The Writing Warrior

by Laraine Herring

  As soon as you begin identifying with a certain element of your writing, you start losing your capacity to see it clearly. It’s a common trap for us. When we say, “I am good at characterization,” we are automatically excluding something else.

  This notion of identification can also seep into other aspects of our writing, such as our language choices. As a writer, it’s important to remember that a word is a concept—it is fluid, not fixed. Even so, we often attach fixed definitions to concepts in our writing. We bring to the table all of our experiences of what “teacher” means. The scary fourth grade teacher with red hair in an impossible beehive and orange lipstick smudged across her front teeth. The bushy-mustached professor who embodied Chaucer so much you were able to at least tolerate the text. The teachers whose names you no longer remember. See how the word “teacher” is no longer an empty slate? Words and concepts have associations with readers. Each word (writer, teacher, fill in the blank) has its own baggage. This is the nature of our art form, so rather than work against it, work with it consciously. To do this, remember the cornerstone of specificity. Don’t assume we see what you see. Don’t assume we associate the same things (negative or positive) with a word or place that you do. Someone, somewhere, loves cauliflower. I do not. To assume I have cornered the worldview on cauliflower is to alienate my reader and do a disservice to my characters and to cauliflower.

  By being aware that every word has its own associations (and that they aren’t just your associations; each person has his or her own associations with words), you enter into a clarified space with language, your tool. From this place of clarity, not clutter, you can create your stories and characters.

  Each day you come to your writing practice, approach it cleanly. No baggage. No expectations. No anticipations.

  Don’t write today from your experience of writing yesterday.

  Take that in.

  Don’t write today from your experience of writing yesterday.

  The moment you come to the blank page with the high of yesterday’s writing, or the drudgery of yesterday’s writing, you’re clouding the present moment with needless clutter. Just because you hit one out of the park yesterday doesn’t mean you will today. Just because you didn’t, doesn’t mean you won’t. Release any attachments you have to those notions, and the time you spend writing—whether it’s fifteen minutes or five hours—will be much more rewarding for you.

  Don’t get trapped by identification with a job, a style of writing, a way of storytelling. Be open. You don’t know everything. You don’t even know much—and that’s the perfect place to write from. Once we think we “know” something, we often close the door on future information. Better to not know and be open than to know everything and be closed.

  CHAPTER 13

  Illusion of Control

  This condition I call neither arising nor passing away, neither dying nor being born. It is without form and without change. It is the eternal, which never originates and never passes away. To find it is the end of sorrow.

  —Udana Sutta

  It begins when you first try to write. You take your No. 2 soft lead pencil and make fresh marks on the newsprint theme paper. A looping p can turn into an r, which can become a q. If you never lift the lead from the paper, you can join them all together in a song of harmony and grace, but then you show the world what you have made and they tell you it is gibberish. The beautiful loops and lines you dragged from your heart are worthless.

  So you learn, there is a way. There is a way to do things and a way not to do things. Your heart is sad, but you cover it up because when you make the loops and lines their way they smile at you and bring you juice. They tell you that you are smart and show your paper to other people. The juice is cold, sweet, and sticky.

  It no longer matters that you cannot understand what you wrote because your letters are mirrors of theirs. You have allowed them to take control of your letters. It happens without your noticing. You learn subconsciously that others can control your writing, so, logically, you believe you can as well. Indeed, you should. You must. After all, it’s how it’s done, isn’t it?

  I worry a lot about rules. I want to stand in the right line, drive in the right lane, and say the right things. I was raised to believe that if you did the right things you’d be rewarded. I could see the benefit of not driving in the lane facing oncoming traffic. I could see it would be more efficient if only people with fewer than fifteen items went through the express checkout line. I do understand we have to communally agree on what a g is—what it looks like, what sounds it can make, what words it’s a part of—in order to communicate. But I learned odd rules about writing in school, such as:

  Never begin a sentence with a conjunction.

  Never end a sentence with a preposition.

  Each new paragraph should begin with a transitional word.

  A paragraph contains five to seven sentences and always begins with a topic sentence.

  An essay’s final paragraph must sum up all that has come before it.

  These are odd things that have little to do with writing and much to do with constructing. Much to do with trying to control what’s already written on the page. Much to do with teaching the student that writing is something that can be mastered, dominated, put in its proper box for its proper praise. Much to do with the killing of the writing spirit.

  It’s a hot day in Charlotte. I’m in the seventh grade. Our text is Warriner’s English Grammar. My English teacher, Mrs. Peeler, is a formidable woman who also happens to attend our church. She is the clichéd English teacher—gray hair pulled back into a bun, glasses on a silver chain around her neck, red lipstick, which occasionally stained the surface of her teeth, and nude pantyhose and high heels, no matter how hot the day. She made us memorize poems and then come to the front of the class and recite them. I still remember mine. William Wordsworth’s “Daffodils.”

  She taught us to diagram sentences (a miraculous feat that has somehow fallen out of favor), and with that, she showed me that every word in a sentence has a purpose. You could see in your diagram if you had too many modifiers for your noun or verb. You could see if the subject of the sentence had no object. You could revise it and make a brand-new structure, a brand-new picture. Most of the kids loathed diagramming, but I thought it provided a door into language I’d never walked through before. (Oops, there I go, ending a sentence with a preposition; oops, “before” is used as an adverb there. How does one keep it straight?) In order to diagram a sentence well, you had to communicate with the words themselves. You had to ask the adjective, “What are you modifying?” And the adjective would answer. You had to ask the prepositional phrase which verb it connected with. You had to listen to the words’ answers. You couldn’t just randomly assign words to each other. They simply wouldn’t fit.

  Contrary to what many students thought, I didn’t think diagramming sentences force-fed rules down our throats. I thought diagramming sentences taught us to listen to the beauty of an individual sentence and, even deeper than that, taught us to focus on the importance of each word choice and ask ourselves, Does that word belong there? Is another word a better choice? If we take out the word, does the sentence change in meaning or aesthetics? We couldn’t make those choices with our intellects. The choices came from our connections to the desires of the sentence itself.

  How do we know what a sentence desires? We have to ask it. How does a sentence know what it desires? It asks the paragraph. And the paragraph? Well, yes, it asks the chapter. And the chapter must ask the work as a whole what it desires.

  Huh? How the heck do you do that?

  Remember when they told you how to write a paragraph? And they gave you rules such as don’t start a sentence with “and.” And they told you writing comes from somewhere out there, involving sources and citations and documentation. And they told you that there were nine patterns of development for your work, and that the thesis statement is the last sentence in the opening paragraph. They
told you these things not because they’re wrong or bad. They do, in fact, work, and they can help a student who has no interest in what language can do write a solid composition. But for a student who is a writer—for a student who loves what sentences do—the rules are the stones in the pockets of your jeans. They can both anchor and drown you. Clear out your mind so you stop hearing the rules before you hear the writing. When you don’t know where to go next, look to the sentence you last wrote for clues. What does the verb denote? What image does the noun conjure up?

  It’s hard to know how much of these rules we’ve absorbed. It’s also hard to know how much these rules control our writing, keeping us from exploring ideas and stories, or even from hearing our own voices. When I was seven, I went to visit my pediatrician, Dr. Huff, for my final dose of liquid polio vaccine. The doctor handed me the plastic packet of vaccine and told me to put it in my mouth. I did exactly that. A few minutes later he came back in the office. I still had the liquid in my mouth. He and my mother laughed at me.

  “Why didn’t you swallow it?” he asked.

  I swallowed, but I was bewildered. “You didn’t tell me to swallow it. You told me to put it in my mouth.”

  My literal interpretation of the doctor’s instructions shows you how strongly I wanted to follow directions, how strongly I wanted to do everything right. How much I believed others had control. My ninth grade English teacher took off points if our cursive letters didn’t have all the appropriate tails. If she couldn’t tell our periods from our commas, she marked the whole sentence wrong. The church we belonged to taught me I was born in sin. My Southern culture taught me not to wear white after Labor Day and that a lady should always wear a hat.

  “Why didn’t you swallow it?” What a provocative question. I did swallow a lot of it. I swallowed rules and doctrines and fears and contradictions. But all that swallowing left little room for listening. When you take the time to be still and listen, the first things you’ll hear are the things you swallowed into your belly. You’ll hear the things you’ve absorbed over a lifetime. You’ll hear the scratches of your mother’s fears and your father’s rage. You’ll hear a chorus of uninvited voices in an avalanche of shoulds and shouldn’ts, dos and don’ts. Sit a while longer. What sounds and voices are yours underneath that din? The clanking of other people’s agendas is enough to make many a writer get up and decide this gig isn’t for him. Stay. What’s under your mother’s sadness? What’s under your grandmother’s alcoholism? What’s under the programming of never beginning a sentence with “and”? The ideas you’ve swallowed built a wall. Shake it down. Move into your lungs and breathe; then break the sadness loose so it can float away.

  Stay. Stay longer than you ever thought you could. Sit cross-legged or not. Sit in a chair or on the floor. Sit on your bed or in your car. But sit. Stay. Look at each thing you’ve swallowed and ask yourself: Is it mine? Does it serve me? Then ask yourself what you feel is the next step. Ask your body, not your mind. When we learn to shake off the rules that keep us from our true voice, when we sit long enough to hear where our story should go next, we’re left with the challenge of writing. Here we’re faced with another aspect of control—the ability to control an emotion or experience enough to express it on the page.

  To attempt to write about an experience separates us from the actual experience. To attempt to use language, that two-dimensional abstract medium, to convey an emotion separates us from the emotion. To attempt to analyze an event, a thought, a feeling, pulls us farther and farther from our direct experience. To label a laugh, even with the five letters of the word “laugh,” is to freeze it, mummify it, burden it with all our projections, expectations, and past experiences of laughing. The rigid spine of the letter l, the dip of the au, the tail of the g, boxed in by the chair of the h makes, when you dissect it, a bumpy outline of a sacred experience that bubbles up from the belly and escapes into the world from the cage of your bones.

  Try to hold a laugh, a smile, a surprise sob. Try to hold the “I love you” that slips through your teeth, the “I miss you,” the “thank you.” Just try to wrap your fingers around such phrases. When you unclench your palm, you’ll find nothing. Instead, rather than holding tightly to the rigidity of form, look softly for the laugh’s essence. The pitter-patter of its feet across your tongue. The salt of its juice in your eyes. Any act of writing is an attempt to hold still what is by its nature moving, so that a reader can bring his or her own gentle spark to the words and put the scene in motion, complete with personal past experiences and conceptions about those words, thus making the magic that is a story.

  How then, to write a laugh? If all we have are letters, then how can the expanse of a laugh be contained? If we are called to write, then what are we to do with a two-dimensional medium in a three-dimensional world?

  To attempt to tell a reader what to think, feel, or do—to attempt to control a reader’s response—will destroy the relationship between reader and author. Instead, step away from the podium. Sink into a comfortable chair, cross your legs, and open your ears, then listen inward and outward. Resist the urge to control the outcome, either of the writing or of reactions to it. Dictating the terms of receipt of your work creates a rigid structure that will cause readers to rebel.

  Think about how you would feel in a prison cell. What would you be willing to listen to in a cage? Make a soft, cozy space instead. Give readers room. Accept that you cannot capture with 100 percent authenticity and accuracy the way your uncle laughed at knock-knock jokes. Move underneath the laugh and pay homage to its essence. Etch a specific detail into your paper. A specific sound. Try a comparison. If it’s too much, pull back. Don’t pile metaphor upon simile upon analogy. Ground us in the scene. Let the laugh dance through the action, its footsteps adding the soundtrack. Do this with a feather, not with a hammer. Do this with the precise verb, the exact color’s hue. Do this without any expectation that readers will hear your uncle’s exact laugh. Trust that the lightness and specificity of your language allowed the reader to be grounded—while she, with her inner ear, heard the laugh of her own uncle, and in that sacred place embraced you, open heart to open heart.

  CHAPTER 14

  Illusion of Distractions

  It is crucial to know when it is appropriate to withdraw our attention from things that disturb our mind. However, if the only way we know how to deal with certain objects is to avoid them, there will be a severe limit as to how far our spiritual practice can take us.

  —Lama Thubten Yeshe, Introduction to Tantra

  My agent frequently tells me that no one is as good at finding distractions as writers. She’s correct. In graduate school, one of my seminar instructors, Jo Ann Beard, talked about the dangers of the poppy field. You know the place, I’m sure. The pretty colored poppy field from The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy and her gang are almost to Oz—they can see the glittering Emerald City—and they decide they’ll rest a while in the beautiful red poppy field. Before they know it, they’ve lost hours and hours of time.

  My husband uses the term “cheese crumbs,” from the book Bonk. The book compares the behavior of male and female rats during sexual intercourse. The male, apparently, is single-directionally focused. The female rat, not so much. She’s easily distracted by cheese crumbs. So my husband and I will be walking down the street, and I’ll spot something shiny or flowy in a store window and stop midtracks to go inside. “Cheese crumbs,” he’ll say.

  But aren’t they yummy and wonderfully sparkly?

  Shunryu Suzuki tells us that the most important thing we can do in this life is to remain in our chair with a quiet mind. Yet our mind is programmed to seek out the next thing—the biggest, brightest, shiniest thing. The newest diet fad. The newest truck. The newest home with the biggest pool. The desire gets us moving, but it gets us moving away from, rather than toward, what we thought we wanted. It gets us responding to endorphins, which feels great for the moment, and then, not so great. So we go searching for more cheese cr
umbs.

  As writers, we must constantly ignore the cheese crumbs so we can actually get to the work of writing. Of course, we are good at turning our distractions into excuses. During any semester, I hear every excuse imaginable for not writing. I hear there’s too much work in other classes. Too many hours at the day job. No inspiration. Too much inspiration. A computer crashed (um, pen and paper, anyone?). Too much time spent on the couch watching television or sitting at the computer.

  Don’t lose sight of the choices you make for managing your time. You don’t have to check your Facebook page four times a day. You don’t have to tweet or read a hundred industry blogs. You don’t have to watch ten hours of Battlestar Galactica in a row. So pay attention. What are you doing? Don’t berate yourself, just notice. How are you choosing to spend your time? Interestingly, it can also be easy to turn your writing into an addiction or a distraction.

  Perhaps you can already see how these concepts are rooted in attachment and aversion. When you are attached to a distraction in your writing (which, of course, is an aversion to doing the writing), you stop the flow of the moment. You get stuck. If you’re becoming obsessed over your writing practice and finding yourself slowly moving away from contact with friends and family, take notice. Pull back a little. Breathe. The middle path will give you more space to stretch. If you’re too far left or too far right, you’ll soon be backed into a corner. When you keep moving, you don’t get stuck. If you’re pulled and pushed by all the cheese crumbs (and this world is full of cheese crumbs!), you’ll find the whole world overwhelming and exhausting.

  Part of the illusion of the distraction lies not in the distraction itself, but in the promise of what the distraction will bring. The illusion also lies in the belief that distractions are inevitable. That there’s no way not to succumb to twelve hours a day of television. There is. Notice the distractions most prevalent in your life. Stand up to them. Challenge them. You are the only one who can make yourself write. Television, overtime at work, no separate home office—these things are not keeping you from writing. They are simply elements of a life. Don’t give them weight they don’t deserve to carry.