A Writer's Space

by Eric Maisel

  The master can get on with his next haiku. His student, by contrast, seems doomed—until he is enlightened, or just a little smarter—to turn over billions of his neurons to brooding about his master’s conduct and parsing the distinction between an injunction against touching and the offer of a helping hand. Probably another few billion neurons will get devoted to fantasizing about that woman. The disciple is unable to empty his mind, a task that is the exact equivalent of returning neurons to the fold.

  A free neuron, unencumbered by the demand to do a bit of work—to connect with his buddies in the service of remembering how many husbands a certain celebrity has cycled through or to link in a sad daisy chain of remembrance about the time we didn’t get that red bicycle—is an available neuron, quiet as a church mouse: hence the experience of profound silence that comes with “quiet mind.” Get all your neurons back and, voilà! you have silence, presence, and the sort of mind space that attracts leaps of imagination.

  Too many stolen neurons and you aren’t actually present. Oh, sure, you look like a writer, sitting there in front of your computer, chewing on your nail and playing with a swell Italian word whose lilt charms you. But it is only your body and a too-small percentage of your brain that you’ve brought to the task. It is like coming to a singing contest with half a vocal cord or to an eating contest with your stomach stapled. You look fine to the judges, who may even peg you for a favorite, but you don’t stand a chance.

  The essence of presence is freeing neurons. You say that you are intending to write, and certainly part of you means that. But a billion neurons are gripping the weather forecast. Another billion are holding your upset about eating (or not eating) breakfast. Another billion—no, several!—are infamously linked to remind you that the first sentence you write today will prove that you are an idiot and an imposter. Virtually every neuron you own is already charged with some task and the remaining few can’t help but whimper, “You want us to dream up a great novel?”

  It is hard to say where you are, neuronally speaking, when you deliver over billions of your neurons to unnecessary facts, sneaky feelings, and mounds of fluff and nonsense. But it’s not ready to write. Of course, you can still write, just as the world’s work force can send e-mails all day long even though trillions of their neurons are elsewhere. But that is not our kind of writing. That is not the writing you fell down on your knees in front of when you happened upon a good book. To do our writing, you need those neurons back. You may have sent them away, but now you must recall them in all seriousness.

  LESSON 12

  There is some delicate, delectable material up there in your head, neurons and synapses and neural transmitters and all sorts of fancy machinery that the universe has gone to a lot of trouble to create for writers. Don’t waste it by turning neurons over to tasks that are the equivalent of getting your socks matched. Every freed neuron is a tiny fraction of a great idea and you—and only you—are its liberator.

  To Do

  1. Forget your brother-in-law’s phone number. You’ve got it stored in your electronic address book, don’t you? Get back 163,000,000 neurons right there.

  2. Practice letting thoughts not only come but go. Think “Weeds in the garden” and let the thought, the sting, the command, the demand, the big drama around weeds just evaporate. Don’t give a billion of your stray neurons even a nanosecond to join hands and create the mischief of a guilt trip.

  3. Remember your wife’s birthday but forget your own. Do you really care when you were born? Isn’t it more important to care about being alive? Make strict choices about where you will employ neurons. When something comes up, ask yourself “Is that worth three billion neurons?”

  4. Get a grip on your mind, which means helping neurons surrender their iron grip. Isn’t that a charming paradox?

  CHAPTER 13

  Pluto’s Not a Planet Anymore

  When Pluto got demoted, I spontaneously composed and began singing a song called “Pluto’s Not a Planet Anymore,” rhyming “astronomer” with “barometer” and, for the two hours it took us to drive from San Francisco to the Gold Country, making our visiting daughters crazy.

  “Stop!” they cried. But I found it impossible to stop, their poking notwithstanding, because Pluto’s demotion struck a deep chord within me. It wasn’t the chord that it struck almost universally, in every town and city in America. Most people were annoyed, dismayed, and even heartbroken that a sure fact of existence, that our solar system comprised nine planets, had turned out be an unsure thing after all. That, however, was not my reaction.

  I was not annoyed, dismayed, or heartbroken. I was amused, amused that suddenly everyone had to share, ready or not, in the writer’s constant fate, that solid things turn liquid on a daily basis. For the irreverent and painful morphing of things is as integral to the process of writing as adding sugar is to the making of Christmas cookies. If, as a writer, you want your planets to stay put, are you ever in for some disturbing surprises and rude awakenings!

  People want exactly that: solid ground. When they come in to work they want their desk to be where they left it, they want the operating system on their computer to be unchanged, they want the person in the next cubicle to be the same person they said goodbye to yesterday at closing time. If all of this were to change from one day to the next they would feel disoriented at best, crazy at worst, and in desperate need of a drink, a drug, or an explanation.

  If you are a writer, forget about solid ground. Here is what happens to you. You start a suspense novel about a Navy wife who learns something she shouldn’t know. Three days in, you find your plot uninteresting. Oh, it’s interesting enough, just not to you. You can imagine somebody else writing your novel and even enjoying writing it, but to you it is just work. Why spend two years on the intricacies of double agents and triple agents when you couldn’t care less?

  So you change it. You make it a novel about four Navy wives and recast it as an atmospheric drama about betrayal and loss. But after a week of writing you discover that only two of the wives actually interest you. The other two are there simply because you think you need four wives, because you read somewhere that “four women” novels are invariably successful. You sleep poorly and wish that someone would kidnap two of your wives—maybe someone from Book 1.

  Book 2 stalls. Should it be about the two wives you like? If so, what is it now actually about? Where’s the suspense? Where’s the juice? What’s the point? You could get them together and make it a Navy Lesbian Wife novel and maybe start a new genre, but that really wasn’t your intention and besides you would have to do all that research. . . .

  In the middle of the night it comes to you that if you set it two hours north of Berlin in a small German town you once visited where they drink that cheap grog whose name you can’t remember and where you got really drunk and recast it as a novel about two German women who teach at a small art college . . . but where in God’s name did THAT come from?

  Our author of this morphing novel needs a name. Let’s call her Cassandra. The universe’s tricksters already plague Cassandra. Her hair is never quite the right length or color, pounds creep on while she is sleeping, the man in her life refuses to work, either because he is inept, passive-aggressive, or too much in love with hockey, and her father, whom she would love to hate, had the gall to die, and how easy is it to hate a dead man? Now her novel is doing this constant morphing thing. It is really too much; and even throwing darts at an effigy of Hemingway doesn’t help. It is as if the television set of her mind were controlled by Rod Serling and, in her particular Twilight Zone, she had to watch two minutes of bass fishing followed by thirty seconds of that infomercial about buying resort property in Texas. . . .

  What is Cassandra to do? Hang in there. Allow her brain to take her from a Navy base in Maryland to a small town in northern Germany to wherever it will take her next, hoping against hope that when it lands on solid ground and the novel she actually means to write arises she will know it; and t
hat the ground will remain solid for eighteen months straight as she writes that darned (always threatening to morph again) novel. She must hang in there exactly as a trapeze artist hangs in there, tumbling through thin air and trusting that her partner’s hands will appear out of nowhere to grab her wrists.

  You must hang in there, even though the “there” is thin air.

  In my own case, I am trying to follow up a recent novel with a sequel in which the main character from the first novel, a feisty New York painter, finds herself at risk in the heartland. Of only one thing am I certain: that there will be a midnight raft trip down the Ohio, a homage to Huck Finn, a flight under a full moon from Full Moon, Indiana. But I hope that the word “certain” in that sentence made you fall out of your chair laughing. Who can say whether that midnight raft ride down the Ohio won’t turn into a subway ride through Barcelona by tomorrow evening? Only my dancing neurons can say—and they are busy dancing.

  Yes, all this morphing can prove our downfall. By contrast, Pluto’s demotion is purely cosmetic. It had a downfall by definition only; it is the still the same happy, arid, freezing spheroid it was yesterday and a billion years ago. Cassandra’s novel, by contrast, is nothing like it was when it was a thriller about double agents or a “four women” novel. Right now, it is just potential energy, weird ideas, and shifting landscapes. I tell you, Pluto has it easy.

  Maybe Neptune will get the ax next. Neither Cassandra nor I will care much. We have books to trap in our consciousness that, like greased pigs, are running and squealing and morphing, not into nice slabs of bacon but into animals undreamed of by gods or by Darwin. All that squealing is addling and the grease is hard to get off your synapses. But there are no alternatives. Maybe you could buy some software that would do the thinking for you— but does that sound promising?

  Hang in there, in thin air. It is precarious; but my what a view!

  LESSON 13

  In the space between your ears, more morphing will occur than has happened in the whole history of natural selection. That makes you something of a god, but a powerless, wacky, and demented one. Enjoy your divinity. If you would like it to be otherwise, better drive a cab or run a corporation. In our mad world, where books appear, we must live with the spectacular nature of the creative process, where profusion and confusion dance together.

  To Do

  1. Change your name to Cassandra. Why not?

  2. Tell yourself “Each book is an adventure.” Mean it, as it is the truth.

  3. Do not feel bad for Pluto. It only has to go round and round. You have to ride the wind in a tornado, grabbing scenes as they fly by along with the uprooted trees, the Dorothies, and the Totos.

  4. Expect change. Wild change. The kind of change that sends nine out of ten writers packing—but not you.

  CHAPTER 14

  Creative Mindfulness

  I’m sure you agree with me that your mind is your gold and that you do not want the vagaries of circumstance and personality to rob you of your rich imaginings. How exactly do you prevent that theft and recover that pregnant silence in which your freed neurons can connect the universe’s dots? You prevent that theft by the practice of creative mindfulness, which is a step up from ordinary mindfulness.

  The word “mindfulness” has a long definitional tradition and a particular meaning. It stands for the nonjudgmental observation and acknowledgment of our thoughts. We notice the thought— for example, “I am running from my writing”—and acknowledge that we had that thought. It comes, we notice it, it goes. The central goal of ordinary mindfulness is to let such a thought come and go without experiencing pain, without holding on to it, without turning it into a monster that eats us alive.

  Traditional mindfulness is an excellent practice. Current studies prove conclusively that a mindfulness meditation practice improves your health and your sense of well-being. If you school yourself in just this limited practice, you will have done wonders for your equanimity. But you will not yet be fully awake, fully functioning, or ready to create. You will have taken a first enormous step: you will have arrived at a place of fearlessly looking at and accepting the contents of your thoughts. But more is needed.

  It is excellent to know that you are thinking “I am running from my writing.” It is excellent to be able to experience that thought without sinking into pain and despair. But observing that thought without pain or judgment is not the same thing as resuming your writing. The goal of a creativity mindfulness practice is not the nonjudgmental observation of our thoughts but complete right thinking that leads to reams of writing and oodles of mental health. Our goal is not to be calm, centered, or even enlightened, but to be all of that and also to write like a wild person.

  The central goal of traditional mindfulness is that when you eat a potato, you really eat that potato. The goal of creative mindfulness is that when you eat that potato, you really eat that potato and you also work on your novel. Being present for that potato is not your highest goal; that is too simple, mechanical, and even immoral an understanding of the point of presence. It makes it seem as if being present for that potato is more important than mindfully planning, as you eat your French fry, how to free political prisoners, end a war, or plot your screenplay. It overrates the simple act of noticing and can easily lead to disengagement and inaction.

  Jon Kabat-Zinn explained, “Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally. This kind of attention nurtures greater awareness, clarity, and acceptance of present-moment reality.”

  Thich Nhat Hanh echoed this idea: “While washing the dishes one should only be washing the dishes, which means one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes. I am completely myself, following my breath, conscious of my presence, and conscious of my thoughts and actions.”

  The high ideal of “creative mindfulness” is to master mindfulness, in the sense in which Jon Kabat-Zinn, Thich Nhat Hanh, and others have described it, and to employ that mastery in the service of deep thought, rich action, and wide-awake living of the sort Thoreau envisioned when he wrote “Millions of people are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred million to a poetic or divine life. We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake.”

  Here are the six principles of creative mindfulness:

  1. Fearlessly observe your own thoughts. All of your excuses, all the ways you unhinge yourself, all of your dodges, all of your secret complaints and sources of pain, are right there in the thoughts you are thinking. Awaken to knowledge of your own thoughts.

  2. Detach from the thoughts you are thinking. This means that you confidently observe each thought with a certain curiosity, sanguine assurance, and phlegmatic and philosophic distance, such that you comprehend it but are not smacked around by it. What you are really detaching from is the pain, sting, or charge attached to your thoughts. Then you can tolerate a thought like “I am fleeing from my writing” long enough to deal with it productively.

  3. Appraise your thoughts. You are not judgmental but you are a wise judge. When you hear yourself think “I am fleeing from my writing,” you do not excoriate yourself; rather, you stop to appraise the truth or falsity of that thought, make sense of its implications, and decide what you want to do in light of your appraisal. That is, you stop and think.

  4. Restate your intentions based on your appraisal. If, after thinking about it, you decide that you do not want to run from your novel, think the new thought that aligns with that positive intention—for instance, “I think I’ll stop running now.” Respond to the appraised thought with your new understanding and your new commitment.

  5. Free your neurons, empty your mind, and ready yourself for creating. Ordinary mindfulness is the observation of thought. Creative mindfulness requires that you vanish, your mind hushed, so that your creative thoughts can appear. Observe, appraise, and restate, then open to an eve
r-deepening silence.

  6. Explode into your work.

  To summarize: observe, detach, appraise, restate, empty, and explode. This might sound like: “Oh, I am fleeing from my novel. How horrible! What a weakling I am! I feel so much pain thinking that! But wait. Let me just be with that thought. ‘I am fleeing from my novel.’ All right. Let me say it again without judging me in the process: ‘I am fleeing from my novel.’ Okay. I think I can tolerate hearing that. Whew. That is one very hard thought to think. Damn! Okay, easy. ‘I am fleeing from my novel.’ Okay. That’s the truth of the matter. I am honestly appraising the situation and I must conclude that I have had a true thought. Okay. Easy. That is a bitter pill to swallow but I am okay. What do I want to do? I want to resume that novel. Yes, I do. I really do! So I am going to think the following thought: ‘I’ve been fleeing from my novel but I won’t run from it any longer.’ Okay. Let me take that in. Okay. Now all I need to do is get quiet, free my neurons, empty my head, and let my novel return with a big whoosh!”

  This sounds much noisier and busier on the page than it will sound in your own brain. In your own brain, you can move from complaint, doubt, distraction, and self-treason to complete freedom and immersion in a nanosecond, by following the principles of creative mindfulness. You can do it in the blink of an eye, just by adopting the right orientation and holding the right intention.

  The day will come when fewer painful thoughts plague you because you have turned your life around through the practice of creative mindfulness. But there will never come a time when your thinking won’t produce some amount of pain, difficulty, anxiety, doubt, and despair. You will need to constantly attend to your creative mindfulness practice: that is the only way to keep your “mind space” healthy and productive.