Breathing your way back to writing

My mind won’t settle down. A wind sets it spinning and I hesitate to write what scatters through: thistles in a dog’s coat. Seeds strewn by a machine, some rolling into tilled earth, some onto pavement. Dust weeping from an eye. What ants and beetles push and carry.

Sometimes it’s hard to find a way into a day’s writing. Nothing seems to cohere, and the cursor blinks and blinks over the next white spot on the page. Today, restless, I get up, search the shelves for a book, one of my favorites—David Abrams’ brilliant “The Spell of the Sensuous” —and flip through it to rub against the words, drop myself into the order of another mind. What catches my eye is a moment in a section on “the progressive forgetting of the air—the loss of the invisible richness of the present.”

Abrams writes of a loss of a deep connection between the body and the aliveness of the world that begins with “forgetting of the air, the forgetting of this sensuous but unseen medium that continually flows in and out of the breathing body, binding the subtle depths within us the fathomless depths that surround us.”

In the smallest of steps toward remembering, I draw a slow breath, and another, returning to the room, the telling still life of the desk (crumpled tissue, empty cereal bowl, blue tincture bottle labeled “inspiration”…). The carpet is soft under my bare feet.

I know this feeling of returning, of grounding myself in the body by breathing, then noticing, once more, the world outside my mind. It’s the core practice I use, and recommend, for daily writing: Breathe, observe just one thing closely, intimately, and write what you see.

Remembering the way back

I know how valuable this process is for me, and yet I let myself push it aside. “You’re writing about the past today,” my rushed mind says, getting ever more bossy the more desperate and frustrated it feels. “You don’t have time to stare at a leaf or the stupid reflections in a water bottle. What does that have to do with anything?”

Given its way, it would probably say breathing is a waste of time as well: “Forget the air. Just be creative, okay?”

Stressed or tired or feeling my confidence dinged, I sometimes respond automatically to that inner voice (you probably recognize the Inner Critic’s inflections in it) and act as though it’s got my best interests at heart. It takes effort to shake off its trance, to come back to myself.

So I learn and relearn, forget and then rediscover.

I think we all do, beautiful writer person. The trick is noticing we’ve forgotten what works for us, and beginning again.

Reminders help. And serendipitous contact with voices like Abrams’ when I most need them. When I return to the past later today, I’ll begin in my body, breathing, paying attention to what’s right here and making room for the possibility of binding the subtle depths inside me to those fathomless depths that are as near as the sky and the birds outside the window.

It’ll look for all the world as though I’m just gazing into the palm of my hand but I'll be going as deeply as I can, following its map of lines: head, heart, life.

(Cloud image by Horla Varlan via flickr)

 

Writing about conflict? Here’s a tool for you.

I thought of you, beautiful writer person, when I heard a guided meditation on conflict this week.

It was offered as part of a program for mediators and others who regularly step into the midst of disputes, but as I listened, I realized that it was an excellent door through which you might step into scenes from your life that could deepen your story or memoir or poem.

The meditation is led by Zoketsu Norman Fischer, a Zen priest based in Northern California, and it’s available here. There’s no religious or even philosophical orientation, just an opportunity for entering an inner space and exploring what’s there.

 

At the heart of the workday: art—and the trickster that wants us to notice

I’m researching a short book about cataracts, in my “working writer” guise. I’m no scientist, but I’ve been reading technical papers to pull out details of the quite amazing world packed into the lens of the eye. The task, I admit, is daunting at times.

Simply getting oriented among the crystallin proteins and the clear, six-sided strands they form can feel a little like traveling into an Italo Calvino landscape of incomprehensible architecture and half-understood words. The going is slow.

Once, I might’ve grumbled about having to spend so much time away from the poems I’ve just begun, the project I hope to build over the next dozen months. I was in the habit of seeing my day jobs—and their demand that I focus on subjects I may not be naturally drawn to—as a distraction, some kind of barrier that stood between me and my real work. But I’ve come to appreciate just how much my writing has gained from my immersion in unlikely worlds, and topics or environments that chafe.

Like everyone I know, I’ve done a lot of things to pay the rent. I’ve dispatched construction inspectors, worked to master the counter-clockwise (or was it clockwise?) swirl atop a Dairy Queen cone, fed SpaghettiOs to the kids left behind by a motorcycle gang, written about bad mothers, hauled hoses and painted houses, edited reports on electromagnetic metrology, and wrangled the minutiae of stories on runway fashion and baseball.

'Soul-killing'? Maybe. But maybe not.

I’m sure I described that work as “soul-killing” more than once at the end of a day when someone yelled, something went wrong, my body ached or I just couldn’t get my mind around the task at hand.

The longing I felt through it all was for a writer’s life that was insulated from demands that I pay attention to all those details  that I might not have cared about if someone weren’t paying me. And even when the work was good and interesting and rewarding, I had the lingering sense that I’d been abducted from my real home in some alternate universe, where I could spend my days writing, filling my brain with the names of birds and reading mythology in the original Greek. Instead of scraping the peeling paint off splintery window frames or staring into a computer screen for the 10th hour of a workday, trying to find something interesting to say about face cream.

 

The exotic, embedded in the ordinary

Increasingly, though, I’ve begun to marvel at what’s right in front of me, the personalities and stories and vocabularies that my working life funnels into my writer’s brain. Today, I looked up the term “cytosolic scaffold,” and my mind rolled the syllables around, then conjured up a clear, liquid ladder, an icon from a dream. The bureaucratic language of corporate memos, the mortise and tenon connections of furniture-building, the haiku sales pitches of shopping websites—extracted from the sea of the workday they’re like household objects set in museum vitrines: exotic, strange, even beautiful. I've begun to see it.

So much flows through a workday, begging to be noticed by the part of us that writes—and used for our own writing. When I can dial down the feeling of “I should be writing a poem right now” and instead allow my workdays to feed my writing, I find myself resenting much less—and pausing to take notes. It used to be that I felt invaded by ideas about the work I do for others. Lately, though, I’ve seen that what was popping up offered images and language and themes for my own work. I just didn’t understand that the gift was for me.

What if our trickster brains are always flying through our workdays and stealing treasures for our writing? Life begins to feel much less fragmented, at least for me, and less conflicted, too. On long workdays, I’m keeping a notebook and a computer file open to see what the trickster brings.

Photo by Edward Dalmulder via Flickr

P.S. Some 'don't-miss' reading for you

A great piece on habits: I've long wanted to write at length about habits, in particular the enticing, life-changing simplicity of "tiny habits"—exceedingly small actions that can form a powerful foundation for much larger change. I've tried and been impressed by the techniques developed by a Stanford researcher named B.J. Fogg, who cheerfully encourages people to "Keep it tiny!" as they commit to, say, flossing one tooth.

Tiny habits and micro-quotas work in a way that grand resolutions never could. And because now is a great time to see for yourself, I highly recommend taking a look at  this article, which explains just how habit-formation works. You'll quickly see how it could change your writing life for the better, and get the lowdown on how B.J. Fogg and others lay out the behavioral  science.

It's the piece I'd envisioned putting together someday, and I'm delighted that Gregory Ciotti at sparringmind.com did it.

What to do when the safari (or your project) winds up neck deep in quicksand

Last week was a hard one. I’d given myself a couple of days to do what sounded like a simple writing job, and I filled hours and screens with words, but nothing worked. Each draft looked worse to me than the one before.

It happens sometimes. Notes that sound brilliant when you take them down seem insipid when you try to spin them into paragraphs. The big ideas that are supposed to tie everything together unravel. Every phrase seems recycled. Mine did, anyhow.

Laboring through the rewrites, I could see myself beginning to criticize every line almost before it was out of my head.

 So it would be tough to pretend that I’ve got the magic goggles that keep me from going snow-blind when my writing shatters onto the page and the flakes begin to swirl. Sometimes I stare at the words on the screen and I can’t make out the shape of anything. I’m supposed to be a writer? Who am I kidding?

     The sign says: "Look out! Quicksand" —in Dutch.

Oh boy. Now we're in deep.

When I was a kid I couldn’t get enough of an old black and white jungle movie in which a bunch of city-slicker explorers on safari stumble into quicksand. The person at the front of the line sinks up to his waist and starts flailing, and the hero behind him throws him a branch and says, “Stay still. The more you struggle, the more this stuff will pull you down.” We know the first guy’s a goner—he was the anxious, whiny one who never listens. And, sure enough, he goes under, thrashing and screaming.

Just to underline the hero’s wisdom, we get the alternate scenario. The safari’s only woman trips into the goo and again the hero yells, “Just listen to my voice. Grab the branch and stay as still as you can.” She does what he says and there’s a big, goopy embrace when he’s pulled her out.

I memorized the quicksand rule, just in case I ever needed it.

And I guess I have. With my mind serving up images of blizzards and quicksand, I’m getting the picture of what it’s been going through lately. I didn’t realize it had been so tough until I saw the words on the page.

It gets pretty mucky out (and in) there

When I’m working with writers, sometimes I’ll ask a couple of questions about a character or wonder about an image or a chronology and the next thing I know there’s a flurry of pages as they pull out versions one through seven and say, “It’s a complete mess. Maybe it was a bad idea to take this on. Is there anything good in it?  I just can’t see it anymore.”

I’m not in the muck of the writer’s mind, so I can look at those attempts without the angst and doubts and confusion of the struggle and experience what’s on the page. I listen for places where the writer seems to be excited, and for what makes me curious. From there, it’s not hard to connect the stars into constellations and feed back to the writer what I see. There are always stars glittering. We both get still, looking at the words, and we begin to see the way forward.

If only I could do that for myself.

Writers who need writers….

I can easily get caught up in the idea that I should be able to power through any rough patch on my own. So I thrash and flail and keep on sinking until it occurs to me to admit that i'm lost, and I need someone to throw me the perspective I don’t have. Someone outside my head, who can see what I can’t.

It's a huge relief to ask for help. I'm positive that what separates writers who keep going from the ones who stop before their best work is done (or sometimes even started) is the presence of trusted writer friends and workshop peers and editors and coaches who help us still the struggle by witnessing our efforts and telling us what they see.

Go ahead. Let someone see what you're trying to do. You don't have to struggle alone. And if you need the branch I'm holding, just holler.

 (Photo by rs photo via Flickr.)

Looking Away: A simple meditation for freeing inspiration in a crazed writing life

What do you do when you reach that “writer action shot” moment—staring off into space with words bouncing around like bumper cars in your mind but refusing to find their way to the page? I used to simply gut it out, staring longer, “thinking harder,” hoping something would come into focus. But recently, I’ve been using a technique I learned from my meditation teacher, a practice called Looking Away. It’s worked so well, and freed my writing so much, that I wanted to introduce you to both the process and to my teacher, Jona Genova.

Jona has done brain research, worked on Wall Street, helped launch restaurants, been a cookie queen and studied Tibetan Buddhism in her fluid and fascinating life. She now teaches meditation and works as a healer from her base in Malibu, Calif., and her organization Samadhi for Peace, samadhiforpeace.com.

We talked this week about writing and meditation, and some highlights of our conversation—including instructions for Looking Away—are below. Especially if you’ve had difficulty meditating in the past, I hope you’ll give it a try. It’s a tiny practice with surprising power.

Meditation may be more familiar than you think

“Creative people tend to be great meditators, and even those who think they’re not probably already have a meditation practice—they’re just not calling it that,” Jona says. “So a first step is to tap into how you’re already meditating.” The techniques you use to center yourself before doing creative work are closely tied to meditation, she explains.

Visual learners, she says, may naturally picture themselves doing a task successfully, the way a musician might envision a performance and see himself going through each step, creating a strong image of what’s going to happen.

For many writers, the process might be more intellectual, using words to pull inward and separate from the world. “It might be a peaceful thought you go to,” she says, or a practice of telling yourself, ‘"t’s going to be okay. Just relax. I have plenty of time to do this.”

That means there’s no one meditation technique that’s right for everyone. “I meet many people who are frustrated because they’ve tried meditation by the book and it’s difficult for them,” she says. “I always say that it’s different strokes for different folks—it’s important to find the meditation that resonates with you, and where have a visceral response to the technique. More than likely, it will relate to (or be) the practice you’ve naturally found for yourself, and you can build on that.”

 

Starting when you don’t know where to start

But it’s not unusual to have trouble recognizing what you always do, Jona says. “You may say, ‘I know I have a meditation practice in there somewhere, but I can’t find it.’ That builds frustration.

“When that happens, the very simple technique I would offer is to engage the process of Looking Away,” which is particularly useful at stressful moments in everyday life.

To describe the effect of Looking Away, she tells a story from her childhood. Her brother was a catcher on a softball team, and during a game, his arm was injured. “So my grandfather ran into the dugout and grabbed an ice pack, the kind you smash so it’ll become cold.” He was a strong man, and when he clapped the pack between his hands, it exploded, its chemicals flying everywhere.

“The next one he grabbed did the same thing. The third time, the coach said, ‘That’s our last one…’ So my grandfather brought himself out of the moment and was a little more gentle. Breaking that ice pack in a more gentle way produced the result he wanted”—and he was finally able to ice her brother’s injured arm.

Go gently, writers, she advises: Brute force probably won’t liberate the muse. “If we try too hard, we’re not going to get the result we want. To some people that effort may feel like squeezing, holding on, or confining our ideas to one train of thought. And when we start to go down that road, it really inhibits our creativity.

“It may seem counterintuitive, but taking a few minutes to not pay attention to the thing you’ve been focusing on can actually put your body in a state that’s able to give you what you want.”

Looking away, step by (short) step

Here’s how Jona suggests Looking Away when you get stuck:

1. Accept that distraction and frustration are going to happen—they happen to everyone, and it helps to acknowledge that.

2. Take a few deep breaths—it may sound cliche, but it does help to clear your mind a little bit and relieves some of the pressure. Then take a very brief break for a meditation.

3. Set a timer for two minutes—and only two minutes; we’re practicing restraint.

4. Sit in a chair and elongate your spine without a lot of strain or thought about it. Try to sit in a comfortable way that makes room for your breath. Once you’re there, find your breath and ride the rhythm of your inhale and exhale, feeling the rise and fall of your body.

Your mind will probably want to go to the task at hand, but bring yourself back to just feeling the rise and fall of the body, and every time your mind returns to your project, bring it back to “feel the rise and fall of my body."

5. Remind yourself to trust this very ancient practice that’s worked for many, many people. Just go with it.

No need to panic if ideas come

She recommends keeping a journal by your side during meditation. “You take your two-minute break, and more than likely, you’ll see ideas pop up about what you were working on. It’s okay to turn to your journal and jot down those thoughts in one or two words rather than letting your mind race through: ‘Okay, don’t forget that. That was a really good one. Don’t forget it! Okay, now back to the breath, back to the rise and fall.'”

“That’s just too much. Don’t make it so hard on yourself. Write down the ideas that pop into your head and enjoy the fluidity of going back into your meditation: 'Okay, got it down on paper. I can go back in. Everything is fine.'”

Less really can be more

“Somewhere along the line, we all picked up the idea that to be successful, we need to work harder and faster. And it’s just not the case,” Jona says. “There’s more and more research telling us that a relaxed state and a well-rested person is going to perform better. So try to shift your framework.

“Spending two minutes in meditation and going back into daily life gives us an experience that I feel is missing in some practices,” Jona says. “What occurs in meditation should flow into the rest of our lives so that eventually, we can’t tell the difference between being in meditation and everything else. When we take those two-minute breaks, we’re carrying with us the resonance of that meditation, that way of being, into what we do next. Less is more sometimes. We just have to recognize that just because something seems simple, that doesn’t mean it’s any less effective. There’s great depth in that simplicity.”

You can find Jona Genova at samadhiforpeace.com, and she's Samadhi for Peace on Facebook. To see one of her short and simple guided meditation videos, click here. 

(Photo by Marcus Hansson via Flickr.)

Following the mystery: We're all going to Graceland.

My DVR decided recently that I needed to watch a documentary about Paul Simon and the making of his “Graceland” album. It was a happy accident—I’ve loved those songs for years. They accompanied me on a long-ago train ride that wound along the edge of the country from Seattle to Washington, D.C., days and nights of staring out at snowfields, swampland and kudzu until my face looked back at me clearly from the glass and told me that what I’d left behind was broken, but I wasn’t.

It was no wonder I couldn’t get enough of lyrics like these:

There is a girl in New York City Who calls herself the human trampoline And sometimes when I'm falling, flying Or tumbling in turmoil I say Oh, so this is what she means She means we're bouncing into Graceland….

I’d always just assumed that some logical process had produced those words—a pilgrimage to the land of Elvis, perhaps a break-up. The writer was sparked by something he wanted to express and searched for the words to say it, artfully. Isn’t that how such a song would come to be?

Actually, not at all. Simon explains that as he worked to match lyrics to pieced-together tracks of music recorded with African musicians, he played with “certain sounds that became words. Sometimes those words formed a phrase and the phrase was interesting. Sometimes the phrase was banal. Sometimes it didn’t make any sense, like ‘I’m going to Graceland,’” which he used as a placeholder because it fit the music well.

“I kept singing this chorus, “I’m going to Graceland, I’m going to Graceland,'" Simon says. "And I kept thinking, ‘Well that will go away, because this song is not about Elvis Presley…. But it wouldn’t go away.

“Finally, I said ... I’d better go to Graceland—I’d never been. I’d better make that trip and see if maybe there’s something about this that I’m supposed to find out.”

Slowly, it came clear that “the song was about a bigger meaning,” he says.“It was a metaphor for a state of grace. I was taking an absurdist lyric for which I thought I had no place … and finally saying, Well, maybe it does….”

I find this account comforting and inspiring. Sometimes, we back into meaning. It glimmers around the edges of a phrase or image that sticks in the mind and won’t let go. Inconveniently, it doesn’t make sense. The opposite of the “lightning through the pen” image of creativity, it’s not delivered fully formed. Or half-formed, even. It’s a wisp, a problem, a distraction. You can easily it brush off, push it away.

Or you can give in and follow it to Graceland.

(The documentary, if you’re interested is called “Paul Simon’s Graceland Journey: Under African Skies.” Some segments are available on YouTube, and a 1997 documentary, “Paul Simon: Graceland,” parts of which are used in the new one, is streaming on Netflix. It’s worth a look, even if you’re not a fan, for Simon’s articulate account of what it’s like to be drawn toward a beautiful mystery, then—with a mixture of willingness, doubt and persistence—to find out what it wants to be. Lyrics above are copyright Universal Music Publishing Group.)

Image by Whatnot (Jack Keene) via Flickr

The world expands beyond the glass. Open a window. Let something wild fly in.

A pigeon muscled into my imaginings recently. I was suspended between lines—words were elusive and connections weren’t coming—and I couldn’t help but notice that the avian equivalent of a Harley had pulled up outside my office.  The throaty coos echoed in, amplified as they bounced off the many concrete surfaces nearby, and I sat, almost drumming my fingers, willing the words to come and the bird to pipe down.

Man, I remember thinking, you’re quite the delicate flower. It’s just a bird. But at that, the pigeon gunned its engines and the decibels climbed. I figured I’d see if I could spot it and shoo it away. I got up from my chair, and as I reached the glass, I heard a small voice in my head saying, “Open a window. Let something wild fly in.”

Open a window. Let something wild fly in. The pigeon was gone as soon as I pushed the curtains aside—it had been on the ledge and startled at the movement—but I’ve been repeating those words to myself all week, thinking at first about the disoriented sparrow that flapped around our living room when I was a kid, and a bat that whizzed past my ear in the dark, both of us vibrating like tuning forks.

Those small encounters stay with me like dreams. I don’t know why the wild comes to us that way—maybe because the contact is inevitable, with only thin glass panes and our habits of seeing keeping us apart.

I take everything as a message for my writing—though this was the first delivered by carrier pigeon—and I’ve been trying to open myself to what’s around me rather than shutting it out. Even on the Internet, I’ve been spending time with what’s less familiar to me, paying attention when I something feels wild and alive as it comes through my computer screen. Perhaps that’s why I’ve stumbled onto so much inspiration this week. I can feel something new taking shape.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that regularly I round up a few “small and magical things,” mostly related to writing, that I gather ‘round the Internet and append as links to the bottom or margin of the newsletter.  This time, I want to share them at slightly greater length. If something strikes you, I hope you’ll engage it. Go to the comments and let me know what happens.

1. Beautiful musings on writing, reading & the stories we tell 

Guernica magazine online (www.guernicamag.com) has a memorable excerpt from Rebecca Solnit’s new book “The Faraway Nearby,” which explores the way we make stories. Guernica’s presentation is laced with exquisite images of eggs in nests, the work of Northern California photographer Sharon Beals—even more reason to click the link.

A taste of Solnit:

“Like many others who turned into writers, I disappeared into books when I was very young, disappeared into them like someone running into the woods. What surprised and still surprises me is that there was another side to the forest of stories and the solitude, that I came out that other side and met people there. Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.”

Read the rest of the excerpt at:http://www.guernicamag.com/features/the-faraway-nearby/

2. A sharp-eyed guide into the work of memoir writing

Friends and clients working on memoirs, I highly recommend the pieces to be found on the blog of the wonderful teacher and writer Debra Gwartney. Two posts in particular, a recent one titled “A Few Memoir Pitfalls,” and an older one called “On Beginning a Memoir,” are excellent starting points and refreshers, full of examples from powerful works. Go read them, especially if you’re puzzling out that big question, “Who’s the I telling this story?”

From “A Few Memoir Pitfalls”:

" A memoir that truly engages ... explores emotional patterns, the relationships that draw us in, that still have their hooks in us for reasons that are often unconscious. These memoirs recognize that the person called “I” is attached to a certain version of the past. At the same time, it’s important to remember that memory is malleable—our memories shift over time. Just ask your sister about a certain day in your childhood, and no doubt you’ll have divergent details of whatever episode you brought up. Also, the way you remember a childhood incident today is likely not how you remembered that same experience five years ago. Our memories are there to serve us. The ways we need to be served change as we change. Tapping into this very notion—just how are my memories serving me?—is a door into compelling memoir writing."

You can find Debra Wartney at:http://www.debragwartney.com/blog/

3. Roll the words in your mouth and discover what they mean

You’ve never seen a maluma or a takete, but from the sound of the names, which of the objects is soft and rounded and which is jagged? Poets and others will be interested in linguists’ research into the evocative power of names, and the way they sound.

The New Yorker “Elements” blog has the details.

4. Notes on scraps of paper: snapshots from the creative process

Creating is messy, and the Pocket Notes project,http://www.pocketnotes.org/ collects the evidence: “Pocket Notes can refer to a passing scent, a bill, a type of bond, a memorandum, an effort, commentary or reference, an indication, a formula, to notice something, an observation, a piece of news, a reminder. Pocket Notes documents process, charts, maps, lists, graphs, diagrams, drafts, recordings, & the leftovers of experimentation.”

For me, flipping through the pages of Issue 2 opened a dozen windows into wildness, as writers and creators show notes, scraps and drawings and describe their projects.

Start here, with the messy notebook of Amaranth Borsuk, and then see the rest of the projects by clicking the “current issue” link in the menu bar. See what shakes loose.

5. Your turn

Take the inspiration and run. Keep writing in small bursts, if scraps of time are all you’ve got. And don’t forget to open a window, beautiful writer person. Let something wild fly in.

(Image of birds by $omebody, via Flickr)

The gate: A story about the power of things that stop us

The writing residency I attended a few years back was set at the edge of a redwood forest not far from the ocean. I was dazzled to be there. I’d applied on a lark and was stunned to get the note that said, “Space just opened up, can you be here in a week? My fellow residents were a mad band of Butoh dancers, visual artists, filmmakers and writers, and it wasn’t unusual to find a small sculpture fashioned from twigs and stones tucked into the grass in the fields around the artists’ studios, or happen on the slow unfolding of a dance in progress along a path.

I was glad someone was making art. In the fresh expanse of time I had to write, I found myself flipping through the pages I’d brought and the notes I’d jotted down as starting points for pieces and thinking, “Now what?”

It was my first time away at “writer’s camp,” and much as I’d longed for it, the empty space in my schedule intimidated me. It was me and the work, there to do big things. Free at last.  I doodled across pages and watched the hummingbirds that hovered expectantly nearby. Now what?

So I spent many days, early on, walking the looping trail around the property, climbing one of the round, gold hills to stare at the oaks that were scattered across the land like small herds of buffalo, or hiking beyond the far studios to the edge of the woods. At dinner, people’s chance comments about the light in the trees and echoes of coyotes in the ancient stands glanced off me.

It was a week before I realized I’d never experienced any of that because I hadn’t gone in.

Sometimes, the signs aren't for you

The trail that led into the woods was blocked by a gate. A low, wooden gate that, but for its small No Trespassing sign, would’ve been at home in a Thomas Kinkade painting. On my walks, I’d get there, look up at the trees, and, after a pause, turn back. Yep. It says, “Don’t enter.” OK.  It must mean me.

It seems crazy to me now. Absurd. The gate wasn’t attached to a fence, and though I don’t remember it, it’s quite likely that a path had been worn around it. For a person on foot, it was purely symbolic. Any magical power it had to stop me was granted by me.

Funny to say, the most significant work I did at the residency might've been getting past that gate. In time, I noticed the way I was stopping there, and the noticing was key. It had been so automatic to turn around—that was the rule, wasn’t it?—that the action was all but invisible. But when actually saw how I was being bossed around by that ramshackle collection of boards and that flimsy little sign, I laughed at myself and hopped the thing.

The long, slow walk into the tree was delicious. And yes, those woods were filled with the poems I needed to write, some carried in the mouths of coyotes.

Swinging open the gate

Most of the blocks writers face aren’t quite that literal, but they’re surprisingly similar. Our minds are funny that way.

* A writer is wrestling with the direction for a story. He says he thinks he knows what he wants to do with it, and he spells it out for me, but he’s at his most animated when he tells me an “off the topic” anecdote that turned up in his research. It’s clear that that’s where the juice is for him. Would he think about starting there?  “Oh no,” comes the quick answer. “That’s not serious enough.” Feels like a gate.

* A mom says she hasn’t had time to write since the baby was born. But the baby’s in preschool now, and pockets of her days have opened up, though her story about not having time hasn’t caught up. Feels like a gate.

* A novelist says she’s been lugging around a work for years and can’t get it finished. It’s keeping her from doing other writing, but it won’t move. She doesn’t speak of the stuck piece in detail or with excitement or desire. It’s an obligation, something that has to be finished because she invested so much time in it so long ago. Feels like a gate.

You could just walk through

It’s interesting to think about blocks as gates, barriers that stop progress, but also meant  to swing open. I’m surprised at how often they’re unlatched already, but stop us simply because we’re so accustomed to stopping. We turn around because our minds flash a sign that says, “You’re too busy to write,” or “You just have 15 minutes and it’s not enough,” or “That’s trivial,” or “That topic’s off limits.”

Take a look at what’s getting in the way of your writing and see if you’re being stopped by an old story, a gate that you could easily open with the slightest tap. The old, habit-laden barriers are sometimes difficult to see yourself, so it can help to get an outsider’s perspective on what’s going on in your process.

That’s what I help my writers do. We identify the gates, walk around them, test what they’re made of and what they’re connected to. And then we pass through. It’s always astonishing to see how much creative energy, joy even, is available on the other side.

What kind of relationship have you had with the gates in your path? Share your story in the comments.

(Gate photo by David van der Mark, via Flickr.)

The art of beginning: Getting to 'escape velocity'

Lately I’ve been obsessed with the idea of escape velocity, the amount of energy it takes to break free of gravity and launch yourself into space—or, in my case, the writing of a book.  I’m starting a new one, and as I return to the blank page, it’s as though almost everything I know about constructing a project like this is a hindrance instead of a help.

This new thing is a book, yes, but it won’t resemble the others I’ve done in voice or structure. It will tell me its shape if I have the patience to keep engaging it—that much I know from experience—but I also know that the routes I’ve used in the past won’t lead me to the core of this one.

So the past few weeks have been full of attempts to lure the book into view. I’ve baited it with metaphors and research and paragraph after paragraph of beginnings—or, when that was too difficult—with tangents.

And then there were penguins...

I got the wild notion that the subject I’m trying to write about is like a Venn diagram with ten circles and went off to find out whether such a thing exists (yes, sort of). I fell into rabbit holes as I checked to see how other people have written about my topic, then crawled away certain I had nothing to add. I was surprised to find myself, at one point, reading about penguins.

I realized I’d gone off the deep end, and it occurred to me that my book will likely contain neither Venn diagrams nor Antarctic birds, though a poem I write someday might. I went back to figuring out what the book is really about.

I read and reread my notes until they began to feel more abstract than concrete, as though I were repeating the word “shampoo” until it lost its meaning. My screen filled up with lather, and my mind seemed to be circling. Was it making connections? Apparently not.

I made yet another start, and paragraphs kept accumulating in precarious, teetering stacks as the commentary in my mind insistently labeled them “not it” and “a little lame, don’t you think?” But on the next try, or the next, the accumulated facets of this mysterious new thing, the book, began to collect themselves into a shape. Something distinct and alive started to move in a direction of its own, leading me.

With persistence, clarity sets in

That little shift is what escape velocity feels like, and it’s less stomach-dropping rush than a whoosh of clarity that comes from staying with what’s difficult, elusive and unknown. That clarity is the necessary starting point for a project, a sense of its core, its heartbeat. It’s the payoff for deciding to persist, and to keep persisting. And yes, it feels very, very good.

There’s an old formula in physics—I think I saw it on Wikipedia—that goes something like “escape velocity = curiosity + desire x (words committed to paper + concentrated time in the chair).” There’s nothing in there about magic or inspiration—though curiosity and desire are plenty magical. The formula hinges on the energy of actual doing, and in my experience, “concentrated time” provides an intense push.

If you’ve been stuck, dreaming of writing something ambitious, or longing to finish a big project that’s drifted into the realm of “someday, maybe,” give yourself the gift of reaching escape velocity. Here's how:

Seven steps to reaching escape velocity

* Create a container for your “launch.” Decide to devote a month or six weeks to fully beginning or re-engaging with your project. For that period, return your focus to the project as often as you can.

* Clear time to do the writing. If you’ve already created a small-burst writing practice, you might be able simply to lengthen your regular writing periods. Or you may want to schedule all new ones. Defer watching “Game of Thrones” for a month and gain hours there. Write through your lunch hour. Tell your friends/partner/kids that you’re diving into your book, and you’ll be less available for a while. Stake out evenings and weekend time Use your well-practiced time-stealing tactics and steal more.

* Write without judging. Take wild stabs at it. Think you have a lousy draft? Interesting. Keep going. You can edit later. For now, write. Listen for what surprises you and pulls you deeper. Tweak. Try something else. Call what you’re doing “the big experiment” and be curious about what’s happening.

* Write more. Then write more. Repeat.

* Persist. When you find yourself off on a crazy tangent, make a note of it, then go back to the task at hand. Praise yourself for persisting.

* Get help if you need it. Check in with someone. Make promises to someone else that you’ll feel honor-bound to keep. Report your progress. Use the Twitter hashtag #amwriting to give the writing world brief updates. Or let me help you in one-on-one coaching, where we can set workable goals, make course corrections and find out what conditions allow you to persist while having a life.

* Feel the work starting to talk back to you. Enjoy the feeling of liftoff.

Do you have tricks for reaching escape velocity? Share ‘em in the comments.

(Image by StormPetrel1 via Flickr)

This writing business could get messy. (It’s supposed to.)

If you’re making notes daily, observing the world and writing ten or fifteen minutes at a time, your collection of lines may not seem like much at first. You may have a glowing jarful of fireflies when you look one day, and swear the next that all you’ve got is sweater lint. So hold off on labeling for a while and just keep going. Look for what draws you in, what sends a tiny jolt through your mind or memory. And keep paying close attention to the ordinary. You can’t know, early on, how your wild, random collection of observations will be (or has been) orchestrated by the part of you that writes. But as you go, you’ll begin to see patterns, and doors that call you through them as you keep feeling your way through them. You'll begin to notice where your mind wants to take you.

Standing in the shower at the gym last week, I found myself studying the tile in front of me, a light mauve square pale mottled by mist, layers of condensation and the faint trails of splashes and drips. As I stared, it became the fabric for a summer dress, delicately patterned, or perhaps slightly ruined, then a canvas I wished I could paint, then a bathroom wall that my mother and I had scrubbed once for a wealthy family on the other side of town. I ran my finger over it, bringing myself back, and got out to search for paper.

In paying attention to what's in front of you, you'll find what's inside, as well. Look carefully. Enter what you see. You’ll discover where you’re going by going; meaning will find you.

It's there for you to discover

Enjoy the messiness and loopy trains of thought that string your notes and observations together. There’s a story in there. A poem. A scene. I’ve always been amazed at how much has grown from what I'd initially despaired over as “false starts.”

Patience and persistence, beautiful writer person. Stay with it. Tell me in the comments what you discover.

(The fabulous Sally Schneider at The Improvised Life, has a great archived post on the messiness of creating here.)

Image by Jamelah e. via Flickr

Your writing's trying to tell you what it wants—tales from George Saunders and L.A. spring

It’s the equinox as I write this, and I’m caught up in the way this moment in Southern California tips us into full bloom. Last night I walked through a friend’s front yard while he gave me a tour of the “orchard” set against two side fences. It was a scattering of trees, some mere twigs dotted with blossoms, one already heavy with grapefruit that reflected back gold in the flashlight’s beam. “That’s a pomegranate, and this is a peach,” the friend said, pointing to a couple of newly planted sticks (to use the fancy horticultural term). A few weeks ago, there was nothing to see. Just bare wood too slight to hold up the word “trunk,” and a few twig-like branches. But something happened, a swelling of buds and petals and scent. We knew it would come. And with luck and cultivation, we’ll see the pomegranates and lemons and first-year peaches later on, too.

Those predictable rhythms don't hold for people and pages, though it would be handy if they did. What we see, sometimes for long periods, are fragile-looking twigs stuck in the ground. They’re the projects we tuck into stray spaces and build from the words left at the end of long days of trading our energy and imaginations for money.Time passes, sometimes a lot of time, before what we have looks like much, or we notice the nubs of buds on what we feared might stay dormant for good. At our best, we persist, staying in conversation with the work, pushing it, then letting it lead us.

George Saunders, talking to a stalled story

In L.A. last month, the fiction writer George Saunders mentioned just that process.

Once, while waiting for a bus across the street from the barber shop in his town, he decided to take on the barber.

“He was one of these guys who checks women out fearlessly—and even after they bust him he keeps looking,” Saunders remembered. “We had just had two daughters, so I was a new feminist and I thought, ‘What an irritating [jerk].’ My first idea was, ‘I don’t know what I’m gonna write, but I’m gonna nail that guy. So I did.

“I wrote what I really thought was some fun inhabiting of this perverted guy…. I did that for about a year, and I had some pretty funny bits, but the story stalled, and I think it was because I knew too much about him. I was going to crucify this idiot. That was my plan.

“The story said, ‘All right, go ahead, but you’re not gonna be interesting doing that. So at some point about a year into it I went, ‘You know what? I’ve gotta somehow make this guy more sympathetic because as this story stands, it’s just kicking him. So then it’s the magic moment when you go, okay, how do I make this [jerk] more interesting?

“Well…  Hmm…. And then you start titrating in bits of yourself, which you were already doing, but now you’re being a little more sympathetic. Not being the most subtle writer, I said, ‘Oh yeah, he doesn’t have any toes!’ That was my way of doing it. But that did the trick … and suddenly it came alive. So I didn’t know that I was out to humanize him, but the story teaches you that. The story’s very stubborn. And it will say, 'Go ahead, write as much as you like, but I’m not movin’ until you show a little sympathy.' And that can happen again and again.”

‘A year later…’

There’s so much to love in how the process evolved, from the original mission (“I’m gonna crucify that guy”) to the more complex (and toeless) version the story wanted. I’m sure Saunders says that often his students: “The story teaches you.”

What struck me most, though, were the toss-away words: “I did that for about a year….” He repeats them, too. “So at some point about a year into it….”

The process can—and often does—look like that: chipping away, experimenting and keeping the conversation with your work going for weeks and months and years.

That doesn’t happen when you simply put the manuscript away and “think about it,” which usually means “wade through guilt, bemoan not having time to work on it or feel flattened by the soul-crushing, 5,000-pound boulder it’s become.”

It doesn’t happen either when you keep ideas locked in your head without making a move to get them on paper where you can start the exchange, however slow, that will move you forward and bring blooms to those awkward little sticks.

Time to amp up the conversation, don’t you think?

One writer I know felt dogged for more than a year by stories she wanted to write. When we talked about them, and she gave herself some “getting reacquainted” sessions to feel her way into the work, she realized that she was actually excited about an entirely different project. And she wouldn’t have known unless she sat down to reach toward the vague shapes in her imagination and pull them into the light.

My guess is that she just would’ve stayed frustrated and blocked and cringing whenever anyone said, “So how’s that writing going?”

The speed of the work you do isn’t important, but the constant conversation and tending are.It’s spring, beautiful writer person—such a fertile time. Feed your work. Talk to it and consider what it wants. Do a small writing practice daily. And as always, let me know if I can help.

(If you want to revisit the George Saunders story in context, you can hear it here, courtesy of the wonderful Aloud program at the Los Angeles Central Library. The photo of blossoms above is by Sterlic, via Flickr.)

Today is the day: You're an all new writer.

This is it. The day everything changes. The day you strip off everything that’s been holding you back. Every bad habit. All that resistance. All those excuses. Goodbye, old skin.

Today, you’re new and gleaming.

Today is the day that some voice deep inside says, “Change,” and you startle awake.

Today is the clean break, the blank page between then and now.

Today you’re that lean body in the running shoe ad, sweating and loving it. You’ve got discipline to spare. This is it. It’s time.

Today the resolutions stick. You’ve turned the key. You’re pulling away from all that’s dragged you down.

Forget what it says on the calendar. It’s New Year’s. New Day. New You.

Words like that were playing in my head one morning not too long ago.  I’d been stuck and frustrated the day before, looking at the puzzle of some writing I’d been working on between projects and thinking, “What a mess. It’s not coming together.” Which quickly spiraled into “I’m doing this all wrong,” and even, “What made me think I could do this?”

When 'Change!' gets wound up with disdain

My psyche’s go-to solution was to summon up some mix of a sports-drink ad copy and the theme from “Rocky,” with a dash of the boss I had at a newspaper once, a guy whose motto was JFDI—Just fuckin’ do it. I could just hear him standing over me saying, “What you need is discipline!”

I’m a sucker for the pitch,  the whole fantasy that it’s possible to make a clean break with the past, to “get in the car and drive west till we’re not sad or broken anymore.”

But when I listened to the “whole new you” pep talk this last time around, it sounded less gleaming and hopeful than … mean. The “wad up the old you and toss it in the trash” didn’t sit so well. Behind the seductiveness of “clean break” and the ad world’s favorite word “New” was disdain. My manifesto had faith in CHANGE and that warrior writer it envisioned, the one with the perfect schedule and Michelle Obama arms. It just didn’t have a lot of faith in me.

So I thought I’d rewrite the script, see if I could make it gentler and truer and lighter. Less  abs-of-steel determined, more embracing. I’m still getting used to the way it sounds. I think I like it.

Softer words, with room for all you are

This is it, the day I continue, the day I pick up where I left off, the day I find out where I’m going on the way there.

Today is the day I take another step down the path.

Today is the day I find the game in it.

Today is the day I praise my every effort, even the smallest one.

Today I stay with what haunts or daunts or eludes me, and feel my way toward it, phrase by phrase.

Today is the day I feed my work something new.

Today I tend a garden stewn with seeds from unmarked envelopes, a tiny plot filled shoots that could be anything—oaks or sage or weeds.

Today I wait and tend.

Today is the day I listen to the whisper inside that says “keep going” and “let’s get lost.”

Today I discover what’s next.

Your writing needs the you who keeps returning

Self-compassion and patience and a sense of play or curiosity produce a whole different kind of discipline, I think. If I’m stuck, playing makes me want to return to the puzzle. (I got over the sense of stuckness with my piece by using the old fortune cookie trick of tacking the words “in bed” to the end of every line until something shook loose a laugh and the spell of “this isn’t moving” was broken.) And the kinder I am to the “old” me, the easier it is to play.

Sometimes, the writing doesn’t tell you what it wants for a very long time.  And as it lets you in, it doesn’t need to keep introducing itself to a string of “whole new yous.” It just needs the one who keeps coming back.