Writing is both an art and a craft, and even a lifetime’s effort does not guarantee mastery. But you have more than enough time to form an intimate relationship with writing. You just have to decide how much work you will put into it. Only you. Don’t sit on a mountaintop waiting for the muse to strike. The muse shows up when you show up, not the other way around.
Writing a good solid scene is a miraculous thing. Getting one sentence to sing, or one character to move another’s heart, well, yeah, that’s a lot. If you are in the direct experience—I am writing my novel. I am writing Cassandra’s scene. She’s about to slip on the banana peel—stay there. Stay in the story. Stay in the character. Don’t jump forward into what you think you ought to be writing (it’s only a speculation anyway, not where you are now).
If you find you’re falling into this second camp of self-judgment, contrasting your work with what you believe it should be at this stage, then try thinking about why you have such unrealistic expectations for yourself. Pay attention to me here; I’m not telling you not to write well. I’m not telling you that you can’t write well, or shouldn’t write well. I’m just telling you to place some perspective on the whole puzzle. Release your desire for results, and for some reason (truly unbeknownst to me), you’ll find yourself writing a lot. Writing better. Pushing yourself. It’s the flow within the present moment that gives your writing what it needs to sustain itself. When you leave your body and let your mind go wandering in the shoulda/coulda/woulda/if only land, your writing will freeze up. It might even run away for a while. This writing thing is challenging enough without you getting in your own way.
Be OK with where you are, with how your work is developing, while at the same time continuing to ask yourself the hard questions. Don’t be OK with good enough. Don’t be OK with an easy word choice, a simple plot construction. See what happens when you push yourself, when you trust yourself to try something new. When you release your attachment to the result, you’ll be freer within yourself to experiment. It’s these experiments that show you your authentic voice, not the canned responses you’ve been trained to give in school or at work. When you follow the path of your own intuition—what if I wrote this whole chapter in sentences that start with A—you’ll find your own voice. You may decide it just doesn’t work to start every sentence with A, but you’ll have learned something. Perhaps most important, you’ll have discovered that it’s OK to try something new. It’s OK for that attempt not to work. And it’s OK to try something different, or even the same thing again later on (because we all know it never turns out exactly the same). Let there be a lightness and a sense of play in your writing practice. You’ll notice an easing in your shoulders, a deepening of your breath, and a significant shift in your relationship with your work.
The way to transform judgment into a powerful tool is through observation. We need to continually observe our own writing. The key to effective observation is specificity. For example: my story needs a driving question. That’s a statement. It provides information that will help my writing. Notice how different that is from saying: my story is boring. Specificity not only will help you see your work more clearly, it will remove the commentary that can be so devastating to a writer.
Think about adverbs. She cried. That’s a statement. She cried loudly. The adverb attaches a judgment to the sound, and that judgment requires qualification. Louder than what? Louder than all the noise in Grand Central station? Louder than the wind blowing through an empty lot? Louder than the person next to her? Judgments do the same thing as adverbs. They attempt to control a reaction and a response. When you control yourself this way, you stay stuck.
Lately we’ve become accustomed to judging many things in our lives. We can rate blog posts. Books. Music. Items of clothing we buy. YouTube videos. There’s an opportunity for us to judge with a five-star system just about everything we consume. Do someone’s comments help you better listen to a piece of music? Do they help you see something in a new light? Every once in a while, a comment does make a difference, and it’s the comment that’s specific. The comment that states exactly what worked and what didn’t and why. This provides concrete information we can use to make our own choices. We’re not responding to “that sucked” or “that’s the most amazing thing ever.” We’re responding to specificity. Specificity allows us to grow and expand our own sphere.
Practice a discerning eye to determine the difference between a fact and a judgment. A statement such as My protagonist is missing a desire is a fact. There’s nothing good or bad about it. It’s an observation. However, a statement such as My story says nothing of value is a judgment. Judgments direct our thinking, taking away the power of direct experience. If you tell yourself your story says nothing of value, that is the lens through which you view your story as you try to revise it. That lens will prevent you from seeing what the story does say (and everything says something). Please don’t freeze up before you even start moving. When you catch yourself judging yourself or others, just notice. Find the specificity underneath the judgment. Does it hold water? How can you rephrase it? Don’t beat yourself up. We’re all human.
Under this big umbrella of self-observation without judgment, let’s look at the role of a teacher or mentor in your development. We have all had them. In order to continue practicing beginner’s mind, it’s healthy to keep finding mentors and teachers in a wide variety of places, not just in your writing life. New people provide new perspectives. Take care, though, to avoid attaching too much importance to one teacher or one set of guidelines. For example, I see many students extremely attached to whatever the latest writer’s magazine article says about character construction. They follow the steps with zeal. They cannot be swayed, it seems, to consider other ways of creating a character. Remember, no one person has the universal answer to anything. No scholar in any field is the definitive authority.
Be careful of transferring your dreams onto the shoulders of a teacher (and I say this both as a student and a teacher). When you attend a class, don’t expect to simply open your brain and get the information you need downloaded. Don’t be passive. Be an active participant in your learning and be open to all that’s around you. Trust yourself to take what’s of value and let the rest go.
Most teachers are genuine, compassionate, and interested in helping their students. This doesn’t mean they’re infallible, and it doesn’t mean they’re the right fit for you at all levels of your career. When something in a class isn’t valuable to you, it may be the exact thing the student next to you needed to hear. That’s one of the most confounding things about teaching; you’ll never succeed every time with every student because no two students are the same. The best we can do is put forth authentic effort.
Don’t look for the teacher who will fix everything for you, the teacher who will open the doors to publishing or to your heart. That projection is unhealthy for both you and the instructor. It will result in expectations that cannot be met, which will result in suffering, which will result in you not garnering any value from the instructor. No one else is responsible for you. No one else is going to write your book. No one is going to stand over you, saying, “Read, read, read! Write, write, write!” You’ve got to be your own first, best teacher. Engage the assistance of others, those whose styles you gel with and those who make you squirm. There is always an opportunity to learn, provided you don’t close the door to your own growth. Remember: the teacher only makes the space. You must chart your own course.
CHAPTER 19
Absolute Vulnerability
Find out what you’re afraid of and go live there.
—Chuck Palahniuk
If you ever need to quickly clear a room of people, write the words “absolute vulnerability” on the board, smile at them, and say, “This is our objective for the entire semester.” I did this recently in a memoir class I was teaching, and I truthfully didn’t realize the powerful effects of that simple phrase on a group of writers. Some had a deer-in-the-headlight
s look. Others were chomping at the bit to “go there.” Still others were calculating whether or not they could still get their money back for the course. True to their warrior nature, they stuck it out for sixteen weeks and emerged, changed, on the other side.
People often think writing is only about grammar and craft components and publishing. It’s about how to make sentences clear and how to arrange events in a plot to make a story compelling. It’s about a dramatic arc and an explosion of a scene from dry summary to powerful dramatization. But it most definitely is not about absolute vulnerability (whatever that means).
Discussions of craft components, while important, are the intellectual aspect of the writing process, not the body-based one. Taking commas in or out is simply rearranging ships on the ocean of the story. What my writing students want to know, and what I want to know as well, is how to create the ocean. A monkey can eventually arrange the ships in an order that will produce a desired result. But creating the ocean, well, that’s another matter entirely.
So the writer’s job is to first find the ocean. And once you do find it, you must release the intellectual exercises and see what happens when you leap, naked, into the cold water. The more you know about what’s going on in the ocean, the better your can position your writing and your life. The trouble is, most of us would rather stay as far away as possible from the churning waters. We’d rather etch our letters on the safety and predictability of dry land, thank you very much.
To write well, you have to bear unflinching witness to yourself as a character in your own story, regardless of whether you are writing fiction or memoir or poetry. You have to recognize that you are bringing up things from your murky depths even if you don’t know what they are. You don’t have to know everything. You have to trust the work and trust that you can bear witness to whatever emerges. To attempt to make art out of the slippery material of a life means you dive off the boat into the waters and trust that your absolute vulnerability brings out the vulnerability of everyone you’re going to meet down there. Your vulnerability, your willingness to be naked, connects others with your work.
This is what authentic writing does: It pulls you from your comfortable fuzzy chair (or podium) of understanding the elements of narrative and how stories work, and it brings you face to face with the one thing you’ve buried under your avalanche of degrees and fictions. It traps you in, holds your eyelids open à la Clockwork Orange and says, “OK, baby. Tell me what you see.” At first, you hem and haw and theorize and analyze and attempt to concretize, but after a while, your eyeballs ache from staring and you just surrender because at that point you have no other choice. That thing is there. In front of you. You can’t pretend you don’t see it. You can’t pretend it doesn’t see you. There’s nothing left in the world now but you and that thing that you’ve been consciously not seeing all of your life.
“I am the story,” it says. And you don’t believe it because you can’t see the narrative arc, and you wonder about the drama, and you realize you have not had the most dramatic of lives, and so you try to swim back to the surface, but your eyelids are still pried apart and you are strapped to the chair anyway, and really, now, you’re a little curious. That’s a quality all writers have. Without it, we spout the same stuff from book to book. With it, we reinvent, revise, and restructure all the time.
“All right,” you say. “Tell me the story.” And you listen, and you take notes, and you are grateful, in spite of your burning eyeballs and exhausted writing arm; you are grateful because nothing less than magic has occurred.
Recently, I had to surrender and listen to the story that was emerging. The image that occurred for me was a yellow swing. When it came to me the first time, I saw no inherent story there. Just a sweet memory of a little girl who used to think she could fly. But it kept coming back. The cheap plastic of the swing. Its Big Bird yellow color. The sheets on the clothesline nearby. The neighbor’s bulldog, Tony. The clouds with their incessant swirling, their movement enough joy for anyone in a lifetime. I began to notice more: the neon yellow and green colors in the ropes that held the swing, wrapped four times and nailed to a scrap piece of lumber; the tiny holes in the seat, delightful because I could feel the air from my flight on the backs of my legs; my mother singing Zip-a-dee-doo-dah while she put the wooden clothespins on the sheets.
And then I saw, or didn’t see, the story. The swing was empty. It was moving, sure, higher and higher, but no one was on it. No mousy-haired girl with too-green eyes. No laughing girl who found even the slickness of her tongue on her own teeth astonishing. No singing girl, who hadn’t yet been told she couldn’t sing. And that was it. Where did she go? Why did she go? Can she come back? These were the narrative questions.
And the answer was a story.
We’ve talked about direct experience and cultivating discipline to stay in the chair when faced with our inner selves. The next step involves giving ourselves permission to be vulnerable on the page. Think for a minute about the phrase “absolute vulnerability.” What comes up for you? Often, one of the things that comes up for people is a primal fear for survival. After all, we can’t survive in the big, bad scary world out there if we are absolutely vulnerable, right? We can’t protect ourselves, our property, our families. Can we? Can we protect ourselves if we dare to splay ourselves open on the page? What happens if we dredge up everything on paper? Who will be left to keep us safe? We’ll go into more in-depth work at the end of this section, but I think in order for you to get the most out of what you’re reading now, it would be helpful to spend a few minutes journaling about absolute vulnerability. Go ahead and write. I’ll wait.
OK. What did you find out?
Let’s keep going. Think of an image or two of absolute vulnerability. Go beyond the cliché of a newborn infant or other cute baby animal. Don’t be lazy here. The images and ideas you come up with can help stabilize you throughout your writing journey. The images will provide something concrete for you to hold on to as you move deeper into absolute vulnerability. They can anchor you. After you have a few images in mind, question yourself even further. What about these images evokes absolute vulnerability for you? And, upon further contemplation, would you say your assessments are accurate or just familiar? Let’s pause here—accurate or familiar? Our conditioning leads to the way we experience situations and emotions. How many times will you refuse to eat a certain food or wear a certain type of clothing because you “know” what it will be like? How many relationships have you turned away from? How many job opportunities? How many story ideas? Begin to notice how the way you assume things will unfold affects the choices that you make. How often do you do that when you’re writing? Do you assume too much knowledge about a story’s arc? So much so that you can’t allow your characters to move according to their own rhythms? (Notice I said their own rhythms, not yours.) Finally, how do these images of absolute vulnerability relate to your own feelings of absolute vulnerability?
Let’s break down absolute vulnerability into some manageable chunks. What’s the first thing you notice about that phrase? For me, it’s the word “absolute.” Suddenly, with that single qualifier, there’s no room to hide; that word by itself is often pretty frightening for people. The word “absolute” is also interesting because it puts you face to face with yourself and your own capacity for truth-telling and for telling yourself a line of crap that poses as truth. There’s no Absolute Vulnerability Police Force out there watching you. “No, she’s not there yet. Just a little more! A little more!” There’s also no end to how deep that word can go. What might be absolute today may travel a little deeper in six months. Both are authentic.
Absolute vulnerability means opening yourself up. Perhaps a better way of phrasing it is letting things go. You let your masks go. Your suits of armor. Your persona of who you think you ought to be, or who you think others believe you to be. You trust the impermanence of each moment enough to realize that any barrier between you and your direct experience will only
mute your quality of life. You trust that you are stable and grounded enough that your center will not be swayed by whatever events pass through your sphere. You are able to be open because you know that you are not your body, not your thoughts, not your relationships. You trust in your ability to make decisions and to respond to situations with clarity and compassion.
Novelist Erica Jong says, “No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers, alas, have to be fools in public, while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks.” Writers have to put it all out and let it flap in the breeze, not knowing whether anyone will see their work, like it, hate it, try to destroy it, or give it a prize. A Writing Warrior stands solidly in absolute vulnerability, unattached to any outcome. You give the reader your heart, with no conditions. Writing with no conditions is a gift. Writing with conditions is an obligation, and an ultimate source of suffering. Don’t write to heal the world. Don’t write to get back at someone, or to make up with someone. Use your personal journal for any type of writing you need to do to unburden your heart, but when it comes to creating art, write an honest, authentic story with no agenda except the terms the story dictates. Notice how clean it feels to be in this level of balance with your work.
Absolute vulnerability involves an intimacy with the self. The what? Yeah, I know. It just gets freakier. How do we cultivate an intimacy with the self? We return to direct experience. Zen master Dogen tells us, “Enlightenment is just intimacy with all things.” Love that word “just” in there! He makes it sound so simple. As you move deeper into a place of self-observation without judgment, you will find this intimacy bubbling to the surface. You will notice your gaze naturally softening, both inwardly and outwardly, as the blanket of compassion wraps itself around you.
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