Self-Observation without Judgment

  Let’s trade in all our judging for appreciating. Let’s lay down our righteousness and just be together.


  —Ram Dass

  Let’s start with a koan.

  One day Banzan was walking through a market. He overheard a customer say to the butcher, “Give me the best piece of meat you have.”

  “Everything in my shop is the best,” replied the butcher. “You can not find any piece of meat that is not the best.” At these words, Banzan was enlightened.

  We make judgments every day. We compare ourselves to others and our writing to other people’s novels, poems, and stories. We make negative statements: “My story is boring.” “I can’t write.” “That novel is better than mine.” These judgments on their own are not helpful. We need to look deeper into these statements. Why do you feel this way? What does this reveal about yourself? How can you respond to make your work better? When we open ourselves up to observing the root of our judgments, we’ll soon see that everything in our shop is the best because everything is 100 percent what it is. Honoring the perfection of each step in your writing process helps you to see that all of your flaws help you deepen your craft.

  Each step, from prewriting, to outlining, to drafting, to starting over, to editing is perfectly itself. Why should your first draft be held to the standards of a final draft? Why can’t that first draft simply be a perfect first draft? Why is it so difficult to look at our writing without picking apart everything that is wrong (or that we perceive to be wrong)? The world seems to tell us to compare ourselves to everyone and everything.

  Let’s return to the koan and examine the nature of “best” when it’s not used in a comparative way. Each item in the butcher’s shop is best because it is perfectly what it is. The piece missing from many people’s thinking is the awareness that nothing is the same as anything else. No two pieces of meat are the same. No two people’s writing journeys are the same. No two people’s abilities are the same, and no two versions of a story are the same. Don’t compare one to the other. Instead, examine the gifts that each one presents. Seeing what isn’t working is not a flaw. It’s a gift. Your first draft will not be like your second draft, yet each draft is complete unto itself. One is not trash while the other is brilliant. When you can call a first draft a first draft and be OK with that, you create space around yourself and your writing. When you view a first draft as something that failed to be a final draft, which is not in its nature to be, you create contraction.

  Here’s the trick. Look at yourself honestly without turning your judgment inward. Stop at the observation. Don’t turn that observation, which is a powerful and important step toward self-awareness, into a judgment spiral. Don’t use it to reconfirm a belief that you’re worthless, selfish, a bad writer, or afraid. Don’t use it to beat yourself up. If you view the things you find out about yourself and your writing as tools toward greater understanding, rather than ways to reinforce your negative self-talk, then you’ll find you’re a few steps ahead of the game in understanding self-observation without judgment. If you can avoid attaching an identifier to your behavior (for example, I am selfish), and if you can look without judgment at your behavior, then you’re standing in a place of balance and harmony with what is.

  For all the concepts we’re discussing in this book, learning to work with them in one aspect of your life will make them available to you in other parts of your life. Once you begin actively cultivating self-observation without judgment in your writing life, you’ll find it’s impossible to turn it off in other parts of your life.

  In writing classes, I see two primary ways that students judge themselves:

  1. They compare their own work to the work of everyone else in the class, or for that matter, everyone else who ever wrote a book.

  2. They compare their current writing to where they think they should be in their development.

  Both of these ideas get in the way of authentic growth in your writing. The first example is easier to recognize and work with. The second example requires a significantly deeper willingness to work with the self.

  Let’s look at the first self-judgment. If you’ve never been in a situation where your work has been shared publicly, a writing class or a workshop presents a lot of opportunities to do so. Maybe you were the phenom of your high school English class and your teachers showered you with praise. Maybe you have dyslexia and were always told you would never be able to be a writer. Either way, you compared yourself to other writers. Leave your baggage about writing (and how others write) at the door. Come to a writing class or a writing project as empty as possible. Otherwise, your stories about yourself will weigh you down so much, the stories within you won’t be able to fly.

  The first time a class or critique group reads each other’s work is a fabulous opportunity for practicing self-awareness. Were you so awed by everyone’s talent that you felt unworthy to be in the group? Were you so appalled by the stories that you felt too advanced to be in the group? Did you begin right away by comparing your work with other people’s work?

  It’s natural to do this, and one of the best ways we learn to make our craft better is by studying powerfully written work. Your class will likely have a participant or two who is farther along in their practice than you are. There will likely be a participant or two who is just beginning. There will definitely be people writing in all genres, which will present another opportunity for you to exercise self-observation without judgment. Do you “hate” fantasy writing? Mysteries? Thrillers? Literary fiction? Not any more. Drop those labels and read what your classmates are writing. We’ve all got literary preferences, but those preferences don’t matter when it comes to learning about writing. They’re an artificial barrier between you and the work.

  Maybe you’re one of those students who’s too shy to present your work to the class because another student is so brilliant and you’re so, well, not so brilliant. Take a deep breath and get over your sweet self. Stand behind your work at whatever stage it’s in. If you’re a parent, are you embarrassed to have your three-year-old child interact with a twelve-year-old child because they’re at different developmental stages? Writing is the same. It has an infancy, a terrible twos phase, a gawky adolescence (sometimes many years of gawky adolescence), a young adulthood filled with mistakes, and finally a maturity that is still not perfect (check out those lines under your eyes) but is complete. You won’t write a perfect book. You won’t even write an almost-perfect book. You can write the best book you’re capable of at the time you write it. I would hope that what I wrote in my twenties is significantly different from what I wrote in my thirties. Now that I’m in my forties, I want to keep pushing myself, keep trying new things, keep stretching the limits of what I know (or think I know) about writing. If I don’t maintain this flow, I’ll get bogged down and before too long I’ll turn into the stodgy old professor who is stuck in some previous glory-filled decade, refusing to embrace the natural morphing of language and storytelling over time. I don’t want to be that person, so I must be diligent about continual learning.

  You’ve no doubt heard the concept of beginner’s mind. A beginner’s mind observes everything. It doesn’t shut out what it thinks it already knows. It doesn’t shut out what it thinks it will never need. It doesn’t discount something because it doesn’t like the person who said it. The beginner’s mind is nonjudgmental, empty, and therefore available for anything. The longer you write and study writing, the harder it can be to maintain your beginner’s mind. There’s now junk in the way; perhaps you’ve completed a twenty-five thousand-dollar graduate program, or published four books, or won an esteemed prize. The junk from all these experiences is only valuable in the degree to which you don’t attach to it.

  Knowing things is great. Understanding the primary types of dialogue is great. Recognizing the key components of plot is great. But be wary of relying on your knowledge exclusively. If you do this, you might dismiss out of hand something that could really push your writing to the next level. If you’re too attached to having an MFA, or a book deal, then you’re viewing everything that comes your way thr
ough that filter. Practice saying, without judgment, “I don’t know.” Say it over and over. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. When you come to a workshop, when you critique a fellow student’s manuscript, when you listen to comments on your own work, the mantra stays the same: I don’t know. This will create space. When you have space, you have movement. When you have movement, you have growth. You don’t have to act on the suggestion that you turn your historical romance into a crime novel starring three-eyed green octopus people, but listening to that idea might trigger something useful.

  The second way students judge themselves, against their expectations of where they should be, is a bit more tangled. Listen honestly to this. Does anything sound familiar? You’re forty-five years old. You should be able to catch on to this writing thing immediately. You should be able to download the information and then regurgitate beautiful sentences and compelling stories after three weeks of instruction, without having had to develop a previous writing practice. If you can’t do this right away, then you’re obviously not cut out to be a writer. This may sound harsh, but self-judgment is harsh. It’s mean, nasty, and unrelenting. I want you to recognize it, so you can laugh at it rather than listen to it. I see it paralyzing too many students.

  If you wanted to dance with the New York City Ballet, do you think you could audition tomorrow, be selected, and then be performing next week if you had never taken a ballet class, never performed before, and, no, never squished your toes into those pointe shoes? Yet people show up to writing classes every year thinking they can “learn it all” and then go forth and produce. Dancers practice. Athletes practice. Writers practice. The folk wisdom is that it takes about ten to fifteen years of practice to find your voice and rhythm as a writer. That’s fifteen years of actually writing. That’s a lot of writing. Journals. Stories. Practice novels. Essays. It’s also sending work out and getting mostly rejections, but a few acceptances along the way, which shine light into your heart. Please hear what I’m saying so you are not ungrounded when these judgment thoughts pass through. Let them pass.