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.

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.)

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.

Writing secret #1: Turn on your writer self first

If you ever picked up Julia Cameron’s classic on creative unblocking, "The Artist’s Way," you’re well familiar with morning pages. The idea is simple: First thing in the morning, you pick up your notebook and write three pages in longhand. About anything. Theoretically, this practice takes the heap of concerns, to-do’s, longings and big ideas—along with pettiness, complaints and irritation—out of your head, clearing space for the good work you want to you. It’s daily time with yourself, it’s writing, and it’s supposed to be a great incubator for your creative work. It never worked that way for me.

I failed at morning pages!

I was a devotee for quite a long time, and I’ve filled up many notebooks, following the instructions to a tee and devoting hours to covering the requisite three pages with my tiny (and yes, illegible) scrawl. Many people swear by doing this, and if you’re one of them, all I can say is: Fabulous. Keep it up!

But the ritual, as I look back on it, did very little for my writing. I wrote as fast as I could, I kept my hand moving, I laboriously put ink to paper. But something essential was missing: I didn’t turn on the writer in me. I never gave myself a charged starting point—a prompt, an observation, a question, a lingering image from a newspaper story or the emotional tone from a piece of music—as I do when I set out to do my own creative work. I didn’t hold my object of curiosity in my mind and feel my way around it, or place it next to something completely unrelated and see a web connections begin to spin. I just moved my hand, brain-dumped, and stayed true to an assignment that seemed, in the abstract, like something beneficial.

What I have to show for all that is a bunch of filled pages that I really need to throw away. By contrast, my working notebooks and files, the places where I keep starts, lines, ideas and inspirations are invaluable. Real work happens there.

Intention was the missing ingredient

I think the difference is in intent, in the tuning of the ear and eye to essence. I do better writing when I actually set out to write, rather than to “unblock” or vaguely “be creative.” I’ve had great results with free writing—fevered writing, some people call it—that same process of keeping the hand moving or the fingers typing. But it’s given back the most riches when I’ve given it a starting point that actually interests me, and aimed my rocket toward it before the writing takes on a life of its own. And when it happens that I find myself writing something that really interests me, I’’m OK with putting aside the idea that I’m doing fevered writing. And I might just break “the rules” and start to work on an actual piece, right then. (Shocking, I know. And let’s not mention that I was typing….)

Your writing knows when you’re walking in with a rote assignment and when you’ve actually engaged. So keep letting details and ideas pull you in when you observe something closely every day. Keep writing down what you notice. Keep being fascinated, even thrilled. And when you sit down to write—as you will when you start getting interested in the little daily lines  you’re collecting—state your intent: I’m working on a story. I’m working on a poem. I’m finding out what my book wants to be. I’m giving my writing some love—by writing something real.

Ah! Focus!

It sounds small and obvious, but if you’ve only got limited time to write, turning over most of it to the nebulous task of filling pages for its own sake may not be all that satisfying.

Try writing a little—a line. A paragraph or two, maybe. In a focused way. Pull on your “writer” intent and identity first. And if you need to break a rule or two in the game, go ahead. When your writing starts telling you what it wants, all you can do is listen.

Why even two minutes of writing can be enough

I’m sure you’ve heard it, maybe from a writer you love, someone you admire. Someone who’s a “real” writer. It’s the most succinct advice in the world:

You’ll never be a great writer unless you put in at least an hour a day. Sometimes it’s two hours. Even more. But let’s say it’s an hour a day.

It sounds so reasonable it must be true. Writers write. If they’ve got full-time jobs and families, they just get up at 4 a.m., when it’s quiet and the yogis say there’s more creative energy. And if you were serious, you’d do that too.

To which I’ve often said, “No possible way.” Quickly followed by the thought, “I must not be a real writer.”

The all-or-nothing trap

Every time I read some version of the “hour a day” truth posited by another writer I loved, perhaps someone who gave up everything for their art, I put another brick in the wall that was rising between me and my writing. In a way, that made things very simple. I ached to write, but I was at a desk in an office for 10 or more hours a day, I needed to eat and sleep and de-stress and try to have relationships, do laundry. I didn’t have the requisite hour, ergo, I should just leave the real writing to the people who did.

I did that for a long time, dying to write but getting farther and farther from it. It was like falling out of touch with a good friend. Less and less contact, then guilt about not seeing each other, until it was just too awkward to try to start again. What would I say? I was the one who couldn’t get it together to keep things going. All because I couldn’t come up with one crummy hour out of 24—which is not, I’d repeat to myself, a lot to ask.

So, with the perfect logic of all-or-none thinking, I let the writing drift away for long, long stretches.

The deliciousness of “just a taste”

That changed, for good, when I set aside the rules and sent my writer idols to another room to talk among themselves about suffering, sacrificing and writing in the pre-dawn hours. In the quiet, guilt-free space that remained, I asked: What would it feel like to just give myself a taste of what I wanted, and missed, so much?

I’d had the good fortune of studying meditation with a teacher who asked us to sit, during our first session, for just one minute, then two. Can you experience meditation in two minutes? Absolutely. Would two-minute writing breaks add up to anything? I thought I’d find out.

As it turned out, both practices “work” in two minutes, and both build easily from there. I gave my initial practice two parts. The first involved observing something—anything—with my writer’s sensibility.  And the second was to write down what I’d observed.

Those two steps gently put me back in the room with my writer self, the one that so delights in noticing, and in pulling words from whatever realm they occupy to capture them on paper.

This is what I learned: In two minutes, you can be awake. Your writing can stir. You can feel it breathing, find things to talk about. And two minutes by two minutes, you can be a real writer again. You already are.

You don’t need a new notebook

I’ve made a lot of grand declarations and new starts when it comes to writing. Yes! This will be the fresh, new beginning of all fresh new beginnings. It’s momentous! I need a new notebook! Man, I love those things. A new notebook, its perfectly lined pages and smooth sheets beckoning, has always felt like a promise to me. “You and I, magic notebook—we’ll live, we’ll travel, we’ll commune in coffee shops, and you’ll be the dream catcher that holds mysterious images filtered by starlight.”

It’s one of my favorite fantasies. Just repeating it makes me want to head out on a hunt for another of those amazing totems.

But here’s what reality looks like. It’s a dozen gorgeous notebooks lined up on a shelf, the first page of each one dated “January 1” or “July 2” (my birthday). If I’m lucky, there will be ten pages of notes, a good number of which have to do with how excited I am to be writing again. And then: Nothing.

That shelf was the evidence of my terrible flaw as a writer, a secret shame I held close for a long time. I was so predictable. So gullible. Such a failure. When I began mentioning my “notebook collection” to other writers, though, I learned that there were a lot of us clinging to the fantasy, and watching it pop again and again.

Here’s what I’ve let myself admit: Writing is a process. It’s everyday. Sometimes it’s romantic—usually after it’s done—and mostly, when it’s working, it’s small and undramatic, not tangoing flamboyantly all over the plaza. Parisian cafes, fireworks and many of the other images that populate my “magic notebook” fantasy don’t often have much to do with it. For me, writing hardly ever even involves paper. I learned to type in fourth grade, and I think through my fingers, as do so many people who write for love and money. I don’t need the notebook, which I can’t search for lines or themes, and which, more than anything, is a constant reminder that my handwriting is 85% illegible.

I still love the fantasy though. And when it tugs me in once more, I pull a notebook off the shelf and start anywhere, on any blank page. I pull a line or two from my collection of “seeds” (click on the nearby link to the free e-book for more on that). Then I walk into the middle of my process, sinking into the opening I’ve worked to make, letting the drops of my newest enthusiasm deepen the beginning I already have. I think a lot, these days, about drops of water on sandstone that wear away paths for streams and their intricate carving.

I let myself create one more drop, then another. And when the work begins to look interesting, I type it into my computer and get to work.

(Oh, and if you’ve got a gently used notebook you’d like to trade, maybe we can work something out…)

Image by Alexander Levin, via Flickr.