Writing Down The Bones: Freeing The Writer Within (13 page)

When we walk around Paris, my friend is afraid of being lost and she is very panicky. I don’t fear being lost. If I am lost, I am lost. That is all. I look on my map and find my way. I even like to wander the streets of Paris not particularly knowing where I am. In the same way I need to wander in the field of aloneness and learn to enjoy it, and when loneliness bites, take out a map and find my way out without panic, without jumping to the existential nothingness of the world, questioning everything—“Why should I be a writer?”—and pushing myself off the abyss.

So when we write and begin with an empty page and a heart unsure, a famine of thoughts, a fear of no feeling—just begin from there, from that electricity. This kind of writing is uncontrolled, is not sure where the outcome is, and it begins in ignorance and darkness. But facing those things, writing from that place, will eventually break us and open us to the world as it is. Out of this tornado of fear will come a genuine writing voice.

While I was in Paris I read
Tropic of Cancer
by Henry Miller. In the second-to-last chapter Miller rages on about a school in Dijon, France, where he is stuck teaching English, about the dead statues and students who would become dentists and engineers, the cold bone winter and the whole town pumping out mustard. He is furious that he must be there. Then right at the end of the chapter, he sits, late at night, outside the college gates in perfect peace, surrendering himself for the moment to where he is, knowing nothing is good or bad, just alive.

To begin writing from our pain eventually engenders compassion for our small and groping lives. Out of this broken state there comes a tenderness for the cement below our feet, the dried grass cracking in a terrible wind. We can touch the things around us we once thought ugly and see their special detail, the peeling paint and gray of shadows as they are—simply what they are: not bad, just part of the life around us—and love this life because it is ours and in the moment there is nothing better.

Doubt Is Torture

A
FRIEND OF MINE
was planning to move to Los Angeles with the hope of connecting with the music industry. He was a musician and songwriter, and it was time for him to follow his aspirations. Katagiri Roshi said to him, “Well, if you’ve really decided to go, let’s see what your attitude is.”

“Well, I’ll try my best. I figure I have to give it a shot, and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. I’ll just accept it.”

Roshi responded, “That’s the wrong attitude. If they knock you down, you get up. If they knock you down again, get up. No matter how many times they knock you down, get up again. That is how you should go.”

The same is true in writing. For every book that makes it, there are probably thousands that don’t even get published. We must continue anyway. If you want to write, write. If one book doesn’t get published, write another one. Each one will get better because you have all the more practice behind you.

Every other month I am ready to quit writing. The inner dialogue goes something like this: “This is stupid. I am making no money, there’s no career in poetry, no one cares about it, it’s lonely, I hate it, it’s dumb, I want a regular life.” These thoughts are torture. Doubt is torture. If we give ourselves fully to something, it will be clearer when it might be appropriate to quit. It is a constant test of perseverance. Sometimes I listen to the doubting voice and get sidetracked for a while. “I think I’ll go into sales, open up a café so other writers can go there, sip cappuccino and write, or get married, have babies, be a homemaker and make wonderful chicken dinners.”

Don’t listen to doubt. It leads no place but to pain and negativity. It is the same with your critic who picks at you while you are trying to write: “That’s stupid. Don’t say that. Who do you think you are anyway, trying to be a writer?” Don’t pay attention to those voices. There is nothing helpful there. Instead, have a tenderness and determination toward your writing, a sense of humor and a deep patience that you are doing the right thing. Avoid getting caught by that small gnawing mouse of doubt. See beyond it to the vastness of life and the belief in time and practice.

A Little Sweet

I
N
J
UDAISM THERE
is an old tradition that when a young boy first begins to study, the very first time, after he reads his first word in the Torah, he is given a taste of honey or a sweet. This is so he will always associate learning with sweetness. It should be the same with writing. Right from the beginning, know it is good and pleasant. Don’t battle with it. Make it your friend.

And it
is
your friend. It will never desert you, though you may desert it many times. The writing process is a constant source of life and vitality. Sometimes when I come home from work and feel disjointed and blue, I say to myself, “Natalie, you know what you need to do. You need to write.” If I’m smart, I listen. If I’m in a destructive or very lazy space, I don’t, and the blues continue. But when I do listen, it offers me a chance to touch my life which always softens me and allows me to feel connected with myself again. Even if what I write about is the details of rush hour that morning on the freeway, living them again usually gives me a sense of peace and affirmation: “I’m a human being; I wake up in the morning; I drive on the freeway.”

Gore Vidal has a wonderful quote: “As every author—and every reader—knows, writing well is the best trip of them all.” Don’t even worry about writing “well”; just writing is heaven.

A New Moment

K
ATAGIRI
R
OSHI OFTEN
used to say: “Take one step off a hundred-foot pole.” That’s pretty scary, isn’t it? Finally you arrive at the top, which is precarious enough, and now you can’t stay there. You have to go ahead and step off the edge. In other words, you can’t rest on your success. Or your failure. “I have written something wonderful.” Good, but it is a new moment. Write something else. Do not be tossed away by your achievements or your fiascoes. Continue under all circumstances. It will keep you healthy and alive. Actually, you don’t know for sure that you will fall when you step off the hundred-foot pole. You may fly instead. There are no guarantees one way or the other. Just keep writing.

Tulips come up in spring for no reason. Of course, you planted bulbs and now in April the earth warms up. But why? Because the earth spins around the sun. But why? For no reason except gravity. Why gravity? For no reason. And why did you plant red tulip bulbs to begin with? For beauty, which is itself and has no reason. So the world is empty. Things rise and fall for no reason. And what a great opportunity that is! You can start writing again at any minute. Let go of all your failures and sit down and write something great. Or write something terrible and feel great about it.

Tony Robbins, who teaches workshops in walking on 1,200-degree coals, told a story about a contract that was supposed to be signed. In the past, every time the workshop was scheduled in this particular city, the contractor haggled about the price, schedule, etc. This time Tony decided to change the energy of the interaction. He bought a water pistol, filled it with water, and put it in the inside coat pocket of his thousand-dollar suit. When the argument about money came up, he pulled out the pistol and began shooting it at the contractor across the large office desk on the tenth floor of an executive suite. The contractor was so surprised he began to laugh, saw in a flash that they had been through the same haggle every year, took out his pen, and signed on the black line. Every moment is fresh. Just because a water pistol hasn’t been used before at business meetings doesn’t mean there is a rule that it can’t be used.

Step through your resistances right now and write something great. Right now. This is a new moment.

Why Do I Write?

W
HY DO I
write?” It’s a good question. Ask it of yourself every once in a while. No answer will make you stop writing, and over time you will find that you have given every response.

Baker Roshi from San Francisco Zen Center said, “‘Why?’ isn’t a good question.” Things just are. Hemingway has said, “Not the why, but the what.” Give the real detailed information. Leave the why for psychologists. It’s enough to know you want to write. Write.

Yet it’s a good and haunting question to explore, not so you can find the one final reason, but to see how writing permeates your life with many reasons. Writing is not therapy, though it may have a therapeutic effect. You don’t discover that you write because of lack of love and then quit, as you might in therapy discover that you eat chocolate as a love substitute and, seeing the reason, stop (if you’re lucky) eating Hershey’s chocolate bars and hot fudge. Writing is deeper than therapy. You write
through
your pain, and even your suffering must be written out and let go of.

In writing class painful things come up—the death of a husband, throwing the ashes of a dead baby into a river, a woman going blind. The students read the pieces they just wrote and I tell them they can cry if they need to but to remember to continue to read. We pause when they are finished and then go on to the next person, not because we ignore their suffering—we acknowledge it—but because writing is the aim. It is an opportunity to take the emotions we have felt many times and give them light, color, and a story. We can transform anger into steaming red tulips and sorrow into an old alley full of squirrels in the half light of November.

Writing has tremendous energy. If you find a reason for it, any reason, it seems that rather than negate the act of writing, it makes you burn deeper and glow clearer on the page. Ask yourself, “Why do I write?” or “Why do I want to write?,” but don’t think about it. Take pen and paper and answer it with clear, assertive statements. Every statement doesn’t have to be 100 percent true and each line can contradict the others. Even lie if you need to, to get going. If you don’t know why you write, answer it as though you do know why.

Why do I write? I write because I kept my mouth shut all my life and the secret ego truth is I want to live eternally and I want my people to live forever. I hurt at our impermanence, at the passing of time. At the edge of all my joy is the creeping agony that this will pass—this Croissant Express at the corner of Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis, a great midwestern city in mythical America, will someday stop serving me hot chocolate. I will move on to New Mexico where no one knows how it feels to be here with the sudden light of afternoon, the silver of the ceiling, the half-smell of croissants baking in the oven.

I write because I am alone and move through the world alone. No one will know what has passed through me, and even more amazing, I don’t know. Now that it’s spring I can’t remember what it felt like to be in forty below. Even with the heat on, you could feel mortality screaming through the thin walls of your house.

I write because I am crazy, schizophrenic, and I know it and accept it and I have to do something with it other than go to the loony bin.

I write because there are stories that people have forgotten to tell, because I am a woman trying to stand up in my life. I write because to form a word with your lips and tongue or think a thing and then dare to write it down so you can never take it back is the most powerful thing I know. I am trying to come alive, to find the distances in my own recesses and bring them forward and give them color and form.

I write out of total incomprehension that even love isn’t enough and that finally writing might be all I have and that isn’t enough. I can never get it all down, and besides, there are times when I have to step away from the table, notebook, and turn to face my own life. Then there are times when it’s only coming to the notebook that I truly do face my own life.

And I write out of hurt and how to make hurt okay; how to make myself strong and come home, and it may be the only real home I’ll ever have.

This was written at the Croissant Express, April 1984. If I wrote it now, a different response might come up. We write in the moment and reflect our minds, emotions, environment in that moment. This does not mean that one is truer than the other—they are all true.

When the old nag in you comes around with “Why are you wasting your time? Why do you write?,” just dive onto the page, be full of answers, but don’t try to justify yourself. You do it because you do it. You do it because you want to improve your handwriting, because you’re an idiot, because you’re mad for the smell of paper.

Every Monday

E
VERY
M
ONDAY LAST
winter my dear friend Kate and I wrote together. We met at nine in the morning and wrote until about two or three in the afternoon. Sometimes she showed up with an idea: “Let’s write about divisions. Okay? Go for an hour.” Because there were only the two of us, when the writing sessions were over, we read aloud to each other the whole of what we wrote. It was a lot, with hands moving the whole time.