Are you nodding in recognition?  The fleas of life.  It's so easy to let them get in the way.  Or to become so busy swatting at them that we get nothing else done.  To be honest, I have just had one of those days.  Oh, I accomplished a lot, if you consider making dentist appointments, arranging upcoming travel, answering emails, taking care of a few literary obligations, and collecting the mail to be accomplishments.  After having been away for the past three weeks in Europe (I know, cry me a river) I'm wary of my manuscript, which has assumed an air of danger in my absence, like a caged and feral animal I have been neglecting.  As Annie Dillard has written about neglecting work: "You must visit it every day and assert your mastery over it.  If you miss a day, you are quite rightly afraid to open the door to its room.  You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, 'Simba!'"

The fleas of life are always buzzing about.  On good writing days, we're able to ignore them and get to work––and once we do, they miraculously vanish.  But on bad writing days, the fleas take over.  They become a thick, grey wall that we can't see through, and we get distracted by them, we give up, we lose the day.  It's a parodox I think about a great deal.  In order to write, we need to push past our own frustration, resistance.  We don't begin in placidity.  We begin, most of us, most of the time, feeling like our heads are about to explode.  We feel surges of energy running through our bodies; we are barely able to contain them.  But then––once we have begun, we settle down at some point.  The fleas disappear.  When asked in the same interview whether his emotional state has any bearing on his work, Styron responded: "I guess like everybody I'm fouled up most of the time, but I find I do better when I'm relatively placid.  It's hard to say, though.  If writers had to wait until their precious psyches were completely serene there wouldn't be much writing done.  Actually––though I don't take advantage of the fact as much as I should––I find that I'm simply the happiest, the placidest, when I'm writing, and so I suppose that that, for me, is the final answer."

If we wait for the fleas of life to disappear––or if we succumb to our own frustration, our own fouled-up-ness, the discomfort that goes hand-in-hand with sitting down to write––we will be waiting a good long time.  And we'll be in danger of forgetting the feeling–– ironed-clean,  lucid,  clear, even hopeful––that visits us at the end of a day spent writing.

Why do we do it?  I can tell you why I do it.  I write because, if I didn't, I would likely lose my mind.  I write because, in writing, the world around me begins to assume a shape.  I write because, when I don't, I feel not-quite-alive, at a remove from everything and everyone I love.  I don't write because I enjoy it.  I don't write because it's fun.  Honestly, it's so rarely fun.  Other words come to mind: satisfying, intense, engaging, maddening, absorbing, surprising.  But not fun.  Having written is another story.  That spent feeling at the end of a long writing day, a day in which one has wrung out every last bit of what was possible, that feeling, I'd wager, is part of what we writers live for.

Still, even twenty years into this writing life, I sometimes hold on to the expectation that it will be...easier.  Not the work itself, but the life.  How many of us, especially these days, are living under a cloud of anxiety?  We wonder about the future of books.  Of publishers.  Of agents.  All of the old signifiers have vanished.  Book tours?  Not so much.  And even for those who go on them, they're not what they used to be.  They're pit stops at hotels overlooking  interstate highways, appearances at bookstores where the audience consists of five people: the bookstore manager,  two of  your local cousins, a young woman inexplicably crying in the third row, and a homeless man who shuffles in and promptly falls asleep.  Publication date, for most, is the tree falling in the forest.  The sound of one hand clapping.

And so.  Why is this not depressing?  (Oops, sorry.  Maybe it is, just a little bit.)  I'll tell you why.  I just looked up from my screen and once again looked out the window.  Then I glanced around my little office: by my feet, my manuscript of Still Writing, along with The Writing Life by Annie Dillard, and a book of drawings made of poems by Mark Strand.  On the table next to me: a cup of coffee rests on top of Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner; The Book of Awakening by the brilliant Mark Nepo, which I have been reading at the start of most days; Daniel Mendelson's The Lost.  On the wall facing me, a bulletin board covered with index cards, scribbled with notes and ideas.  On this bulletin board, something catches my eye: a quote I don't remember finding or putting up there:

"The first task, though not the most important task, is to quiet the busyness in your mind.  The second task is to find your song.  And the third task is to sing your song."

We get the opportunity, every single day, to quiet our minds.  To find our song.  And to sing it.  Once, when I was in graduate school, a mentor of mine put the writing life into perspective: "All we have a right to expect," she said, "is the chance to do it again."  This––the singing of the song, the opportunity to wake up in the morning and do it again––is the beginning and the end of what we can hope for.

How often does a day like this happen?  Well, I had one yesterday, which is why this description is so fresh in my mind.  But really--how often?  Probably about once every two weeks, if I'm completely honest.  Something usually gives.  I struggle with getting to the page in the morning, and it's noon before I begin to accomplish anything.  I get sidetracked by a disappointing email, or an exciting email.  It almost doesn't matter what the content, a full in-box is always over-stimulating.  I don't get to the yoga mat.  I don't make dinner.  My work suffers.  Four o'clock rolls around and my head feels like it's about to pop off my shoulders, and when I pick my son up at school, I am in a fog, emotionally unavailable and hating myself for it.

The question, really, is why?  Rarely, it happens that something legitimate gets in my way.  Say, a leak in the house.  A blizzard.  A call that a friend's parent has passed away.  You know, life.  But more often than not, the only thing getting in my way is me.  Sound familiar?  It seems so simple, so obvious that all we need to do is get out of our own way.  Set up some ground rules (no internet, no email, no phone) and just follow them.  But we all know that it isn't that easy.  And the reason it isn't easy is because writing is hard.  It ain't for sissies.  It's painful, exhausting, and it exposes nerves we didn't even know we had, not to mention turmoil.  It unleashes the beast of memory.  Left to our own devices, we will do anything to avoid it.  Even though we know that we'll feel better if we just sit down and get to work.

Consider this a challenge.  Just this morning I saw a tweet (yep, today wasn't as good as yesterday) about a 28 day meditation challenge a favorite teacher of mine is starting.  Well, how about a 28 day writing habits challenge.  Do just these three things religiously: 1) begin your day by reading something nourishing, remembering Jane Kenyon's advice to always have good sentences in your ears.  2) Wait until you've been at work for a while––say, an hour––before checking email or going online.  If you can't do it on your own, download Freedom.  And 3) Take a yoga or a meditation break––even if you don't do yoga or meditate.  Even if you're totally resistant to the idea.  Just try it.  Here are a few suggestions.  Oh, and one more, a treasure trove of talks about meditation.   I'll be doing this too.  Please let me know how it's going!

Sorry, but it isn't going to happen.

Every single day, the writer begins again.  When we wake up in the morning, when we roll out of bed, brush our teeth, splash our faces with cold water, make the coffee, the toast, pack the sandwiches into lunch boxes, bundle our children off to school with the proper mittens and hats and sports attire and homework, when we wash the dishes, make the beds, answer the emails, walk the dogs––until the moment when we finally sit down at our desks, we are preparing to begin again.  We may be halfway through a novel, an essay, a story, a memoir.  We may be nearing the finish line on a piece of work that has taken us years.  We may, in fact, be attempting to start something new.  But wherever we are within our work, we have never been exactly here, today.  Today, we need to re-learn what it is that we do.  We have to remind ourselves to be patient, to be gentle with our foibles, to be ruthless with our time, to withstand our frustrations, to divide our attention if we are parents of young children.  We must remember what it is that we need.  The solitude of an empty home?  A strong cappuccino?  A walk through the woods?  An hour of yoga?  A bath?  Half an hour with a good book, the echo of beautiful sentences in our ears?

When I was first learning to meditate, this idea of beginning again was revelatory.  It still is.  When Sharon Salzberg spoke of catching the mind, scampering off like the little monkey that it is, into the past, the future, anywhere but here, she suggested that the real skill, in meditation, is simply noticing that the mind has wandered, and beginning again.  So liberating, this idea that we can start over at any time, a thousand times a day if need be.  I see many parallels between the practices of meditation and writing, but none are more powerful than this.  Writing is hard.  We resist, we procrastinate, we veer off  course.  But we also have this tool, this ability to begin again.  Every sentence is new.  Every paragraph, every chapter, every book is a country we've never been before.  We're clearing brush.  We don't know what's on the other side of that tree.  How can we?  We are visitors in a foreign land.  And so we take a single step.  Up the stairs after the morning coffee.  Back to the desk after the doorbell has rung.  Returning to the manuscript that has been languishing, becoming a stranger.

No, it never gets easier.  It shouldn't get easier.  Word after word, book after book, we build our writing lives.  Hopefully we don't repeat ourselves.  Hopefully we grow, deepen, evolve as interpreters and witnesses of the world around us.  We remain willing to feel our way through the darkness, to stop, take stock, breathe in, breathe out, begin again.  And again, and again.

The secret contemplative self.  The private heart.  The very phrases bring tears to my eyes.   I don't know about you, but for most of us, our daily lives take us farther and farther away from that secret self, that private heart.  A paradox central to most writers lives is that so often we spend our days not writing, not reading, not in the silence in which the secret contemplative self thrives, but rather, speaking, tweeting, traveling, facebooking, trolling the internet...doing, rather than being.

It is only in the silence that our voice emerges.  It is only in the movement of the hand across page, one word following the next, in the crafting of sentences that we know ourselves.  We can talk ourselves blue in the face, and we may be telling a certain kind of truth, but it is not the deepest truth, not the truth of our private heart.  When people ask me when I knew I wanted to be a writer, or when I "decided" to become a writer, it is this I think about.  This bittersweet pleasure, this pressure and longing to find myself on the page.  It's always been this way for me, since I was a child scribbling in my notebook.  A shape emerges.  An image, a fragment, a thought I didn't know I was thinking.

The more time I spend away from the page, the further that secret self recedes.  I know she is not always available to me.  She is a chimera, elusive, finicky, sly.  She doesn't always want to be found.  She likes to be treated with the respect she deserves.  And that respect involves sitting down.  Showing up.  Eliminating distraction.  Remembering that the writer's heart is a private heart, that our sentences are like candles in the darkness, showing us the way.

"My bread bakes well.  All is rather rapt, simple, quick, effective–except for my blundering on at The Waves.   I write two pages of arrant nonsense, after straining; I write variations of every sentence; compromises; bad shots; possibilities; till my writing book is like a lunatic's dream.  Then I trust to some inspiration on re-reading;  and pencil them into some sense.  Still I am not satisfied.  I think there is something lacking.  I sacrifice nothing to seemliness.  I press to my center."

How many lessons there are to be learned in this one brief paragraph!  First, the revelation that Woolf felt she was blundering as she was writing one of her masterpieces.  That we all feel we blunder.  We are failing at every moment to get it right.  The chasm between the perfect work that exists in our imagination and the chicken scratches on the page can be too much to bear.  Still, we write.  Woolf wrote through bad shots, compromises.  She was willing to put her lunatic's dream down on paper.  Then, the shaping, the penciling into some sense.  Still–and of course!–she is dissatisfied.  Something's missing.  Something's wrong.  She stays longer, doesn't polish it into prettiness, but instead, presses deeper, ever closer to the center, to the place where it's pulsing, tiny, alive.

I don't know about you, but I need to learn these lessons again and again.  I lose sight of how hard it is for all of us, and assume that it's just hard for me.  I wake up with my mind ironed clean, the best of intentions, but within moments of my feet hitting the floor, already I've begun to fret.  The dog left a stain on the carpet.   I need to schedule a doctor's appointment.  Those expenses for a recent business trip need to be turned in.  My in box is full of chores.  Letters to be written.  Why not do them now?  The chores are real, but they can also be done later.  They're a hedge against the true work at hand.  My job, the one that I have done for better or worse for the past twenty years, does not involve the dog stain, doctor's appointment, expenses, letters.  My real job involves pressing to the center.  It's hard, and painful, and god there is always something to distract us, something easier to do.  (Baking bread, perhaps?) Writing well involves walking the path of most resistance. Sitting still, being patient, allowing the lunatic dream to take shape on the page, then the shaping, the pencil on the page, breathing, slowing down, being willing–no, more than willing, being wide open–to press the bruise until it blossoms.

For years, I railed against the idea that we write from our wounds.  It makes all writing sound autobiographical.  It seems to discount the imagination, and imply that writers simply bleed onto the page.  But I've come to see that wound is just another word for obsession, and obsession is just another word for theme, or subject matter.  We cannot get away from what obsesses us.  Why would we even want to?  Those of us who write are enormously lucky to have something to do with our obsessions, a craft, an art, that turns what haunts us into something that (hopefully) resonates for others.

In truth, I often have no idea what drives me forward when I'm writing a work of fiction.  I try to remain willfully obtuse about my themes, because to over-think, at least in the early stages, creates a self-consciousness that ruins the work.  It's only later, much later, when a story or a novel is finished, that I understand what it is that I've done, and what has driven me to do it.  And still... what is most powerful is that feeling of writing in the dark, of following that line of words, first one, then another, and slowly building something that way.  A shape emerges.  It is not our business to analyze it as it takes shape, because analysis will ruin it.  First there is a foundation, then doors, windows, a roof, furniture, a faucet dripping, a flower drooping in a vase, a child crying alone in a room... Who is the child?  Why the dripping faucet?  We keep writing forward, trusting that, in time, we will know.  In other words, we allow the imagination, along with our invisible wounds, to weave together in ways that defy comprehension, that wither under too much reflection.  This is how we find our niche.  Our own fingerprint.  The one that is ours and ours alone.  This is how our wounds become art.

I confess that I have mixed feelings when it comes to teaching craft. There are brilliant teachers of craft, and I know they don't feel the same way I do about it.  When I think of teaching craft, I picture myself standing beside an old car, perhaps a vintage car, that has run efficiently and without incident for many years, and deciding, just for the hell of it, to open its hood and poke around.  Oooh, what's this?  A piston?  What's a piston?  I've been driving for years, without knowing, or needing to know.  I often tell my students that if they're sitting down to write while thinking about structure, point of view, setting, voice, plot, they're setting themselves up for misery.  That kind of self-consciousness has no place in the creative process.  There is an intuitive freedom in the getting down of a first draft, and so often, students make the mistake of thinking that the burnished prose of published, completed work just came out that way.  It almost never does.  It takes draft after draft after draft, and at a certain point, it may require knowing what a piston is.  So to speak.  But not when beginning!  Never at the beginning!

Lately I have been enduring a time of waiting.  I'm working on my book about writing, but my next novel is proving elusive--as, if I am completely honest with myself--my novels always do.  It's only when I reach a point of true despair that I begin to see through the forest to the next work of fiction.  I can't fake this despair and fool the muse.  It doesn't help to tell myself that this always happens and eventually I will find my way.  This time, I am convinced, it's different.  I have nothing.  My interior life a blank slate.  Yesterday, while re-reading an interview with Cynthia Ozick, I came across this gem: "The only thing more tormenting than writing is not writing."  I took comfort in this, as I always do from the words of my fellow writers.  And, in the meantime, I wait for what Ozick calls my "private heart" to once again reveal itself to me.  "It's probably impossible to define," she writes, "but it's not what the writer does––breakfast, schedule, social outings––but what the writer is.  The secret, contemplative self.  An inner recess wherein insight occurs."

Ozick goes on to say something that I want to impart to my students over this next month, on these two retreats: "The writers self is perhaps coextensive with one of the writer's sentences.  It seems to me that more can be found about a writer in any single sentence in a work of fiction, say, than in five or ten full-scale biographies.  Or interviews!"

This strikes me as a deep and powerful truth.  And it exists in the place that knowledge of craft cannot touch.  It exists in the dark recesses of waiting.  Of enduring.  Of reading and re-reading and thinking and not willing anything into being, but rather, allowing the possibility for a whole new shape to form.

“What’s the problem?” he asked.

“No problem,” I said. “I just don’t feel like listening.”

I couldn’t tell him that later that afternoon, “This American Life” would be rebroadcasting an episode with a reading I did years ago from my first memoir, “Slow Motion.” That I was afraid a promo would come on the air, and that suddenly, improbably, horrifyingly, he might hear his mother’s voice of more than a decade earlier, telling a story of events in her life that had happened more than a decade before that, a story no parent would want her child to hear.

Before I became a mother, I spent many years writing with no thought that some day I might have a child. When I first started the memoir, I hadn’t even yet met the man who would become my husband. And so I wrote with abandon, a kind of take-no-prisoners story about dropping out of college at 20 and, in a booze- and drug-induced haze, becoming involved in a destructive affair with a much older married man, the stepfather of my best friend. My life was turned around by a car accident in which my father was killed and my mother badly injured. I was in my early 30s when I wrote “Slow Motion,” and my focus was on trying to capture that painful and chaotic time. I wasn’t projecting forward to a lifetime later, when, as a Connecticut wife and mother in my 40s, I’d be driving along with an impressionable and curious preteenage son whose access to his mother’s not-so-pretty rebellion would be as close as the push of a button.

Everyone has a past, and it’s a very personal decision to reveal — or not reveal — the more unsavory bits to our children. It’s possible for most people to smooth out the rough edges of their histories, to edit out indiscretions or sanitize their mistakes. After all, some things are none of our kids’ business, right? They don’t need to know every single detail about their parents. On the day our son was born, a friend with teenagers gave my husband the following piece of advice: “If he ever asks you if you did drugs . . . lie.” But for memoirists, the stories we’ve told of our own lives are set in stone. And while certainly some memoirs might whitewash the past, and others might omit unsavory details, the kind of memoir I wanted to write required being hard on myself publicly. I lifted up rocks and peered into the darkness. In my attempt to find the Emersonian thread of the universal in my story, I laid myself bare in the most unflattering light.

I’ve often wondered whether I would have written that memoir — one of seven books to my name, but the only one I would bodily throw myself in front of my son to prevent him from reading — if the timing had been different, if the idea for it had taken root in me only after he had been born. It’s a book I’m proud of, and the artist in me would like to think that I would have written it no matter what. But the mother in me isn’t so sure. I might have stopped myself, for fear of what he might think some day. Certainly, it would have been a very different book, bearing the marks of time, maturity, experience. After all, one can’t write with abandon if one is worrying about the consequences. And to have children is to always, always worry about the consequences.

From the time my son was an infant, I became aware that he hadn’t asked for a mother who is a writer. Up until then, the people in my life — parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, boyfriends, friends — had felt like fair game. If I was going to be hardest on myself, then, well, they were grown-ups; they could handle it. But if I was going to write about my son, I was going to have to be very, very careful. And as any writer will tell you, careful has no place in making art. My atavistic desire to protect my child (against myself!) was at odds with my creative desire to write from an internal landscape that now included him, one which had been forever altered by his birth.

Every memoirist makes her own set of rules to write and to live by, and in these 12 years, the strictest rule to which I have adhered has been this: Before I have written anything about my son, I have asked myself whether I could imagine him turning to me some day, and saying, I wish you hadn’t told that story about me. But of course the boy I know today has not yet grown into the man he will someday become. Right now, he likes the fact that he sometimes appears in my work. He has read my most recent memoir, “Devotion,” though in truth I think he’s skimmed it for his own name. He thinks it’s cool when I mention him in an interview. (He would enjoy being written about in this essay, though I have no intention of showing it to him.) But he may not always feel this way, and so I can’t possibly know; all I can do is try to protect his privacy while not censoring myself to the point of muteness. Certainly I can imagine him saying, I wish you hadn’t told that story about yourself. But as a writer, my inner life is my only instrument. I understand the world only by my attempts to shape my experience on the page. Then, and only then, do I know what I think, feel, believe. Without these attempts (the word essay derives from “attempt”) I am lost.

Later that day, I drove my son to his piano lesson and as I sat waiting in the driveway of his teacher’s house, I tuned in to “This American Life.” I leaned back in the driver’s seat and listened to my younger self quietly, forcefully reading her sad, painful story. In the distance, through an open window, the sound of my son playing the opening strains of “Für Elise.” It was a strange and powerful moment, one in which I felt my past and present fall one on top of the other to form something like a complete picture. I closed my eyes and choked back tears. And I thought what I always think in such a moment: I’ll have to write about this.

Dani Shapiro’s next book, “Still Writing,” will be published in 2013.