A Writer's Space

by Eric Maisel

LESSON 14

  Mind space is your main space. You can fill it up with clutter and chatter, you can let its contents sink you into depression, or you can aim for creative mindfulness and mind mastery. You are a slave to every thought of which you are not the master.

  To Do

  1. Learn to observe your thoughts, detach from your thoughts, appraise your thoughts, restate your intentions, empty your mind, and explode into your art.

  2. Really learn this.

  3. Really, really learn this.

  4. Produce a thought you hate, such as “I haven’t written in a month,” and practice creative mindfulness.

  Part IV

  Emotional Space

  CHAPTER 15

  Emotional Intelligence for Writers

  You get angry. You get envious. You get depressed. You are not a stone. Nor do you want to be a stone. You have no intention of not feeling. You have no intention of taming your emotions so well that you end up domesticated and limp. You want your full measure of emotion, as emotion is the lifeblood of art. Emotion is the surest sign that you are alive, the deepest motivator, and the edge that causes your knife to cut. Of course you intend to live with emotion.

  But that doesn’t mean that you should be a slave to your emotions. Say that you hear about a writer getting a big advance. Do you want to feel bad for a week or do you want to let the pain go in a split second? Say that an editor criticizes your short story. Do you want to writhe in agony or do you want to laugh at the blowoff? Say that you’ve had nothing published for two years. Do you want to sink into despair and end up drinking turpentine or do you want to demand of yourself continued optimism and shout out that you are not dead and not defeated?

  In each case, you should want the latter from yourself. There is no good point in allowing your feelings to rule you as if you were a rag doll puppet. If you let your emotions rule you, you will use your newly sharpened pencil not to write the excellent novel waiting to be written but to stab yourself in the heart. You want to master your emotions, not be their slave. If you think that is too tall an order, think again. Remember the time that you decided that you didn’t want to feel a certain way any longer, shook the feeling off, and felt better instantly? See, you can do it!

  All the emotions that sometimes get you down—the pain, discouragement, bitterness, self-disgust, rage, sorrow, emptiness, hollowness, envy, fear—may well rear up automatically and reflexively in response to a stimulus. But in the next split second, the emotion having arrived, you get to decide whether you will embrace it and invite it to stay or whether you will meet it with mindful resolve and show it the door. You can quickly and efficiently deal with an unwanted emotion the split second after it arrives: that is what emotional mastery means.

  Mindfulness includes minding your emotions. If you know that it will rile you to reread that curt e-mail from that literary agent, delete it. What are you saving it for? Are you saving it just to rile yourself up, or for the day when exactly the right retort will come to your mind and you can get even, or to forward it to your friend the hit man who owes you a favor? Delete it. Let it go. That is the self-beneficial thing to do. That is the mindful thing to do. Do not save bile as if it were fuel for the winter. The emotionally mature thing to do is to delete it.

  A writer sent me an e-mail, thanking me for my books and complaining that he didn’t know what to do with his novel, which was currently 200,000 words too long. I wished him luck in figuring out what he ought to do. He replied with a furious e-mail attacking me for not saying more and for not caring more. I responded that sometimes you should accept a friendly “Good luck!” in the spirit in which it is offered and get on with your life. This prompted an even longer, angrier e-mail (you know the kind, PEPPERED WITH CAPITALS), to which I didn’t reply. I have no doubt that this writer was keeping himself enraged for one reason and one reason only: to avoid the hard job of revising his bloated novel. His abundant intelligence was completely subservient to his emotional immaturity.

  If you embrace your bilious emotions, cherish them, take pride in them, and keep them warm by wrapping them in your immaturity, chances are that you’ll find yourself making one mess after another. There you go again, agitated, angry, and upset, striding off to the liquor cabinet. Yes, you are following in the footsteps of Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck—all Nobel Prize winners. Or in the footsteps of Edna Saint Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, Djuna Barnes, and Carson McCullers. So you can take pride in that: pride in joining the pantheon of alcoholic writers.

  Mind your emotions or else prepare for a gutter crawl. You think there is no cost to raging? No cost to tempests? No cost to black moods? No cost to grandiose, paranoid, histrionic—and completely unnecessary—operatic feelings? Just ask our alcoholics and suicides. Just ask anyone who lives on drama, turmoil, and bad feelings. Words such as sanguine and phlegmatic are not the most exciting words in the dictionary, but they are nevertheless golden. Become someone who is able to mind her emotions: that is an integral part of a complete mindfulness practice.

  Picture a snow globe at rest and a snow globe violently shaken. Everything is the same about the two pictures, except the agitation. They are the same physical space and yet they have completely different atmospheres. In the first, ideas are available. In the second, nothing can be seen, not an idea, not the way to travel, nothing. In the first, you could get in your miniature car and drive around and arrive at your destination. In the second, you’re bound to run hard into a glass wall. Calmness or emotional turmoil: which is your way?

  This is not an area of your life where perfection is possible. You had high hopes that your novel would sell; it didn’t; enter pain. You had high hopes that your editor would buy your second novel; she hates it; enter pain. These are not pains that are easy to shed with a little willpower, right thinking, and deep breathing. Your writing life matters to you, and it is reasonable to expect that disappointments of this sort will linger on as foul moods and a despairing outlook. But even in the face of such disasters, angle for mastery and look for the way to shorten winter.

  Sometimes you may want to hold firmly on to your rage. Sometimes you may want to sink into a well-earned funk. Sometimes you may want to feel exquisitely fearful and shiver for your life. There are moments when even our darkest emotions have a place, and there are good reasons for feeling bad on occasion. But it is not a healthy way of life. Limit your darker emotions just as you limit your intake of chocolate: just like a little sweet, a little sour goes a long way.

  LESSON 15

  An emotionally intelligent, emotionally mature person does not strive to avoid feeling and does not hope against hope that unwanted feelings will stop arising. Rather, he monitors his emotions and masters them by embracing the ones he wants and discarding the ones he doesn’t. This isn’t an easy practice, but it is an invaluable one.

  To Do

  1. The next time you get angry, decide not to be angry.

  2. The next time you get morose, decide not to be morose.

  3. The next time you get envious, decide not to be envious.

  4. The next time you experience any emotion, embrace it or discard it: your choice.

  CHAPTER 16

  The Weight of Individuality

  It is a creative person’s individuality that defines him. Most people are conventional and prize conformity; some people prize their individuality. Even if he trains himself to hold his tongue, an individual will already know as a young child that he can’t conform and that he wasn’t built to conform. Looking around, unable to understand why people are acting so conventionally, starting to feel alienated, out of place, and like a “stranger in a strange land,” he finds himself burdened by this pulsing energy: the fierce need to be himself. This need produces lifelong emotional consequences.

  If you are born individual and find yourself presented with some arbitrary, odd-sounding rule—that you can only play with one of your toys at a time or tha
t God will be offended if you don’t wear a hat—you immediately ask “Why?” If the answer makes no sense to you or if you get your ears boxed, you cry “No!” and begin to grow oppositional. A certain oppositional attitude naturally and inevitably flows from an individual’s adamant effort to reject humbug and to make personal sense of the world. What does this feel like, emotionally? It feels like a combination of sorrow and anger, tangled together to form a root ball of depression.

  This oppositional attitude, perhaps suppressed in childhood, begins to announce itself and assert itself in adolescence and to grow as an individual’s interactions with the conventional world increase. It grows as his ability to “do his thing” is directly or indirectly restricted by the machinery of society. He finds himself in an odd kind of fight, not necessarily with any particular person or group of people but with everyone and everything meant to constrain him and reduce him to a cipher. He finds himself in a fight to the death, a fight to retain his individuality.

  One proof that this dynamic actually takes place is the frequency with which we see it in the lives of creative people. Arnold Ludwig, in his study of “1000 extraordinary men and women” called The Price of Greatness, explained: “These individuals often have an attitude set that is oppositional in nature. These are not people who just see that the emperor has no clothes; they offer their own brand of attire for him to wear.”

  Popping out of the womb individual, needing to experiment and to risk as part of their individuality, and feeling thwarted and frustrated by the oh-so-conventional universe into which they have been plopped at birth, the world’s individuals rush headlong like a ski jumper down a ramp toward reckless ways of dealing with their feelings of alienation and frustration. They are not only individual, they are driven to be individual, a drive that sets them apart and sends them racing through life.

  Nature is not stupid. Nature makes the calculation that, for an individual to truly be individual, it had better invest him with enough power, passion, energy, and appetite to manifest that individuality. Otherwise individuality would be a cosmic joke, and nature doesn’t joke that way. So it invests the individual with extra drive. Just as it makes no sense to produce a creature that enjoys the leaves at the tops of trees without also providing him with a long neck, it makes no sense to produce a creature that is built to assert his individuality without providing him with the energy of assertion. This nature does.

  Thus the individual has more energy, more charisma, bigger appetites, stronger needs, greater passion, more aliveness, more avidity: this is all the same idea and flows from the same wellspring. It is nature’s way of fueling the individual so that he can be individual. It should also be clear how this extra energy and fuller appetite lead to conditions such as addiction, mania, and insatiability.

  Nature does not joke, but it does produce unintended consequences. One of the major unfortunate consequences of this extra drive—this extra ambition, this extra egotism, this extra appetite— is that the individual is hard-pressed, and often completely unable, to feel satisfied.

  He eats a hundred peanuts—not satisfying enough. He writes a good book—not satisfying enough. He has a shot of excellent Scotch—not satisfying enough. He wins the Nobel Prize—not satisfying enough. This inability to get satisfied produces constant background unhappiness and makes him want some experience that will mask this feeling or make it go away. So he has another hundred peanuts or another Scotch—without, however, coming any closer to satisfying himself.

  It is as if nature turbocharged some of its creatures and then failed to give them a decent braking system. It provided extra energy—and with it a susceptibility to mania. It provided extra ambition—and with it a susceptibility to grandiosity. It provided extra appetite—and with it a susceptibility to promiscuity, obesity, and alcoholism. It provided extra adrenaline—and with it a susceptibility to car wrecks. If all of these “extras” could be channeled and regulated, we might thank nature for its largesse. As it is, these extras make the individual’s life unruly and fraught with danger.

  So nature, which doesn’t joke, nevertheless has its little joke and creates an individual who must know for himself, follow his own path, and be himself, puts it in his mind that he is born to do earth-shattering and life-saving work, gives him the energy to pursue this work and the courage to stand in opposition even to the whole world, and then turns around and tortures him. It heightens his core anxiety by giving him an existential outlook, making sure that nothing will satisfy him, pouring adrenaline through his system, and swelling his head so that he is primed to tip over, top-heavy, into self-centeredness.

  The mandate to individuality forces the creative person to wonder about life’s large questions—pesters him with those questions—and demands that he respond to what he sees going on in the universe. It forces him to write a mournful poem, craft a subversive novel, and walk the earth from one end to the other on some unnameable quest. Each of these is an existential response, that is, a response arising from his plaintive, poignant questioning of the world into which nature has dropped him. On top of everything else, nature tells him that he is responsible for looking out for the world—nothing less is expected of him.

  Of course, we aren’t equal to all of this. As individual as we are, as magnificent as we are, we are also quite puny. We may be large, but we are also small. Even if we do manage to persevere— to write our poems, to battle our windmills—it is not without a thousand ups and downs, frustrations and disappointments, rages and dirges. Is this your emotional landscape? Then you are probably an individual.

  LESSON 16

  Individuality has emotional consequences. Nature may have designated you as one of her individuals, but she has not provided you with a blueprint to follow. You will have to work that out, even while nursing a pain in your heart and a pain in your head.

  To Do

  1. Be the individual that you are. Do you really have a choice?

  2. Become more mindful of your emotional landscape by adopting a self-observer’s attitude. Rage against injustice, but also observe what that rage is doing to your system. Write manically, but also observe whether you are racing too fast. Monitor yourself—that is your duty.

  3. Learn how to calm yourself through the practice of slow, deep breathing. You have no better soothing tool than the regulation of your own breathing; use it to counteract your inner turmoil and speediness.

  4. Wear the weight of your individuality as lightly as you can.

  CHAPTER 17

  Quick Centering

  You can learn to center and quiet your mind and your emotions by taking ten-second pauses of the sort that I’m about to describe. You may be amazed to learn that a truly life-altering strategy can come in a package as small as ten seconds, but it can. This simple technique has two components, a breathing part and a thinking part. First you practice deep breathing until you can produce a breath that lasts about five seconds on the inhale and five seconds on the exhale. Then you insert a thought into the breath, silently thinking half the thought on the inhale and half the thought on the exhale. That’s it.

  This sounds very simple, and it is. This ten-second centering technique is simple to grasp, simple to use, and simple to master. It’s nevertheless profound in its benefits. You will be able to do things that previously felt too painful or too difficult to attempt. You will be able to calm and center yourself before you write. You will change your basic attitudes about life, moving from pessimism to optimism, procrastination to effort, and worry to calm. These are the benefits that await you. (For a full discussion of this technique and its benefits, please take a look at my book Ten Zen Seconds.)

  The first thing I’d like you to do is familiarize yourself with what ten seconds feel like. Look at the second hand of your watch and experience ten seconds. What I think you’ll notice is that ten seconds is a surprisingly long amount of time. It probably feels longer and more substantial than you expected it would. Each second of the ten seconds i
s a distinct entity, clearly separate and distinguishable from the one that preceded it and the one that followed it. Doesn’t a full ten seconds feel like a small lifetime?

  The customary breath you take is on the order of two or three seconds in duration. This is normal, natural, automatic, and does a fine job of keeping you alive. Exactly because it is natural and automatic, a breath of this length does nothing to interrupt your mind chatter or to alter your sense of a given situation. When you consciously decide to breathe more slowly and deeply, you alert your body to the fact that something is up and that you want it to behave differently.

  This long, deep breath serves as a container for specific thoughts. Before it does that, however, it serves as the best way available to you to stop and address what you are doing and thinking. If you’ve been doing something compulsive and harmful to yourself, this alteration in breathing gives you the chance to become aware of your behavior. If you’ve been obsessively worrying about something, the conscious production of one long, deep breath interrupts your mind flow and provides you with a golden opportunity to counter your anxious thoughts. A long, deep breath is the equivalent of a full stop and the key to centering.

  You may want to build up to your long, deep breath with several preliminary breaths that you use to progressively deepen your breathing pattern. I predict that ultimately you will find this unnecessary and that you will be able to switch from your ordinary breathing-and-thinking pattern to your centering incantations from one breath to the next. For now, if it helps you to arrive at a long, deep breath by progressively breathing more deeply, by all means allow yourself as many warm-up breaths as you need.

  The meat of this technique is using the deep breath that you just mastered as a container to hold a specific thought. Let’s consider two different thoughts: “stained glass window” and “I am perfectly fine.” When you insert a thought into a long, deep breath, you need to decide how to break the thought up so that it divides naturally and rhythmically between the inhale and the exhale. You’ll discover, for instance, that “stained glass window” divides most naturally as (stained glass) and (window) and “I am perfectly fine” divides most naturally as (I am perfectly) and (fine). Give this a try and see if you agree.