Writing Down The Bones: Freeing The Writer Within (15 page)

A Large Field to Wander In

T
HREE SUMMERS AGO
David took an intensive week-long workshop with me in northern Minnesota. There were twenty students in the workshop. Several of the students were teachers who had the time off; others were adults who had regular careers in other fields. They all had an interest in writing, though many were timid and very nervous the first morning of class. I gave them the usual pep talk about trusting their own voices and saying what they needed to say. Then we wrote for ten minutes, and went around the circle and read what we had written. People were shaking as they read, not necessarily because they had written anything earth-shattering this first morning, but because it is very naked to put your voice out there for the first time in a group of strangers. People read about their childhoods, their farm, how nervous they were. It was a regular beginning. Then David read in a very loud voice:

Masturbation. Masturbation. Maaaaaaas . . . Ma!

Ma! Ma! Ma! Mastur ba ba ba tion tion tion . . .

And so forth. It certainly woke everyone up.

David wrote little else on any other subject for the entire week. Now, on the basis of that kind of writing, one would wonder why I had a great belief in his ability, but I did. Right from the beginning he broke all rules of syntax, said what he needed to, and continued to trust his own voice to all our amazement. I also felt great energy from his writing and knew if he could harness it—why, he could even move on to other subjects. As he came to writing groups during the next two years, I was impressed by his determination, and I loved his sense of humor (though at times I was the only one laughing in the group). It is true that often no one could quite understand what he was talking about, but I trusted the energy behind his words.

Often I have had students who were very coherent right from the beginning. They wrote complete sentences, were descriptive, detailed, and grounded. In Minnesota, in the heart of the Midwest, almost everyone could write like this. I heard stories about tornadoes, winters, grandmothers, but after years of that I felt there was nowhere to go in their writing. Because they did write well, they were unwilling to leave what they knew, to break into new frontiers and crack open their world into the unknown. I remember in one Tuesday-night class, the writing was so basically solid and good, I couldn’t shake them. I wanted them to foam at the mouth, becoming blithering idiots, and wander into unknown fields. At the end of the class, after they were eager to understand and didn’t, and I was eager to shake them and couldn’t, I suddenly stopped and said, “I know what the problem is! None of you have ever taken acid!”

Now, I don’t propose that LSD or psychedelics necessarily make a person a better writer. What I meant was at some point in our lives we have to be crazy, we have to lose control, step out of our ordinary way of seeing, and learn that the world is not the way we think it is, that it isn’t solid, structured, and forever. We are going to die someday, and nothing can control it. Don’t take LSD. Go to the woods alone for three days. If you are terrified of horses, buy one and make friends with it. Extend your boundaries. Live on the edge for a while. We act as though we were immortal, and are comfortable in that illusion. We don’t actually know when we will die and we hope it will be in old age, but it can be this next minute. This thought of mortality is not droll; it can make our lives very vital, present, and alert right now.

I trusted that while David was out there flying in his writing, he would land someday and make his vision clear to us who were living in the solid land of Minnesota. He would down-spiral and hit the mark exactly like a great archer. He had given himself a lot of space. If you begin too exactly, you will stay precise but never hit the exact mark that makes the words vibrate with the truth that goes through the present, past, and future.

The important thing is that David was determined and he continued. I was only half surprised when he just recently entered a master’s program in writing at the University of Minnesota so he could learn to write in full sentences and to write persuasive essays and memoirs, and so his energy could come home to roost. And it did with pieces like this:

Legs

BY
D
AVID
L
IEBERMAN

Suzuki Roshi says in
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
that “The best way to control people is to encourage them to be mischievous. Then they will be in control in its wider sense. To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control him.” You need a large field in writing too. Don’t pull in the reins too quickly. Give yourself tremendous space to wander in, to be utterly lost with no name, and then come back and speak.

The Goody Two-Shoes Nature

I
N ORDER TO
improve your writing, you have to practice just like any other sport. But don’t be dutiful and make it into a blind routine. “Yes, I have written an hour today and I wrote an hour yesterday and an hour the day before.” Don’t just put in your time. That is not enough. You have to make great effort. Be willing to put your whole life on the line when you sit down for writing practice. Otherwise you are just mechanically pushing the pen across the page and intermittently looking at the clock to see if your time is up.

Some people hear the rule “Write every day” and do it and don’t improve. They are just being dutiful. That is the way of the Goody Two-shoes. It is a waste of energy because it takes tremendous effort to just follow the rules if your heart isn’t into it. If you find that this is your basic attitude, then stop writing. Stay away from it for a week or a year. Wait until you are hungry to say something, until there is an aching in you to speak. Then come back.

Don’t worry. You won’t have lost time. Your energy will be more direct and less wasted. This does not mean “Great, I’ll stay away for a little while and then come back wanting to do it and I won’t have any more trouble.” There will always be trouble, but the embers of expression deep inside you will have had some space and air to really begin to glow. You will have made a deeper commitment and come back more fully choosing to engage.

It is also good to remember that if you have been pushing hard for a while—a few weeks, a month, a whole weekend nonstop—rest completely for a while. Do something totally different and stop thinking about writing. Go paint the living room that looks dark and ugly; paint it white. Try baking some of the desserts that you cut out the recipes for in your local newspaper. Put full energy into something else. Do your taxes or play with your kids totally for two weeks. You will learn about your own rhythm—when you need to write and when you need to rest. This will give you a deeper relationship with yourself. You won’t follow rules blindly.

I am thinking of the very close friend whom I traveled with in Europe for a month. She was very busy teaching during the year and raising her four-year-old son. This month in Europe she was determined to write an hour a day. It was very painful to watch her because she approached it as dutifully as she did her teaching, her evening cooking, her laundry.

As we talked, I found out she had never missed one day of school in her entire public school career. Even if she was sick, her mother insisted she go to school. We have been taught to follow rules and never think about the value of the rules. Over my six years in Minnesota I met several people who proudly told me they had perfect attendance in public school. I fail to see the real value of perfect attendance. Yes, schools receive a daily allowance from the government for student attendance, and there is virtue in dependability, perseverance, and regularity. These qualities should be taught, but not in a black-and-white way.

There should also be shades of gray and blue. There are dentist appointments, sadness over the death of a dog, Jewish holidays or American Indian celebrations, sore throats, a visit from your grandmother. Life is very big. There should be a flexibility in our daily routines so we have the space to feel how good it is to receive a public school education and learn to read words and form letters with our yellow pencils on white, blue-lined paper.

You need this flexibility and space also for writing. Writing asks you to be engaged. Yes, after an hour of keeping your hand moving, you will have several pages filled with words; but ultimately, you can’t fool yourself. You must enter the gray and blue and your feelings, hopes, dreams. Somewhere along you have to break through. If not in this writing session, then in the next. If you are bored for years of writing, it means you are not connecting with yourself and the process. If you have a wish hidden below your Goody Twoshoes nature to be a writer but you make effort only as far as putting in your time, it just isn’t enough.

Sometimes you have to change something else in your life in order to go further. Writing alone is not enough. One night in the Milan airport, after we had each had a glass of wine, my friend asked me, “Well, do you think I’ll be a writer?” I had to say the truth. “Well, I think you will have a good life, bring up a good kid, and have a happy marriage. I don’t know if you’ll be a writer.” She slammed down her glass and said with more energy and original response than she had the whole trip thus far, “I’m not going to finish out my life cooking hot dogs on Sundays!” When the month was over she had firmly decided to quit her eleven-year-old teaching job, which she had been tired of for the last few years, and try something absurd that she had always wanted to do—be a bartender. Her writing the last days of the trip was full of vitality.

When I lived in the Midwest I loved to walk in cornfields. I would drive out to farmland, park my car, and walk in the rows of cornfields for hours. In fall you could hear the dry stalks crack. When I invited a friend to join me, her immediate response was, “But isn’t that illegal? Doesn’t someone own that field?” Yes, very strictly speaking that is true, but I didn’t hurt anything. No one ever seemed to mind, and on several occasions when I met the farmers who owned the fields, they were accepting of what I did and mildly amused that I took joy in their fields.

It is important to feel out the situation. Do not make up your own rules ahead of time. If there had been barbed wire around the fields, I would have read the clear message. Rather than following rules, have a friendliness toward existence. Rules were made so things won’t be hurt or abused. If you are kind, you will naturally be doing the right thing without having to refer to legalities. I knew not to pick the corn or step on the roots, and I walked between the rows.

Don’t be a Goody Two-shoes just to be a Goody Two-shoes. It is not based on any reality. Go into the cornfields. Go into your writing with your whole heart. Don’t set up a system—“I have to write every day”—and then numbly do it.

But please note: just as with my friend who had to change her life in order to go deeper into her writing, the reverse is also true. You can’t go deep into your writing and then step out of it, clamp down, go home, “be nice,” and not speak the truth. If you give yourself over to honesty in your practice, it will permeate your life.

You can’t straighten up during writing and then hunch back down when you let go of the pen. Writing can teach us the dignity of speaking the truth, and it spreads out from the page into all of our life, and it should. Otherwise, there is too much of a schism between who we are as writers and how we live our daily lives. That is the challenge: to let writing teach us about life and life about writing. Let it flow back and forth.

No Hindrances

I
WAS AT
a wedding in Taos, New Mexico, talking with a person I knew ten years ago at the Lama Foundation. I remembered that he had tilled and planted a whole bean crop by hand that summer. He is a builder now and says he knows if he did the dead center of what he’s supposed to be doing, it would be writing, “but building’s easier.” I told him about this book and how the day before I’d had the worst resistance to writing I ever had. “I wanted to scream and burn my typewriter. I never wanted to write again.”