A Writer's Space
Page 8
At our next session I wondered what other reflective questioning she might try. She didn’t seem inclined to engage in self-reflection or motivated to discover what might be preventing her from writing. But finally she agreed to try another week of mindful reflection, this time using the prompt “medieval Seville.” I wanted her to think about her book, not about writing or not writing, and the phrase “medieval Seville” seemed promising as a door opener.
Over the next several days she found herself sometimes muttering the phrase “medieval Seville.” A couple of times she caught herself completely stopped, unaware of her surroundings, not checking items off her mental to-do list but lost in the medieval Seville that her imagination was creating. She knew that something was shifting inside of her, although she still hadn’t written a word.
On the fifth day she stole a few minutes during the afternoon between meetings to jot down some notes about the Seville she was envisioning. She saw the narrow back streets . . . and a single snarling dog . . . which put her in mind of bull runs . . . which in turn caused her to picture a runaway bull on a dark, moonless night. She wrote her thoughts down.
These were the first actual bits of writing on the book that she had ever managed. The next morning she woke up and went right to the computer. She began describing the wild bull, the moonless night, the narrow streets, and her heroine, who all of a sudden came to her. She wrote for an hour and then had to rush to make it to work for a meeting. But even as she rushed she found that she was still thinking about her embryonic novel. She understood that this morning marked a real breakthrough.
She also understood that unless she made self-reflection a daily practice, her writing life might slip away again. The practice she instituted involved letting go of and mourning several of her previous activities (a few of which, once she let them go, she didn’t miss or mourn all that much), changing her relationship to the magazine, which she still oversaw but with a less consuming intensity, and consciously getting to her writing first thing each morning for at least an hour, even on the weekends.
It was not a smooth ride to the first draft of her novel. There were many days when she felt pulled in too many directions, many days when she found herself hating the draft and wondering why she was putting herself through this torture, many days when it upset her that the magazine looked to be a slipping a little. But finally the draft was done: a much less beautiful thing than she hoped it would be but full of potential. She knew exactly what she needed to do next: to enter her “reflective space” and commit to honorably revising the draft, once, twice, as many times as necessary.
LESSON 20
You have a coach available to help you reflect on your writing life, improve your writing life, and make sure that you maintain a writing life. That coach is you. Whenever you need some writing advice, enter a “reflective space” and coach yourself to your own best answers.
To Do
1. Name a challenge in your writing life.
2. Reflect on the question “How can I handle this challenge?”
3. Open up to your own solutions.
4. Choose one to implement.
CHAPTER 21
Frank and Janet
Frank had grown up with critical parents who made him feel worthless. If he played a piano piece decently, they commented on the way he’d slouched, how shy he’d seemed, or how much better they’d expected him to play considering all the lessons he’d taken. If he ate all the food on his plate, they wondered if he was trying to fatten himself up; if he left food over, they wondered if he knew how much a year’s worth of groceries cost. Nothing he did pleased them.
The upshot of their meanness was to ruin his ability to freely make mistakes. He still made mistakes, since we all do, but he hated them and tried to hide them from himself and from everyone else. As he couldn’t really hide them, he ended up chastising himself and saying things like “Only a champion idiot like me could make this many mistakes.”
Finally he realized that he had to change his attitude, since his fear of mistakes was ruining his ability to write decent papers in his graduate psychology program. Because he felt that he needed perfect, complete knowledge of his subject before starting a paper, he invariably delayed starting them; then, at the last minute, he would grind something inferior out. What he produced was never as good as the paper he might have written if he had felt free to write multiple drafts.
Desperate, he agreed to engage in some mindful self-reflection, using the question “What can I do about my fear of mistakes?” as his starting point. For a few days nothing came to him even though he sat quietly for fifteen minutes twice a day and tried to open up to answers. Then one night he had a dream about mud, the kind of mud you make when you’re painting a picture and mix too many pigments together. It was a dream about painter’s mud.
What he saw in his dream was a happy child obliviously mixing pigments together, making a face at the mud he produced, and blithely starting over. The child in the dream just didn’t care that he had wasted some paint. It wasn’t a tragedy or any sort of issue at all. No word like “mistake,” “failure,” “stupid,” “wasteful,” or “incompetent” crossed the little boy’s mind. He made some mud, discarded it, and started over, as happy as a lark. Frank realized that he wanted to live his life exactly that way.
He made the pledge to himself that he would learn to live like that little boy, like the person he might have been if he hadn’t received so much disabling criticism. His mantra became “mud means nothing.” He began to freely write without worrying that maybe he didn’t know enough, that maybe somebody had already said what he was thinking of saying, or that maybe he had no profound insights to share. By focusing on one issue, his lifelong fear of making mistakes and messes, he altered the course of his writing life.
Janet’s circumstances were different. She had raised two children with her husband, Mark, with whom she had a decent if distant relationship. Their children looked successful, getting good grades in school and participating in all sorts of extracurricular activities. Their daughter, Elizabeth, was an excellent tennis player and their son, Alex, was his soccer team’s star forward, and from the outside everything about Janet’s family life looked ideal. But Janet, who worked outside the home at a large company and who chalked up her inability to write to the fact that she had no time for writing, was still suffering in her early forties from a trauma that dated back to her late teens.
Before Mark there had been another man in Janet’s life. During that relationship Janet had become pregnant, had had their baby, and had given it up for adoption. Ever since, the abiding messages in Janet’s brain were “I’m evil” and “I don’t deserve to have anything good happen to me.” She believed that her self-hatred had led to self-censorship and prevented her from writing. At the same time, she wondered if giving up her child had anything to do with her writing block, and whether dwelling on the event was the actual problem. As she was of two minds about the matter, she’d decided that she would just not think about it at all.
Still, she agreed to practice a little mindful self-reflection, despite the intensely painful nature of the issue. Several weeks later she informed me that she had decided to look for her son and to write about the search. I asked her how she’d come to that conclusion. She replied that, through some process of softening and surrender that she couldn’t put into words, an opening had occurred; and through that opening a dream had arrived.
It was a dream about a therapy session in which she was the client and her son, all grown up, was the therapist. What was most important about the dream experience was that her son didn’t seem to hate her. She couldn’t really hear what they were saying but she could tell by the way he sometimes smiled and by his general demeanor that, although he was asking her tough questions, he wasn’t being critical of her. By the end of the dream she knew that she wanted to find him.
She grudgingly admitted that burying the experience of giving up her child for adoption had
probably tied her in knots and prevented her from writing. She wished that she’d forthrightly faced the matter years sooner and not squandered so much time avoiding the issue; but at least she was facing it now, and with something like equanimity. She announced that she was ready to feel whatever she was in store to feel and to record that journey in writing.
We may have experienced things, such as persistent criticism or repeated rejection, that now prevent us from writing. We may have done things, such as inflicted harm or wreaked havoc, that stop us from writing. As painful and difficult as it may be to face those issues, can we write if we don’t face them? The answer is: hard to say. Sometimes we overcome such difficulties by committing to our writing practice and by showing up every day at our computer. Sometimes we have to engage in self-reflection and experience healing before we can move forward.
LESSON 21
Commit to writing or commit to reflecting on what is stopping you from writing. Do one or the other.
To Do
1. Make a list of the issues that prevent you from writing. Don’t force issues onto the list, but at the same time be open and give issues a chance to surface.
2. Reflect on your list. If an issue stands out, address it.
3. Even before you have it completely resolved, say to yourself, “I think I’ll write anyway.” See if you can get on with your writing at the same time that you are dealing with the issues in your life.
4. If an issue seems intractable, seek help.
Part VI
Imagined Space
CHAPTER 22
Desiring Worlds into Existence
Front and center in our genetic memory is the experience of worlds arising out of solar explosions. Some worlds, such as Mercury, were made very hot; some, such as Jupiter, were made very cold. Some, such as our Earth, gave rise to apple orchards, mosquitoes, and us. As part of our genetic understanding, we know all about the creation of countless dead worlds and the creation of occasional beautiful, meaningful, and coherent worlds—and we know which we prefer.
Because of that genetic understanding, we feel a peculiar pressure to replicate existence and create beautiful, meaningful, coherent worlds of our own. We see that, out of nothing much, just strings and process, our own world got made. Desire bubbling up from our depths gets us hungry to make a world too. Creating such a world feels like the best use of our time on Earth and even seduces us into feeling like the creator of (a/the) whole universe. We say, “I can build worlds too! Bring it on!”
So we begin. A first step in creating this new world is to collect matter, as even gods need matter in order to make their visions manifest. Our matter is composed of ideas, images, feelings, and punctuation. But those are the molecules of our world, not its fundamental particles. Even more fundamental is our desire to create. A subatomic entity such as a string is driven energy; so is our writing. Our writing is made of sentences that desire alone has created.
The instant our desire fails, so do our world-building efforts. When our desire returns, we find ourselves once again at play in the fields of words. Can you cause a fictional 1890s Boise to materialize without a real desire to do so? Not even a god could. Focus on desire, then! If you focus on desire, you will be keeping your eye on the fountainhead.
It doesn’t matter what problem you’re encountering with your writing: focus on the rekindling of desire. If the problem is that a character is flat, rekindle your desire to breathe life into him. If the problem is that it’s time to write a synopsis of your novel and the absurdity of that task demoralizes you, rekindle your desire to present your world to the public. If the problem is that Chapter 3 is excellent and that Chapter 4 is dull, rekindle your desire to make Chapter 4 worthy.
A client of mine confessed: “I reflect on my own process and I realize that for a long time I’ve been playing it quasi-Zen-cool, trying very hard to start my engines without kindling any sparks of desire. Inevitably this leads to inconsistent efforts. I’ve had maybe one or two spurts of activity, followed by long lulls. Probably this stems from a lack of respect for my own work, as I go about coolly treating everything as practice, everything as a study, so that I don’t have to deal with the fact that the work might just suck. This cool, non-stick Teflon method has worked all too well: I’ve managed to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I understand now that this Teflon method doesn’t raise any stakes for me. There is no commitment, hence no risk. Work can’t be created without intention, without desire.”
Mere motivation isn’t enough. We think that our life would make a good story—that amounts to mere motivation. We think the subject we’ve been teaching for years would make for a good nonfiction book—that amounts to mere motivation. That sort of motivation peters out at the first signs of difficulty: that is, somewhere on the first page. If we are not burning to create, our chances of actually creating are slight. Do not be afraid to burn hot in the service of your work! Get excited, worked up, a little manic. Zen cool is cool; but dharma teachers tend not to get much writing done.
Writers who write are dancing bundles of desire. They crave sex, peanuts, and Nobel Prizes. They crave; they itch; they lust; they are alive. Whether they effectively manage their abundant desires is a separate question, but without all that dancing, pressing desire they’d sit quietly like old folks lined up in the corridor of a nursing home. Honor your goal to create new worlds by burning with desire. Be incandescent—or else nothing will happen.
Here is a little creation ditty, a creator’s Babylonian Genesis:
I am a world-builder.
That isn’t so easy.
But I am a world-builder.
Despite all my disabilities.
I am a world-builder.
Desire is the complete prescription.
Whether I find myself at stage one of my book, stage two, or anywhere along the Tao.
Without desire I am done.
Every day I rekindle my desire. Somehow.
Hallelujah.
LESSON 22
In the space where imagining happens, worlds arise if you kindle your desire. Do not be so cool, detached, and phlegmatic that you starve yourself and your art. Burn! In the light of that flame you will see sights worth describing.
To Do
1. Want. That’s okay.
2. Really want. That’s really okay.
3. Have you been hungering for years to write a certain piece while simultaneously curbing your enthusiasm and, by curbing it, killing it? Set the table. Light some candles. Get out the good china. Serve up your delicious piece to yourself, no enthusiasm spared.
4. Can’t locate your desire? It may be buried under a hundred doubts and disappointments. Train a flashlight in that direction— no, a spotlight.
CHAPTER 23
Setting as Big Idea
You inhabit many spaces: your mental space, your emotional space, your physical space. Then there are the spaces you inhabit when you write: the setting of your novel, the milieu of your nonfiction book, the geography of your poem. You inhabit an imagined Rome, imagined fields blazing under an imagined sun, an imagined sea and imagined ships. Then, when it’s your readers’ turn, they inhabit these imagined spaces too.
I grew up in Brooklyn. I can picture the Brooklyn of my youth with photographic clarity. But I can also picture with equal clarity places I have only visited as a reader: the Algeria of Albert Camus’s childhood as described in The First Man, the pastoral England of Thomas Hardy, the New England whaling world of Herman Melville, the southern small-town world of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. The richness of these settings is a gift to readers. We not only get to travel in our imagination but we are helped to fathom what we want our life to mean.
By inhabiting an author’s Saint Petersburg, Paris, or Savannah for a few hours, we rework our understanding of the universe. We augment our understanding of class and privilege as we watch tea served from a silver samovar. We change our mind about how much personal space we need as we live with a chara
cter in her under-the-eaves Paris studio. We recalibrate our conception of race relations as we attend an all-white private club luncheon waited on by an all-black wait staff. We are not in “the real” Saint Petersburg, Paris, or Savannah: we are in a place the author has created, learning what the author intended us to learn.
This is imagined space: setting as big idea, as big as character, plot, or theme. The setting of a piece of writing, whether in fiction or nonfiction, is never a comprehensive snapshot of a place. If you tried to describe with the utmost accuracy every structure in a city—every hovel, every mansion, every shop, every government building—and went on to describe every stitch of clothing, every banquet, every parade, you wouldn’t capture anything essential about that place. We wouldn’t know what it felt like to be an abstract painter in Greenwich Village in the Forties or, further uptown, a young girl growing up during the Harlem Renaissance. No catalogue can do that work: we need an author’s art and intentions.
Just as you have an intention for the physical space in which you work, that you write deeply there, so you conjure intentions for the spaces you write into existence. Maybe you picture a place—Berlin, an oasis in the desert, or your small town in the Midwest—and hear yourself say, “I could communicate something about the way this place has changed and, by doing that, get at how the world has changed.” Or: “I could communicate something about the way this place has remained the same and in that way get at how nothing really changes.” Isn’t that more interesting than picturing monuments and museums?