The Writing Warrior

by Laraine Herring

  Where do you get in your own way with your self-judgment? What do you think you should have/would have/could have done already? How do those beliefs feel? Write a scene in which you let at least one of them go.

  Free write beginning with the phrase: Absolute vulnerability means . . . Find an image that conveys absolute vulnerability to you. How do you relate to that image?

  In your journal, explore the phrase “soften your shell.” Describe your shell. Be specific. What is its texture? Width? Strength? Location on your body? When did the shell begin forming? How does it benefit you? What is it keeping you from doing? (Remember: self-observation without judgment.)

  In your journal, begin with this phrase: “Perhaps you never did _____, but I remember it just the same.” What do you remember? What do you know? Are you sure?

  Accept that revision is a natural part of the writing process, not something you have to do because you didn’t write it right the first time. What is your initial reaction to the idea of revision? Love it? Hate it? Feel too overwhelmed by it?

  Set aside thirty minutes to write. You can write anything—a journal entry, a novel, a poem, a blog—it doesn’t matter. Your only objective is to write. Keep a separate piece of paper where you can make tick marks. Set your timer for thirty minutes and then go. Notice each time that you’ve gotten off track (and this takes many forms—switching from your Word doc to a website to shop, checking e-mail, thinking about what you’re going to do for dinner, wondering if the sexy guy from the corner store is going to call you back, thinking about the last time you saw your mother); notice anything that pulls you out of the train of word to word that you’re writing. Each time you notice that you’ve been distracted (and you will likely at first not notice when it begins; you’ll notice it after a few seconds or minutes when you realize you’ve been holding your hands above the keyboard while your mind has been someplace else), make a tick mark on your piece of paper. When the timer dings at thirty minutes, notice how many tick marks you have. Just notice. Don’t judge. The more you practice this, the more tick marks you’re going to have, not because you’re sliding backward toward sleep, but because you’re waking up and observing more quickly when a distraction first occurs. This is requiring your mind to step up its game to keep pace with you. Over time, the number of tick marks will decrease, but they won’t go away all together. Remember: You’re not killing the mind. You’re integrating the mind.

  What were your formative experiences with writing? Diaries? Poetry? A school assignment? Can you identify the moment in your life when writing took on a powerful role? Write that scene.

  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.

  Identify a piece of your writing that needs attention and compassion. Read through it (no judgment, just detached scrutiny). Make a plan for what needs to happen to take the work to the next level. Make sure the plan is specific. For example: More research on seventeenth-century modes of transportation. Deepen John’s motivation. Cut the scenes with Karen and her cat.

  Pick a character you’re having trouble with. Describe the shell your character is carrying. When did it begin forming? What benefit is it providing? What is it preventing your character from doing?

  Write a scene in which your character ignores the logical or rational course of action and follows his or her intuition. What happens? Be specific.

  Fully embody one of the characters you’re struggling with. Inhale and exhale with your character. Where is there tightness in your character’s body? Write it down. Where are there aches and pains? Write them down. Where does your character feel free and flexible? Write it down. Write a scene focusing only on this character’s movement. Your character might be walking through a park or a mall or to the bus stop. Be in your character’s body. Nothing else has to happen except physical movement. How does it feel to be moving as someone else?

  Examine your characters’ relationships with intimacy. Dogen says, “Enlightenment is just intimacy with all things.” How does this idea strike your characters? Who and what is your character intimate with?

  Embody one of your characters as he or she gazes at himself or herself in the mirror. Describe not just what you see on the surface, but what you see underneath the surface. Look for the story underneath the story.

  Your character has a prized object in his or her room. What is it? Describe it. Then view it with soft eyes. How did it come to be in your character’s possession? Where was it before then? What does it want to tell your character?

  PART FIVE

  Deepening Your Writer’s Roots

  CHAPTER 28

  Alchemy

  It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

  —Anaïs Nin

  Ask any writer to explain what it is about his or her writing that makes it unique. You’ll get some stumbling, some searching. Perhaps my voice? My ideas? But a writer knows that those things are only part of the answer. The rest of the answer is a mystery. It’s that mystery that keeps us coming back to the page. What’s going to happen today? Who am I going to meet? What are they going to say? What am I going to learn? How is my life going to be changed by this story? Who is going to show up?

  These questions pull us from the bed to the computer at five in the morning so we can write before going to the office. They tug us away from a staff meeting to jot down notes on a poem. They keep us in that childlike place of curiosity and compassion. Who? What? When? Where? Why? We don’t know, and so we write to find out.

  The magic part of the writing process is different for each writer. All the parts of an art form cannot be quantified in a book or a class. For the most part, we can collectively agree on mechanics. On several ways to build tension. On paying attention to adverb usage. But we can’t collectively agree on where the voices and stories come from. And that, to me, is what makes the whole journey worthwhile.

  I love to talk with other writers about their creative process. Do you hear voices? What do you see? What questions are haunting you? What emotions bang against your ribs at night? What characters have you lived with your whole life? Being able to have conversations with people who don’t run out of the room or call 911 when you ask these questions is an important part of a writer’s life. It’s nice to know we’re not crazy (or at least not dangerously so!). And it’s vital to honor this not-knowing part of writing.

  Voices and places are often the catalysts for my stories. I’ll hear a line or two, or even a sound of someone’s voice. Perhaps I’ll see a house and a landscape. It’s no coincidence that my two strongest writing gifts are dialogue and setting. Pay attention to your own inner wisdom, pay attention to how writing shows up for you. Do you hear a voice or see a scene? Does an idea that needs to be explored present itself? When you’re aware of your inner voice, you’ll hear it more often. When you’re aware of how your stories come to you, you’ll recognize them more quickly.

  Think of alchemy as the art of transformation. Early alchemists tried to change common metals into gold and silver using heat. As writers, we take the common experiences of daily life, bring them into our beings, and transform them into art. Each of us notices and observes the world differently. As our awareness of our observations deepens, our art deepens. As you read this section on the mystery of writing, ask yourself: What is your writer’s alchemy? What is carried on your breath? The answers to those questions will point you in the direction your writing wants to take you. Be still and let it guide you.

  CHAPTER 29

  Hark! Who Goes There?

  The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.

  —Italo Calvino

  In the winter of 2007, I had the privilege of hearing Shantala, a husband and wife duo, perform at my yoga studio. The room was filled, so fill
ed in fact that we steam etched the windows (an odd occurrence for Arizona!). We “aum’d” them in and then sang with them for ninety minutes. Benji, who performs backup vocals and percussion, opened with a dedication of the whole year’s performances to his mother, who had died on Christmas day. “To say it is the hardest thing I have ever gone through is an understatement,” the fifty-year-old man said. “Her spirit will be dancing with us tonight in her flannel shirt and Goodwill hat.”

  We laughed in that way of laughing that hides the sadness. I watched the man next to me brush his hand over his eyes. The woman on the folding chair in front of me kept her eyes closed while tears eked out the edges. I imagined Benji’s mother’s spirit in a flannel shirt dancing with my father in a golf shirt while we all, those of us embodied now, re-remembered how fragile our flesh was. Benji talked of unlikely teachers. He talked of the battles his mother had fought against the government for denying the increased risk of cancer for people living under exposed power lines. He told of her coming to his concerts at eighty years old with her forty (yes, forty) year old boyfriend, tapping her feet and dancing. The greatest way to honor her spirit, he said, was to use his gifts.

  Then, they sang.

  Helen, one of the protagonists in my current novel Unbearable Compassion, circled above them, called, apparently, at the news of the death of Benji’s mother. “My mother died when I was eight,” Helen whispered to me. “That’s why I had to leave Georgia. That’s why I couldn’t take care of Claire. That’s why I killed Ellie.”

  “You didn’t kill Ellie,” I whispered back. “You just didn’t know how to take care of her.”

  “My mother lay in her bed dead for three days before anyone came to find her,” she said. “I curled up with her.” She took a swig of her whiskey. “I curled up with her.” She took out her bridge and snarled at me, gums deep red. “Damn you.”

  I watched her, toothless, drunk, and old, but still eight years old. I watched her watch Benji’s mother hover over her son, fingers of light touching his skin. I watched her melt.

  “Stop poking at me,” Helen said.

  I kept chanting, kept listening. I took off my fleece vest. I took off my socks and held my feet.

  “There’s no Ellie out there, dancing,” whispered Helen.

  I shook my head. No Ellie. She’d been dead almost forty years. Helen hadn’t wanted her.

  It’s a thread of mothers, I thought. Unbearable Compassion is a thread of mothers. How about that.

  I have learned to follow visions, obsessions, and quirky bits of intuition. I am one day obsessed with old Southern juke joints. I feel myself in them, swaying, dancing, sweating. I see the singer, a thin black woman with long fingers in a dress so red it shouts. I feel the music walk up my spine, though the kind of blues she’s singing about I’ve never known. I see the knife carvings in the tables, the red clay mud on the floor. I’ve never been in a juke joint, but one morning I wake up and am surrounded by characters I don’t recognize, but a sound my soul remembers. What is this?

  One day, it is tulips. I order books about them. I take pictures of them. I study their bulbs. Their many colors. I read up on Holland. Why? One day, in my mind, I watch a little boy being buried on his family’s farmland in south Georgia. The father makes the coffin himself the night before. He worked alone in the woodshed while his wife baked and baked and baked. His other son has taken off again for the lake. His other son who has not drowned has returned to the place where the drowning occurred. The place where he did not pay attention. He has removed his shoes before stepping first one foot then the other into the dark lake, but he is not brave enough to follow his brother. Or he is not guilty enough. He’ll spend his lifetime wondering which.

  Images appear and disappear. Voices whisper just on the other side of the wall. The story unfolds in front of you too quickly to capture, so you wait until it shows itself again. I don’t know where they come from. I only know they do come, and the longer you stay put and wait, the more frequently you’ll see them. Don’t analyze the gifts that appear. Instead, hold them in your hand as if they were a pair of monarch butterflies. Watch the delicate wings. Notice the antennae, the feather-like texture of the colors. Trust yourself to write the next right word without thinking about it. Trust yourself to write the next right scene. It will emerge from the scene in front of it. Listen to its pulse and follow its lead. Practice this active listening and notice what changes in your writing.

  I taught writing groups at a local Girl Scout camp for several summers. We were doing a listening activity one day when a girl with thick glasses shouted, “I have voices in my head!” Rather than make fun of her, the other young writers at the table merely nodded.

  “We all do,” said another girl.

  “Yeah,” said the girl with the thick glasses. “But I didn’t know they were so loud.”

  CHAPTER 30

  I-10 between Phoenix and Tucson

  Most people think that shadows follow, precede or surround beings or objects. The truth is that they also surround words, ideas, desires, deeds, impulses and memories.

  —Elie Wiesel

  I travel east on I-10 past mile after mile of broken glass, tire skins, rusted axles, and brown dirt and wonder how anyone could ever say there is nothing on this road. I went to college in Tucson, and every time I travel this stretch, I feel out of balance. Some years, leaving Phoenix and driving to Tucson was going home. Other years, the opposite.

  Cars filled with eighteen-year-olds off to college jam the road. Possibilities stretch in dotted lines in front of them. Retirees from Minnesota driving motor homes bigger than my house inch over the lane markings. The road behind them releases regrets.

  Altars speckle I-10. Crosses edged with carnations, candles, letters, and balloons are monuments signifying that at that spot someone’s life changed forever. My own crosses are not marked with wooden sticks and hand-lettered signs, but I see them three-dimensionally every time I make this trip on this road where I grew up, grew apart, grew together.

  On the way to Tucson, I gather the ghosts. Sacatan Rest Area, with its brown round restrooms and vending machines and warnings about dangerous insects and snakes is where I pick up the first one. She’s nineteen and bitter. Fire cracks in her eyes. She just buried her father. Just left her family. She climbs into the backseat, smacks her spearmint gum, pops a few M&M’s in her mouth, and stares at the back of my head. We pull out of the rest area and are reminded to Buckle Up: It’s the Law. The ghost looks out the window, yawns, and refuses to put on her seatbelt. It’s seventy-eight miles to Tucson. We’ll have a long time to chat.

  I almost died at mile marker 199, where the second ghost jumps in, east of Casa Grande. Looks like an ordinary roadside, with the stray Adidas tennis shoe upside down in the dust and the coyote bones bleached almost clear, patches of the animal’s tan fur pressed into the dirt. Along the highway’s edge, the road dissolves to gravel. I was tired. Driving in the dark. Going back to college. Fell asleep. A semitruck behind me flashed its brights and honked its horn, and my head jerked up and awake, my car swerving inches from the mile marker sign and a wooden fence post. I spun in the gravel on the shoulder and stopped, heart pumping, hair electric, palms sticky. I rolled the window down and smelled the asphalt and musky heat. Even with cars passing in both directions, I knew the land around me was deep enough to walk into and vanish, wrapped in a cloak of indigo night.

  The second ghost has only one tennis shoe and hair so short she’s almost bald. Her mouth is stitched closed. She kicks the same things over and over with her bare foot and cries when her toes bruise. Time to wake up. Remain present. Accountable.

  The third ghost lives at Toltec outside the Carl’s Jr. She waits, drinking an up-sized Diet Coke at the yellow plastic table, for me to pick her up. She’s got a ferret, a brand-new college degree, and bright red hair. Her ring finger is bare, but the suntan line still glows from the diamond she wore for two years. She comes to sit in the passenger seat, looki
ng warily at the ghosts in the back. She hates them. She turns the radio to the pop station. I smile and ease the dial over a few notches. She doesn’t realize that the modern music she’s looking for has somehow become classic rock. She moves back into the backseat, and I pull out of the parking lot and wait for a caravan of Wal-Mart trucks to enter the on-ramp in front of me. They spit black smoke into the air. The red-headed ghost coughs and drums the riff to a Foreigner song on her legs.

  The fourth ghost hitchhikes on the hill just outside of Marana, where the high school stretches into the middle school and farther down to the playground of the grade school. Cops wait here to catch speeders. This ghost smiles and waves. She’s jumping into a new life, a new future, a new home. She’s hopeful, hoping. She squeezes into the backseat and the whole energy of the car shifts. I like this one. I remember her. She still wanted to play.

  The ghosts ride with me into Tucson and through it. Past U of A, where I hardly recognize the campus anymore, and the signs above the construction zones tell me my mother’s tuition dollars are still hard at work. Past my old two-room apartment with the lima bean-green door where I learned more in a year about what I would not tolerate than at any other time in my life. Past Greasy Tony’s where we’d eat Philly cheesesteak sandwiches and french fries as if our metabolism would never change, and we would always have hours in the afternoons to talk about Woolf and Faulkner.

  Back to Phoenix and the car is heavy, carrying all the excess. I feel it in my shoulders. I hear it in the whine of the four-cylinder engine shifting gears as we go from zero to seventy-five as quickly as my little Sentra can.