Having a writing practice is critical to your journey as a writer. It’s essential to have a habit, a routine, a familiar place to settle in to. Developing a routine in any area of your life makes it easier to have a routine in other areas. A mind and body accustomed to a disciplined practice (and I don’t mean you have to get up at four in the morning, forgo all human contact, and give up gluten products) will begin to naturally move toward a place of greater focus and discipline at all times. For writers, having a disciplined writing practice will be especially helpful in eliminating the frustration that occurs when you try to take an undisciplined mind, set it down in front of a computer, and say, “Write! Today’s writing day!” The undisciplined mind says, “Yeah right. Look over there at that shiny thing. Look there! No there! Are you hungry? I’m hungry. Let’s go to the bathroom. Let’s check e-mail.” And when you walk away from your writing space in disgust, with yourself and with writing, claiming, “I can’t write!” you’re telling yourself a lie. You’re limiting yourself because of a lack of understanding about how your mind works, and then you let that limitation dictate the terms of future events.
All writers do battle with their minds at some point. All writers must find a way to coexist with their minds. The mind is just a part of your body, like your heart or liver. It’s your mind’s job to make thoughts, so it does. Don’t overidentify with them any more than you’d overidentify with the sound of your breath. Thoughts come and thoughts go. You won’t succeed in making your mind stop making thoughts, but you can slow them down. You can release attachments to them. You can use breath work and movement to help calm your mind. But you won’t get it to shut up all together. And really, you don’t want that. That’s dead.
Writers in particular need to be disciplined in their practice because the experience of writing can be so intense. A writing practice illuminates our inner thoughts. It can yank out into the open everything the writer has been trying not to look at. And so the writer often walks away. This is normal; writing is hard. Writing holds up a mirror to our demons. It dares us to look at them, dares us further to write about them, and then dares us even further to share them publicly.
A writing practice brings up our limitations. This is a gift, not a problem. The more we know about what we do and why, the more we are able to make authentic decisions. A writing practice shows us our belief systems about ourselves, our family, our world. It shows us where we need to be right and where we feel invisible.
There is no way to avoid practice. Writing begets writing. There is no way to write but to write. There are no tricks, though there are plenty of diversions. Your discipline, your practice and flexibility, make your writing work. However, any structure someone provides for your writing, including the one in this book, or any structure you create yourself, is only as useful as your ability to work freely within it and to stay centered and focused. When a structure of any kind (a relationship, job, religion, writing practice, city) becomes a prison, it’s time to move on. Writers often get in the way of their own writing because they think they are supposed to be somewhere other than nestled in the writing. There is nowhere else to be. The structure or concept doesn’t make the writing work. The writing makes the writing work.
Writing will not unlock the secret code to fame and fortune. Writing will not bring about world peace. But what writing will do is bring forth your sorrows and joys, your secrets and your lies. It will bring these out, and, once in daylight, they will vanish and you will find you have space in your body, in your mind, and in your heart. And as one writer opens to herself, she brings that changed being into the world and into her contact with others. She has no attachment to whether others change or not, no attachment to whether they write or not; she simply is, and in that “is-ness” she is the stand-alone noun, nothing in the way of all that beauty.
Students of all disciplines have long been resistant to practice. Maybe you are noticing new reasons to avoid practice. Perhaps it’s spring and you want to be dancing in fields of flowers. Perhaps it’s simple human nature to avoid work. Or perhaps you are not ready to commit to writing. Writing, after all, is serious business. You will likely notice your own resistances surfacing. Stand steady. Shake them loose. Don’t be the obstacle on your own path.
CHAPTER 7
Attachment and Aversion
Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.
—Simone Weil
You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation . . . and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else.
—Hermann Hesse
Writers are always finding ways to get in the way of their writing. We grab onto the desire to be published, we become attached to a plot that isn’t working, or we become so attached to an image that we squeeze all the life out of it. We avoid doing the very thing we know we need to do—show up, stay put, and write. I know it isn’t as easy as “just do it.” I know that in order to stay in the chair, you need to face parts of yourself you may have kept hidden for decades. I know it takes courage to tell the truth to yourself and about yourself. Attachment and aversion are the two sisters of suffering. If you’re human, you’re intimately involved with both of them. They are shadows of each other, and they love to dance on the writer’s path.
When I was young, I had a baby blanket that I loved. I slept with it. Carried it around the house. I had planned to take it to school when I started kindergarten, and I remember telling Mom I was going to have it at my wedding. What I loved most about the blanket was its smell. I don’t remember that it smelled dirty; it just smelled like me, which likely was dirty if I’d never had the blanket out of my sight for four years.
One day Mom told me she was going to wash the blanket, and she gave me a new blanket to hold. The new blanket wasn’t the same as the old blanket. It was thicker, a different shade of white, and it didn’t have the fraying ribbon edge that I loved to rub between my fingers. It turned out Mom hadn’t planned to wash my blanket. She threw it away and hoped I wouldn’t notice. To be fair, Mom and I hadn’t known each other long enough for her to know that I noticed everything, but more importantly, she couldn’t have known yet that once I loved something, I loved it forever. One blanket can’t be replaced with another blanket.
I don’t remember how I found out, but I know she ended up getting my blanket back out of the trash. I’m sure there was loud screaming and much stomping of feet. I’m sure she thought it was time I got rid of the baby blanket. I’m sure she was right. But I’m sure of this too: I’ve still got that blanket in my nightstand.
A baby blanket might be a small thing in the course of a life, but it is a symbol of the larger issues of attachment and aversion. It may be easier to see a toddler’s attachment to a baby blanket than an adult’s attachment to an unhealthy behavior pattern, but it’s the same underlying principle. If a child is attached to her baby blanket, then ask yourself, what is that child avoiding by holding on? Moving into the next phase of life? Putting away childhood things? Losing something familiar?
The answer is an individual one, but the concept is universal. Being attached to something is connected to having an aversion to something else. Perhaps I want to avoid intimacy, so I am attached to a relationship that only partially meets my needs. In the world of writing, perhaps I’m attached to the idea of publication because I’m avoiding a fear of anonymity, a fear of not mattering in the world. Perhaps I’m attached to a particular story arc (which all ten of my closest writer friends have told me doesn’t work) because I’m avoiding the issues I’d have to look at if I altered the plot line.
Reverse the idea. What if I avoid sending my work out in the world because it might (will) get rejected? Perhaps in that avoidance, I’m also attached to a faulty idea of what it means to be a writer. Perhaps I avoid sending manuscripts out i
nto the world because they might be accepted. Then, instead of just having a small circle of readers to which I’m attached, more people would read my work, opening me up to criticism. Easier not to send the manuscript out. See how the two ideas are intertwined?
It can be challenging to identify these obstacles in our own writing. Attachments and aversions arise from past experiences. Most frequently, attachments are connected to past experiences of pleasure and aversions are connected to past experiences of pain. But we can take this deeper. Many of us become attached to unhealthy story lines or patterns in our lives because we believe things will always unfold as they did once upon a time. For example, you may refrain from sending a story to an online publication because the editor has rejected your work three times. You may assume that it isn’t worth submitting anything because you “know” what the outcome will be.
Over a lifetime, we have catalogued and labeled many future experiences as pleasurable or painful based on what happened or didn’t happen in the past. This creates both a closed present life and a life governed by things that already have occurred, not by things that are occurring right now. Attachments and aversions keep us from seeing clearly what is before us to write.
After returning from a trip to North Carolina last year, I wrote a young adult novel feverishly. I hit a wall with it and went to see my teacher. “I’m afraid of getting stuck in these emotions again!” I said. “I have worked so hard to let them go.” I feared being unable to move in and out of old feelings as the writing required. I both had an aversion to accessing those emotional areas of my life and felt attached to a past experience that told me I tend to get stuck. Even though the past experience was not pleasurable, the attachment was to the belief that the story line would always play out the same way. Remember, Writing Warriors: The writing does not block us. We are always the ones in its way.
Attachment and aversion in writing are perhaps best observed when you have the gift of finding yourself blocked. When this occurs, rather than stomp away mad, be grateful for the opportunity the block is giving you to learn more about how you get in your own way. Ask yourself: What am I avoiding in this writing? What issues are these characters or this essay or poem working with? Where can I see connections to my own experiences of pleasure or pain? What scares me in this scene? What do I want to have happen? What personal attachment might this writing be connected to? Where there is attachment, there is most likely aversion, and vice versa. As you use the Writing Warrior’s sword to cut away these illusions, your path “miraculously” becomes clear. It’s not a miracle, though. It is you showing up and doing the work.
In 1977, a year after my dad’s heart attack, on summer nights when he felt up to it, he joined the other neighborhood men on their green-and-white plastic Kmart lawn chairs and talked about whatever Southern men in their mid-thirties talked about. My sister and I played kickball with our neighbors, and then tag, running in and out of their house, which was a split-level and so much cooler than our small, single-story ranch house.
We loved the endless stretch of a summer evening and hearing the men’s voices, comforting as a summer quilt. Several of the men had a beer in their hands—Schlitz or Pabst—the poor Southern man’s nectar and truth serum. Jimmy Carter was president. Nobody liked him but my father, even though he was one of us, a soft-spoken Southern gentleman. It seemed to me that these men sitting together and talking in a North Carolina dusk could fix anything. At the very least, they could fix your car or your riding lawnmower, if not your father’s heart.
I loved this time of day because the fireflies were blinking. Slow bugs, they were easy to catch in the palm of my hand. They had a patch of red on their backs, and their light was an ember. They were even easier to catch in a Mason jar. Once, I sealed them in and poked holes in the lid for air, believing that the only thing the bugs needed to survive was oxygen. Of course, in the morning they were dead, even though I’d poked a dozen air holes in the jar lid. I cried because I hadn’t meant to kill the bugs; I only wanted to save their light.
I became a writer in part because of my extreme attachment to things. I attempt to capture, preserve, and freeze time. Like catching a firefly, though, it is in the capturing that the death begins. The tendency of many writers, myself included, is to want to freeze the moment, but that’s really the antithesis of what needs to happen for a reader to become engaged with a story or idea. The moment must move. You must relax your grip on it so it can expand. The writer’s paradox is to hold the moment closely enough with language to give the reader a container to explore it, but not so tightly that the reader suffocates, along with the moment.
A book is not a series of still images; it’s a motion picture, an exploration of the constant change of life. The breath and the movement of the breath through your body allows movement to occur on the page. You must not affix too tightly to an image or idea that you want to communicate. You must trust the writing, and you must trust yourself; listen deeply and distinguish between what your ego is writing and what your authentic self is writing. Both attachment and aversion keep us out of direct experience. The farther we are from direct experience, the farther our writing (which by the nature of the craft is a step removed from the experience) will be from the energy of the moment.
A scene’s movement engages the reader, not its stagnation. A static scene grants only passive participation. A reader will forget something she passively experiences. He won’t so quickly forget a moment he was involved in. Accept the transience of form—of body, of breath. Breath is our transportation from one moment to the next. Your stories float in on the element of air. Dance with them. Feel how light they are when you aren’t the one holding them down.
THE WRITING WARRIOR PRACTICE
No horse gets anywhere until he is harnessed. No stream or gas drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick
Part 2, Building Your Foundation, introduced you to the fundamental concepts that will root you on your Writing Warrior path. As you learn to release your desire for results, you’ll find freedom and clarity in your writing. Letting go of expectations teaches detachment and allows you to be in your direct experience rather than in your past or future concept of that experience. Deepening your understanding of the difference between writing theory and practice will help you move from an intellectual acknowledgment of ideas to a visceral understanding of experience and its effects on you. As you become more present in your writing practice, your work will naturally deepen. You don’t need to force it. Being able to recognize your attachments and aversions will help you avoid remaining stuck in patterns and beliefs about your writing that are no longer serving you.
Remember to return to your three-part breathing practice, your shaking practice, and your writing practice. They are your safety practices, your companions, your guardians. They will hold you when you thrash about in the wind. They will give you the freedom to fly because with them, you are firmly grounded.
INTERNAL CONVERSATIONS
You can use these internal conversation exercises for personal work. The deeper your relationship with yourself, the deeper your writing becomes. Feel free to use poetry or prose to respond.
Consider keeping a journal just for your reflections and awarenesses around your writing practice. How frequently have you shown up to practice? Don’t judge yourself. Just observe.
What have you observed throughout your daily life now that you’ve incorporated the breathing, shaking, and writing practices?
The shaking practice helps keep impurities (undigested food, disease, and emotional issues) from building up in your blood, tissue, and bones. You may experience some sneezing, coughing, itching, or changes in your elimination schedule. Your body is getting rid of what it doesn’t need anymore. What have you noticed?
Take inventory of your space, both internal and ext
ernal. Look with a discerning, nonjudgmental eye at your inventories. What can you let go of today?
Look honestly at your writing process. Pay careful attention to your writing time, your writing place, even your thoughts and attitudes toward writing. What are your unique resistances to writing? What pulls you to write? Nobody is standing over your shoulder to make sure you write this week. The more you understand your process, the softer your relationship with writing will become.
What are you worried about that you haven’t yet experienced? How far into the future are you thinking? No judgment. Just notice.
We truly are a results-oriented culture. What would you do/could you do if the end result didn’t matter? Write a letter to yourself. Are there ways you can incorporate these ideas into your life now?
WRITE NOW
The following exercises can be applied to works in progress or used as prewriting. Feel free to use poetry or prose to respond.
Place your character in a situation in which he or she is incapable of moving, either physically or psychologically. What happens?
Describe a setting in one of your stories or poems by relating what is not there.
Allow your character to take an inventory of the things in his or her bedroom. What is the character most attached to? Write a scene in which the character must let the item go.
What is your character worrying about? What keeps him or her up at night? What would happen if that thing occurred? Write the scene in which it does.
PART THREE
Dissolving Your Illusions
CHAPTER 8
The Writer’s Wheel of Suffering
Because you’re not what I would have you be, I blind myself to who, in truth, you are.
—Madeleine L’Engle
We’re sitting together on metal folding chairs in a lopsided circle. Some of us are smoking cigarettes. Some of us are on our fourth Styrofoam cup of coffee. Some of us have nervous twitches, or the shakes. We’re in a moldy basement, or an attic, or a meticulously furnished living room in a swanky suburb. No one wants to begin. We look at each other, or deliberately away from each other. We hold our Styrofoam cups to our lips longer than it takes to swallow a sip of coffee. Finally, a pale man, slightly bowlegged, with dyed black hair and black-framed glasses, speaks.
The Writing Warrior Page 4
