by Eric Maisel
There is nowhere that you need to go in order to write, not even out of that bed. Right where you are is where your thoughts and feelings become available, if you are inclined to access them. Franz Kafka explained, “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.” You can experience that ecstasy without even budging.
You don’t have to deck out a fancy office in order to dream. Dreams come perfect and unbidden in bed, as you sit under an orange tree, as you stare out at the water, or when you sit quietly at your desk in front of drawn shades. They come to you on your sofa with jazz softly playing or in a busy café with life all around you. First of all, they come to you while you sleep, dreams and good ideas both, fantasies and complete chapters. Isn’t that proof that your primary physical space is between your ears, resting on a pillow, with the shades drawn or at most a sliver of moon for company?
LESSON 6
There is no place you need to go in order to write, not even out of bed. You are the writing machine, the writing space, everything.
To Do
1. Write a whole book in bed. See what that feels like.
2. Alternate writing spaces: a chapter in bed, a chapter at your desk, a chapter in bed, a chapter at your desk. See if that helps.
3. Invite someone into your bed. Collaborate—I mean on a writing project!
4. Organize your physical space so that it does the simple yet profound job of supporting your thinking, feeling, dreaming, and writing. Take out the distractions. Let everyone know the house rules. Supply yourself with all the necessary equipment and icons. If some itch remains, move the rubber ducky a little south or change the music—but at some point decide that your space isn’t the issue, that your rubber ducky isn’t a dybbuk, and that it is time to write. Just hop back into bed—but get writing.
Part II
Home Space
CHAPTER 7
Like Taking Your Medicine
You’re at home. But the faucet has a drip. The plants could be watered. The hall could be swept. You are at home, yes, where you do your writing, but writing isn’t quite on the agenda right at this moment. You feel a little too muddle-headed to write; and then there’s the drip, the parched ferns, and the dust bunnies. So, although you are at home, just a few feet from your writing, you might as well be in Kazakhstan, as close as you feel to writing.
So you wait. But waiting is very dangerous. If you wait for a time when your muddle-headedness, mild depression, to-do lists, doubts about the universe, and a thousand other things you could name are finally handled or settled, you will wait for a very long time. And as you wait, nothing good is happening; in fact, you are digging your hole deeper. No, waiting is a very dangerous game. Why don’t you try the following instead?
Every four hours, just like taking your medicine, maybe at eight A.M., noon, four p.m., and eight p.m., ask yourself the following question: “Given the exact circumstances in which I find myself, am I able to write for fifteen minutes?” If your answer is no, explain to yourself why you are answering no. If your answer is yes but you don’t start writing, explain to yourself why, even though you feel able to write, you aren’t writing. If your answer is yes and you do write, have a chat with yourself about whether this writing stint would have occurred if you hadn’t been checking in with yourself in this experimental way.
People who try this experiment typically report the following. “I wasn’t able to write every four hours, as that seemed too artificial and arbitrary; and it also didn’t work very well given the shape of my day. But I did notice that writing was much more on my mind and in fact I did turn to my writing more than I probably would have if I hadn’t been thinking about those writing stints.”
That’s the point of this tactic: to keep your writing on your mind in such a front and center way that you’re holding the intention to write even as you pull out the ironing board or pay your bills online. Whenever you find yourself at home, hold the intention to write, as that intention will translate into actual writing stints. However it is that you remember to take your medicine four times a day, do exactly the same with your writing.
Of course there’s the risk that at your appointed time you’ll find yourself unable to write; that by not writing you’ll disappoint yourself; and as a consequence you’ll feel even worse than if you hadn’t tried at all. There is always the risk that you may disappoint yourself. That risk is there even for productive writers, as most writers don’t write as often as they would like. Because of this reality, you will need to practice self-forgiveness. Just so long as you tie self-forgiveness to new resolve, it’s smart not to badger yourself about any writing stints you skipped or any writing you failed to get accomplished.
We are very clever in the ways that we talk ourselves out of writing. Only rarely do we say, “I refuse to write today.” More usually we say things like “I can’t go shopping without a grocery list, so I had better get that list written” or “A little nap would be pleasant; no, more than pleasant, vital.” By talking this way, we make sure that we don’t notice that we’re holding the strong intention to avoid our writing. The day goes by; some guilt accumulates; a little bitterness builds; maybe a little depression flowers. But on balance we’ve achieved our objectives: to avoid writing and to say nothing to ourselves that might alert us to our shenanigans.
By getting small, regular writing stints on the table, you get some writing-related inner talk going, even if it’s of the “Oh, time to write—but I don’t really feel up to it!” sort. That refusal, while disappointing, is nevertheless better than not thinking about your writing at all. You want to get a grip on your mind in such a way that your writing intentions exist in your thoughts. Planning your day around a series of writing stints helps with this.
Joan, a novelist, explained: “Continually holding the intention to write has caused my writing to feature more prominently in my life. Now I’m always mulling over the next paragraph, ruminating on it throughout the day, and thinking about where it’s going to lead. Doing this regular ‘intention holding’ has given me a new freedom to think about the work, do the work, and allow the work to flow.” You could wish to write, but that isn’t quite strong enough. You could want to write, but that isn’t strong enough either. Intend to write: that is the steelier orientation.
LESSON 7
Instead of scheduling one writing stint a day, schedule several. Wouldn’t it be nice to write more than once a day?
To Do
1. Pick a day when you will be home all day.
2. Write four times that day, just as if you had medicine to take.
3. Write for those four stints; or for as many as you can.
4. Forgive yourself for any writing you didn’t get done and commit to doing a better job of taking your medicine.
CHAPTER 8
The Space-Time Continuum
I have positive proof that the earth is slowing down and that soon we won’t have gravity to contend with. My proof is the following. Every Wednesday morning Ann and I have the following conversation. Ann says, “The garbage goes out today.” I say, “Right.” Straightforward enough; except that Wednesday keeps arriving amazingly quickly. We just blink and there we are, saying those words again. “The garbage goes out today.” “Right.”
Since Wednesday has begun to arrive instantly, this must mean that time has speeded up, which means that the earth is slowing down. Elementary physics. You will remember from that physics text that cost you seventy-five dollars (and was worth it as a paperweight) that as you approach the speed of light, time slows down. If you could travel at the speed of light, you would never age. As to whether that would be a good thing or a bad thing, and how you could get a cup a coffee at 186,000 miles a second, I don’t know. But that’s the physics of the matter.
Since everyone’s internal clock has sped up, the earth must be getting ready to stop it
s rotating. Even if that’s bad physics—and I confess that it probably is—it’s still good cultural reporting. Why do writers dream of spending a few months in Paris? Not for the Parisians, the weather, the Louvre, or even the baguettes (well, maybe for the baguettes). They dream of spending those months in Paris because they see themselves experiencing time differently there: they see themselves on café time. They see themselves not in a rush, neither externally nor internally. They see themselves actually stopping.
They see themselves quieted, finally, not through rough discipline or by dint of will but because the European café culture fully permits that stopping. Your waiter grants you that permission by not returning, not until you make some large gesture and boldly summon him. He respects the fact that you are slowing down time to a meditative crawl as you nurse your double espresso. He presumes that you have nothing to do more important than this—without presuming for an instant that you are an idler.
The waiter makes no such judgment. For all he knows (or cares) you worked for six straight hours earlier in the day, selling cars or fomenting a revolution, and will return to that work for another three hours after you leave his café. For now, though, time is appropriately stopped, making the fourth dimension an ally and not a thief. In our everyday life we steal our own neurons and we steal our time as well, rushing here, rushing there, committing one felony after another, until we have nothing left but those last fifteen minutes before bedtime—just enough time to feel disgusted by our own thievery.
When did we start rushing like this? Around 1880, I think, with the blooming of the Industrial Revolution and the introduction of the conveyor belt. I think the conveyor belt is the culprit, coupled with that famous Lucy episode. Or maybe it began with Sesame Street and its style of fast cutting, which created culture-wide ADHD. Or maybe it’s a more contemporary phenomenon connected to video games and the global ideal of business at the speed of light. Whatever its precise date of birth, it’s been a hundred years in the making and now we’ve perfected it: perfected the rat race, complete with text messaging.
Today, even when we’re sitting still we’re speeding. We’re anticipating our next cell phone call, awaiting our next e-mail, entering or leaving some chat room, and running a race that can’t be won. The finish line is moving right along with us, keeping perfect pace because the gods want us to feel ridiculous. I presume that you picture the same gods that I do, ironic ones who love to watch us meditate and then rush out the door to accomplish sixty-eight thousand things before dinner. Can’t you see them pointing and laughing: “As if twenty minutes of meditating is going to stop her inner rat race!”
When time has taken this nasty turn and begun speeding up, such that a walk on the beach becomes a jog and a weeklong retreat in our rented Maine cabin becomes 618,000 seconds of racing monkey mind, we are obliged to acknowledge that we are out of control. We are like the passengers on that bus in Speed, the bus remote-controlled by a fiend, and we are terrified, exactly as they were, that if we slow down we will explode. What a place we have landed, to fear thirty minutes of silence.
If, because the week has sped by, it is always Wednesday, and you are always getting ready to take out the garbage, what does it matter if you have the perfect writing space? You are like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, able to grab a pill or a bite to eat but in no way able to write Wuthering Heights. Time is racing; you are falling; and just imagine—there is nothing necessary about any of this. This is nothing but an experience you are permitting. You could right your time ship by simply penciling in two hours and announcing, “I will experience this time as slow, quiet, precious, and full of my writing.” You could right your time ship just like that.
There is objective time of the sort kept at the Greenwich Observatory, muddled in Indiana (where neighboring towns find themselves in different time zones) and marching along no matter how we rail at it. Then there is our experience of time, which is a psychological, social, and cultural matter. We do not experience time the same way when we are depressed as when we are manic, when we are trapped in a duck blind as when we are crouched there of our own volition, or when we are typing away on our opus as when we are wringing our hands over a comma. As much as we want more time, even more than that we need to monitor our experience of time. That’s the challenge.
When you carefully monitor your experience of time, then you don’t mind if time races by, not if you are immersed and engrossed and, after three hours, look down to discover seven pages of your novel completed. That is good speed. What you don’t want is your life to speed by in the pursuit of nothing. Speed is not the issue; time is not the issue; the issue is the quality of your life. When you find yourself at home in your writing space, hush your mind, hold your dream, open to your work, and time will take care of itself. It may pass in slow motion, it may race by, or it may stop altogether: none of that is an issue, not if you are lost in the writing.
LESSON 8
There is time per se. Then there is time as experience. You want to carve out hours for your writing and you want to experience those hours in a certain way, your mind undistracted, your heart open, your watch broken.
To Do
1. Slow down time by watching the second hand of an old-fashioned clock for five full minutes. Experience the fantastic length and abundance of those five minutes. Isn’t it enough time to create a whole world, right down to the lampposts and the street signs?
2. Stop racing around as if someone had lodged a jet engine in your shorts.
3. Replicate café time at your own desk, from 5:00 A.M. to 7:00 A.M. each morning, as you quietly create your masterpiece.
4. Take the time or waste the time. Your choice.
CHAPTER 9
At Home, Choosing
Every day, writers must make choices: about which piece of writing to tackle, about whether to write for twenty minutes or for three hours, about whether to abandon a difficult piece or revise it one more time, about whether to put the comma in or take the comma out. They must also make choices, at least as hard as their writing choices, about whether, how, and to what extent to market their work. Is this the day to update the Web site, propose a column, schedule some talking engagements, or engage in some networking?
If you are already choosing to write and choosing to market in a regular way, you may not need to institute the following practice. But all of us can benefit from this mindful way of living the writing life. Every day, say, “I choose to write today. This means that I will ____________” and fill in the blank appropriately. For instance:
I choose to write today. This means that I will
• return to Chapter 3 of my novel for at least an hour
• commit to beginning my memoir even though I’m afraid of offending my parents
• start that article that feels a little bit boring but that would probably be wanted in the marketplace
• walk the beach and let my swirling ideas settle, then write for an hour at the rib joint by the beach (then have ribs!)
• go directly to my writing
• deal with the unwieldy transition between Chapter 2 and Chapter 3
• decide whether to write John out of the novel or figure out how to make him much more lively
Occasionally, at least once a week and maybe even daily, especially if you are hoping to build your platform or have several projects to market, say, “I choose to market today. This means that I will ____________” and fill in the blank appropriately. For instance:
I choose to market today. This means that I will
• try to get some early endorsements for my nonfiction book idea
• make a list of twelve literary agents to query about my novel
• tackle writing the synopsis of my novel
• find an Internet site to query about my column idea
• invite my contacts to subscribe to my newsletter (and then write my first newsletter!)
• find some way to give a talk about my subject, so
that I can get comfortable with public speaking
• visit the sites of the five small presses that might be interested in my poetry collection
For the coming week, try out both sets of sentences (“I choose to write today. This means that I will” and “I choose to market today. This means that I will”) on a daily basis.
Mark, a novelist, gave this a try. He reported: “This choosing to write daily and then defining the action I’m going to take is powerful. It sets the intention right off and then creates a kind of mini-plan. I’ve been doing it all week and the writing’s been getting done this way without a lot of struggle getting to the computer. What gets worked on and for how long becomes the ‘conversation,’ not whether to write or how to find the time to write.”
Joanne, a nonfiction writer, explained: “The word ‘today’ is a very useful one for me. Although I did not ask myself these questions every day, I did ask one or the other of them on most days; and having the time limitation of ‘today’ embedded in each was very useful. In the past, I have tended to get overwhelmed, feeling that everything must be done in some amorphous ‘now.’ Asking one specific working question at a time, focusing on one writing priority for one creative day at a time, has been a useful device.