On Practice

Oh, it’s difficult.  Finding and maintaining a daily practice in anything–whether yoga or meditation or hiking or learning an instrument or writing–requires something beyond discipline.  Something that is like a distant cousin to discipline–so distant that the two are barely related  at all.  I dislike the word discipline, when applied to the writing life.  Oh, you must be so disciplined is one  of those things people say (people who are not writers) because they don’t know how else it can possibly be done.  (The secret underside of this statement is, of course, that if only they too were disciplined, they would be able to produce novels, since that’s all it takes.)  I mean, yes.  We do actually have to sit down in a chair.  Or stand and pace.  Or take baths.  Or drives.  We do have to devote a certain portion every day to this thing–this discipline.  It’s our job, after all.  But when I speak of practice, I’m referring to something different, something deeper.

Discipline–if I were to think of a physical manifestation of it–would look like a very tense person.  Gritted teeth.  Furrowed brow.  Squinting eyes.  Focusing hard.  Practice, on the other hand, requires a kid of looseness.  Writing from a softer, more porous, interior place.  A forgiving place.  Think of the word: practice.  It doesn’t imply perfection; in fact, it precludes the possibility of perfection.  One of my graduate school mentors used to say: all novels are failures.  It took me aback, at the time.  I was young, and this seemed like a dreadful thing to say–but now I understand it.  There is no perfection.  All novels (stories, poems, plays) are as good as they can be when the writer finally lets go of them.  What practicing promises is engagement.  Sitting every day with new pages, with a work in progress, is all about engagement.  And that kind of engagement is gentle, and leaves lots of room for missteps, for misguided attempts, for tearing it up and beginning again.  So what?  Novels are born of the practice of writing.  It’s not as if we practice and then sit down and write.  The sitting down and writing, that daily time, is the thing itself.

On Gratitude

You’d think gratitude wouldn’t have a place in a blog about writing.  We writers are notorious ingrates.  Nothing we do is ever good enough, and there isn’t a word anyone can say to change that.  We don’t believe accolades.  We turn a deaf ear to praise.  We feel stricken, most of the time, by this compulsion to set words down on the page.  A friend recently reminded me: writing isn’t a career, it’s an affliction.

And yet.  Within this affliction, there is so much to be grateful for.  I’ve spent so many years now alone at my desk, or curled up in my chair with a notebook on my lap.  I’ve spent so many years now, in silence.  It’s easy to forget that the world is full of people who don’t love what they do.  That loving what we do is one of life’s greatest gifts.  Sure, it’s a tortured gift.  How could it not be?  I almost never feel I’m getting it right.  I am like Penelope, weaving, unraveling.  Weaving, unraveling.  Eventually, something emerges, something takes shape that–if not up to my ideals of perfection–at least I can live with.  I live an examined life.  Sometimes I think the examined life is overrated, but in truth, there comes a point at which every life faces some sort of reckoning.  I think nearly every day of Buddhism’s Eight Vicissitudes: pain and pleasure, loss and gain, praise and blame, fame and disrepute. All lives contain all of these, the teaching goes.  All lives.  At one point or another.  None of us is spared.  So why not think about it?

I could wish that life was easier, that our financial lives were less precarious, that I didn’t have a deadline Thanksgiving week.  I could wish that I had some idea of what the future holds, the way some of my friends with regular jobs (or “job-jobs” as my writer friends and I call them) do.  Sometimes I wish it were a bit less of a high wire act.  But deep down I know that I wouldn’t really want it any other way.  As a Rabbi friend of mine recently wrote to me: we can think of the glass as half empty or half full — or we can just envision a smaller glass.

On the New Normal

It has been a while since I’ve written.  In the last six weeks I’ve been to Chicago, San Francisco, Columbus, Los Angeles and Milwaukee–in that order.  In the next two weeks, Houston, New Orleans, Detroit, and Miami.  I’m not used to this.  Oh, I’ve become a bit like the character George Clooney plays in Up in the Air.  I keep a plastic bag full of two ounce toiletries at the ready, and I’ve gotten very good at negotiating upgrades and making my way quickly through security lines.  But.  I wasn’t built for this.  I was built for solitude.  I require a tremendous amount of time and space in order to know myself.  To know what I’m feeling, thinking, believing.  To access my inner life.  Maybe not everyone needs this.  A lot of people are perfectly fine not accessing their inner lives.  But for writers, what goes on inside of us is all we’ve got.  And when we’re on the road, overstimulated, sleeping in hotel rooms, drinking room service coffee, texting with our children, away from our routines and our rooms of our own–it becomes harder to see what’s really going on.

Harder, but not impossible.  This morning I curled up with Zeke in my reading chair in my office and read a bit more of Emerson’s long essay on Self-Reliance.  “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

Zeke

Perfect sweetness.  The independence of solitude.

I am learning, always learning.  Writing Devotion taught me to keep my eyes open.  To keep my heart open.  Many times a day, more than I can count, I realize that I’m living in my racing mind, and I return to my breath, to my body, to feel rather than think.  Can I move through this time softly, with sweetness, maintaining my independence of solitude while in the midst of the crowd?  Why is it so hard to hold on to ourselves?  I know this much.  When I am writing, all the pieces come together.  The head, the heart.  The thoughts, the feelings.  A channel opens–it doesn’t always feel good, nor is it meant to always feel good–but nonetheless it opens and I am able to follow the line of words.  I’ve started a new novel (there, I’ve said it) and I have not had the luxury of endless stretches of days, a lit fire, the dogs curled up, the ninety minutes of yoga and meditation, the silent house.  I have learned to write in hotel rooms.  I have learned to write if I have only an hour.  Because I’ve realized that I’ve been waiting for life to return to normal–and normal is constantly shifting.  As my friend Sylvia says, we are always accommodating to a new situation.  The challenge is to not hold onto the way it used to be.  Instead, to adapt.  With courage, with softness, with sweetness.

To find the counsel of solitude, of refuge, within myself.  Wherever I might be.

On Thinking

What do you write about? People sometimes ask me.  This cocktail party question is up there with some of my other least favorites, like What are you working on? and How’s the book doing? It’s an innocent question, really.  The person asking it has no way of knowing that he or she has pushed me into a murky swamp of answers from which no good can come.  How do I describe in a few sentences or less what I write about?  I’ve tried, over the years, to come up with a sound bite:

I write novels about dysfunctional families.

I write about family secrets and what we do to each other in the name of love.

I write about mothers and daughters.

And always, I feel kind of sick after I’ve said pretty much anything that amounts to a pithy description.  Because the truth is, I have tried to stay willfully obtuse about what it is I write about.  My subject matter.  My themes.  Once in a while, a critic will tell me what my themes are, and I try (unsuccessfully) to forget what I’ve been told because it isn’t useful.  When I sit down to write, I am not a writer who writes about dysfunctional family, mothers and daughters, secrets.  I’m a writer facing a blank page, and what that ought to mean, if I don’t censor myself or over-think, that anything is possible.

In Emerson’s essay on Self-Reliance, I came across this passage, which I have been re-reading nearly every day: “A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages.  Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.  In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”

Lately I have contemplating the difference–when it comes to writing– between thinking and feeling.  Between leading with the head, or with the heart.  I don’t mean this in a treacly, sentimental way, but rather, in a grounded, physical sense.  My mind, when I am setting a draft down on the page, does not help me.  My mind is not my friend.  My mind will tell me all sorts of things about what kind of writer I am (or am not), what I can and can’t do.  My mind will laugh at me, pause cynically, get in my way.  It will tell me it’s time to check email, or clean my closets.  In other words, my mind will beat me senseless. But if I follow the line of words from a more rooted place, I can short-circuit my mind and see what happens.  A riskier proposition, to be sure.  But in that direction lies the only possibility of surprise.

On Distraction

For the past few days I’ve been reading a book by Eckhart Tolle.  Quite a few people who read Devotion asked me if I had read Tolle’s work, which I hadn’t.  So I picked up a copy at the Kripalu bookstore, and dug in.  There’s no arguing with Tolle’s message, which is that our minds are constantly leading us into the past (memory) or into the future (projection) when really all we have, all that exists, is the Now.  The present.  I know this, I think about it all the time, I grapple with it on a daily basis.  But as I’ve been reading the Tolle, I find myself jarred and troubled.  My relationship with my mind has become adversarial, as if I’m constantly trying to tamp it down, to silence it.  As a couple of friends pointed out to me yesterday, the book is more prescriptive, more self-helpy than what I’m used to reading.  Each and every page exhorts the reader to think of her mind as the enemy of her spirit.  I don’t want to think of my mind as my enemy.  What I want to do–what I try to do–is gently bring it into alignment, the way a good parent might take a screaming toddler by the hand.

Many times a day, I realize that my thoughts have drifted far away from whatever I’m actually doing.  It happens when I’m driving, walking, reading, even writing.  Certainly, it happens while I’m meditating or practicing yoga.  I tend to leap more into the future than to dwell in the past, but wherever I go, I’m not in the present.  I can be driving in my car for twenty minutes and suddenly realize that I’ve covered a lot of ground, while noticing nothing around me.

It’s harder and harder, of course.  We all know this.  We are faced with ever-increasing distractions.  The noise is always around us, luring us away from a state of interiority.  Our days are filled with what Virginia Woolf called “cotton wool”.  As I’m in a delicate place, at the moment, poised near the edge of beginning a new book, not quite there yet, I feel a bit like a swimmer, toes curled against a diving board, ready to spring off, not sure whether or not there’s water in the pool below.  It’s a state in which distraction looms around every corner.   Everything is more enticing than writing that first sentence.  Everything is less scary, more appealing.  All the voices speak in chorus: what if it doesn’t work?  What if it’s no good?  What if it’s a terrible mistake? And I find myself online, instead.  Looking at possible bicycle trips through Provence, or a recipe for cream of tomato soup, or the perfect pair of black boots.

But eventually, I know from experience that I will make friends with my mind.  I will lay the transparency of mind over the transparency of spirit until they form a single, coherent picture.  Instead of approaching my mind as a foe, I will greet it as a friend.  There you are, I will say.  As if to a tantrum-y toddler.  Come on.  Let’s go.

On Grasping

We know when we’re competing and comparing, don’t we?  When our focus is not on our work, not on what matters, but rather, on what we don’t have.  What we think we need, or want, in order to be fulfilled and happy.  The Buddhist term is, of course, grasping–a word I’ve come to love.  It’s so vivid, so visceral, the whole idea of it.  When I’m in this state I picture myself, my hands outstretched, grabbing at air.  Coming up empty every time, because this kind of grasping has nothing to do with true ambition, but rather, with a stupid and meaningless pecking order and our need to assert ourselves.  Our need to win.  It’s a lousy feeling, isn’t it?  Especially since there’s no such thing as winning.  There is no finish line.

I’m writing in the plural because it’s easier, of course.  I can hide behind the fact that all of us feel this way at one time or another.  But the truth is, I fall into this grasping state more often than I’d like to admit.  I have to be very careful.  Lately, a lot of good things have been happening.  And while in some ways I’m aware of this, I’m also aware of’ a hunger driving me, an uncomfortable desire for more, more, more.  The rungs on the ladder, the achievements we think we need–what are they, really?  Every time–honestly, every single time–I have reached one of those rungs on the ladder, my sense of joy and satisfaction has lasted, at the most, for a few hours before that little whispering voice starts up again.  There are more desires lined up being that one.  Higher rungs on the ladder, and always someone ahead of us, as if life is a race.

When I am in alignment, when I am at my my most centered best, I am aware that there is only one person I am competing with: I am competing with myself.  I think it was John Irving who once said that we writers are lucky, because it’s possible for us to get better as we get older.  I took this to heart, years ago, and resolved to get better with each book.  I want everything I write to be a greater creative achievement than the last.  Me, in competition with me.  Learning, growing, reaching–rather than grasping–or perhaps better yet, digging deeper for the places I have yet to go, the lessons I have yet to learn.  When I’m focused on my own work, minding my own business, there’s nothing to grasp for.

On Inwardness

I’ve long understood that I need to spend a certain number of hours a day alone.  If I’m not by myself, in a quiet room, reading, writing, thinking, doing yoga, staring into space, taking baths, for the better part of each day, I start to feel all jumbled up.  Uncomfortable.  Awkward and irritated, as if something is chafing me from the inside.  I am almost always running a monologue in my head–something I’ve learned, in my meditation practice, is often nothing more than detritus and noise.  But in order to move past the running dialogue, I require a great deal of solitude.  I’ve learned, over the years, to be able to move in and out of isolation, into family life, social life, community life, and then back out of it, back to the cave where I do my work.

But.  (You knew there was a but coming, didn’t you?)  I had the recent realization that inwardness doesn’t always serve me well.  It’s necessary, crucial for a writer to be inward-looking (and by this I don’t mean navel-gazing, but rather, the capacity for intense, interior contemplation).  But it’s equally important for a writer to look outside herself.  Lately I have noticed myself trapped in my interior life when, in fact, what was going on all around me was interesting, possibly even useful and important.  When I am thinking, rather than using all five senses–seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting, touching–I am not really using my whole instrument.  We are observers, aren’t we?  We carefully watch and listen to what is swirling all around us, and that in combination with our interior lives is what ends up making something rich happen on the page.  If a writer is entirely trapped inside herself, the result can be stultifying.  If a writer is entirely outward-looking, the result can be superficial and thin.  The goal, I think, is to balance oneself in the fulcrum between thinking about life and actually living it.

On Procrastination

There are as many forms of procrastination as writers who procrastinate.  Cleaning, organizing, exercising, making lists, checking email, online shopping, calling your mother/mother-in-law/best friend, in fact, answering the phone at all.  Procrastination has many other names: one of my favorites is, research.  We tell ourselves that there are certain things we need to know before we begin.   We can’t possibly start a short story set in, say, Mysore, India, without spending many hours reading up on Mysore.  Blogs, maps, essays, books, photos… there’s so much to read, we might even lose sight of the fragile glimmer of an idea that set us on this road in the first place.  Instead of just sitting down. Putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard.  Seeing what we come up with.  Just seeing what’s there.  E.L. Doctorow once told me that he never researches his novels before he writes them.  He writes first, and does research–mostly as fact-checking–later, to see whether his imagination got it right.  Often, our imaginations get it right, if we just get out of our own way.  If we spend too much time researching, we suddenly feel the need to justify our time by including the wonderful details we’ve come across–which may, in fact, be wonderful details but don’t belong in our story.

This, I’ve known for years, but lately I’ve discovered whole new forms of procrastination–sort of like discovering a new species of beetle.  Who knew?  I decided about a month ago that I wanted to write something in a new form.  I remembered a piece that had been written a couple of decades ago in that same form, and decided that I had to read this thing before embarking on my own project.  So I went to my local bookstore.  They couldn’t get it for me.  I called a friend who I thought might have it.  He didn’t.  I went on Amazon, where it was out-of-stock.  I have been waiting for a month to read a quite-possibly-irrelevant piece of work that I convinced myself I could not go on without reading.  And here’s another distant relative of that version of procrastination: since I was going to be writing in a new form, I decided that I needed the proper software.  After all, there’s no point writing if it isn’t formatted properly–right? So I spent time online researching software.  I became completely overwhelmed by the possibilities, and ended up not doing anything at all.

After a month of this, I ended up exactly nowhere.  No reading material.  No software.  And–most of all–no writing.  All because I threw up roadblocks, one after the next, keeping me from that single, most essential process.  The only process that matters, really.  I kept myself from sitting down in my chair, with a notebook in my lap, pushing past my own fears and self-censorship and resistance, and following the line of words wherever it takes me.

On Talking

I know this, I’ve known this forever, but still I fall prey to it: sometimes I talk too much about a piece of writing– an idea for a novel, a story, an essay–before  I sit down and actually try to write it.  Lately I’ve been all hopped up, back from book tour, over-stimulated, and I’ve grown accustomed to having lots and lots of conversation.  I have some time now to settle in quietly and think and write — but what have I been doing instead?  Talking, talking, talking.  I’ve talked to a few friends, I’ve talked to my husband, I’ve even answered the dreaded question at cocktail parties and barbecues: what are you working on? And each time I talk about it, I feel the very essence of the idea–the moment, the shimmer, the image, the piece of language–slip away a little more.  I start to lose my footing before I’ve even found it.  The idea begins to go flat.  What was I thinking, anyway?  Why did I think it was worth exploring?  Where before there was the beginning of a landscape in my mind, suddenly there is only dust.  All because I opened my mouth and let it loose, instead of harnessing it on the page.

For years I have kept a quote from Nietzsche on the bulletin board above my desk: “That for which we find words is already dead in our hearts,” he wrote.  “There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.” When I talk about what I’m thinking, instead of simply thinking it–when I talk about it instead of grabbing a notebook and starting to lay down words, what I’m really doing is succumbing to my own anxiety.

Is it going to be any good? Does the story have legs?  Can I create momentum?  Is it something anyone other than me will care about?  Here’s the thing: I cannot possibly know this. Until I write it, I will not know.  I can talk about it until I’m blue in the face, but all that will happen is that it will wither and die before I’ve had a chance to find out.

On Inspiration

I’ve long been aware that the whole idea of being inspired is a dangerous one for writers.  What does it mean, anyway, to be inspired?  Is it necessarily a good feeling?  One of joy and incipient productivity?  The muse alighting, perched gently on the writer’s shoulder, whispering a stream of words that find themselves lining up effortlessly on the page?  I don’t think so.  At the risk of pissing off the gods of creativity, I think that the muse is elusive at best, and may well be a fiction we tell ourselves.

All I know is that if I had given in to this idea of inspiration over the years– if I had waited to feel that eureka moment each morning before I began to write, my output would be much smaller than it has been.  Instead of seven books, I might have had a story or two, or three, or five.  But not much beyond that — because most days, when I’ve sat at my desk, it has been with a sense of purpose, of desire, of longing, of diligence, of doggedness, but rarely have I sat down with a sense of inspiration.

Don’t get me wrong.  Inspiration has come.  It has tiptoed into my writing room when I’ve least expected it.  It has shown up mid-sentence, mid-thought, mid-idea.  But it generally doesn’t precede me to the desk.  Inspiration comes out of doing the work: the hard labor of laying each brick on top of the next, one at a time, until what you’ve done begins to resemble a wall.  Often, it doesn’t resemble a wall, or it’s come out crooked, or in some way less than you’d hoped, and you have to smash the thing up and start all over again.  Inside this painstaking labor is where inspiration lies.  Only when you’re up to your eyeballs, covered in dust, hopeless and bordering on despair, does the muse even consider paying a visit.

I remember once, working on a single short story for six months straight.  Draft after draft, I couldn’t get it right.  It was fine, it was polished, even (and often a piece being polished before it’s finished is the worst thing because it becomes harder and harder to see through its veneer) but it didn’t sing, and I knew it.  I despaired.  I wept.  I was convinced that I had thrown away six months of my life.  Then, one morning, depleted from the stress, I became sick with a terrible flu.  I became feverish, my body wracked with chills.  I wrapped myself in a blanket and sat in bed with my story, which suddenly, through the lens of my illness, became clear to me.  I tore it up and started all over again from that place of feverish misery which transformed itself into…you guessed it…inspiration.