Writing Down The Bones: Freeing The Writer Within (19 page)

Naturally, there should be a place for editing and revision, but when we hear the word
editor
, we think, “Okay. I let the creator in me go wild, but now I’m going to get back to the proper, conventional, rational state of mind and finally get things in order.” We bring out the man or woman in a tweed suit from the East Coast with a doctorate in literature who is critical of everything. Don’t do that. That person in the tweed suit is just another disguise for the ego that is trying to get control of things any way it can. There should be no place in your writing for the ego to manipulate things the way it wants and to become picky. Instead, when you go over your work, become a Samurai, a great warrior with the courage to cut out anything that is not present. Like a Samurai with an empty mind who cuts his opponents in half, be willing to not be sentimental about your writing when you reread it. Look at it with a clear, piercing mind. But it is human nature to want to intrude and butt in with picky mind, so give your ego something to do. Let it type up your work, address the envelopes, lick the stamps. Just keep it out of your writing.

See revision as “envisioning again.” If there are areas in your work where there is a blur or vagueness, you can simply see the picture again and add the details that will bring your work closer to your mind’s picture. You can sit down and time yourself and add to the original work that second, third, or fourth time you wrote on something. For instance, you are writing about pastrami. Your first timed writing is good, but you know you have a lot more to say about the subject. Over a day, two days, a week’s time, do several more timed writings on pastrami. Don’t worry that you might repeat yourself. Reread them all and take the good parts of each one and combine them. It is like a cut-and-paste job, where you cut out the strong writings of each timed writing and paste them together.

So even in rewriting you use the method and rules of timed writing. This helps you to become reengaged in the work you wrote before. Attempting to reconnect with first thoughts is much better than standing in the middle of your mosquito swarm trying to swat at your discursive thoughts before they suck blood. It’s a much more efficient way to rewrite, and it bypasses the ego even in rewriting. This method of rewriting can be used for short stories, essays, chapters of novels. A friend who just completed a novel said that when she had to rewrite a chapter she would say to herself, “Okay. This chapter needs these elements, and it has to begin in the grocery store and end in the cemetery. Go for an hour.” The good parts from her timed rewritings of chapters were added to the original chapters to enrich and refine them.

Often you might read page after page in your notebooks and only come upon one, two, or three good lines. Don’t be discouraged. Remember the football teams that practice many hours for a few games. Underline those good lines. Add them to your list of writing topics, and when you sit down to practice you can grab one of those lines and keep going. Underlining them also keeps you alert to them, and often you unconsciously use them. All these disparate parts suddenly come together, and you will be amazed.

I Don’t Want to Die

S
UZUKI
R
OSHI ESTABLISHED
the San Francisco Zen Center and is the author of
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
. I have heard that he was a great Zen master. He died of cancer in 1971. When Zen masters die we like to think they will say something very inspiring as they are about to bite the Big Emptiness, something like “Hi-ho Silver!” or “Remember to wake up” or “Life is everlasting.” Right before Suzuki Roshi’s death, Katagiri Roshi, an old friend, visited him. Katagiri stood by the bedside; Suzuki looked up and said, “I don’t want to die.” That simple. He was who he was and said plainly what he felt in the moment. Katagiri bowed. “Thank you for your great effort.”

Katagiri Roshi has said that when a spiritual person stands in front of a great art masterpiece, she feels peaceful. When an artist sees a masterpiece, it urges her on to create another one. An artist exudes vitality; a spiritual person exudes peace. But, says Katagiri, behind the peace of the spiritual person is tremendous liveliness and spontaneity, which is action in the moment. And an artist, though she expresses vitality, must behind it touch down on quiet peace; otherwise, the artist will burn out. Unfortunately, we have many examples of artists who have burned out through alcoholism, suicide, and mental illness.

So while we are busy writing, all the burning life we are eager to express should come out of a place of peace. This will help us and keep us from jumping around excitedly in the middle of a story and never quite getting back to our desk to finish it. Someplace in us should know the utter simplicity of saying what we feel—“I don’t want to die”—at the moment of dying. Not in anger, self-recrimination, or self-pity, but out of an acceptance of the truth of who we are. If we can hit that level in our writing, we can touch down on something that will keep us going as writers. And though we would rather be in the high hills of Tibet than at our desks in Newark, New Jersey, and though death is howling at our backs and life is roaring at our faces, we can just begin to write, simply begin to write what we have to say.

EPILOGUE

I
FINISHED TYPING
Sunday night at eleven. I said to myself, “You know, Nat, I think the book is done.” I stood up and was very angry. I felt used. (“Used by the muse,” as my friend Miriam said later.) Suddenly I didn’t know what the book was about; it didn’t have anything to do with my life. It wouldn’t find me a lover or brush my teeth in the morning. I took a bath, climbed out of the tub, dressed, walked alone at midnight to the Lone Wolfe Café in downtown Santa Fe. I ordered a glass of white wine and two scoops of toffee ice cream. I looked at everyone, spoke to no one, and kept smiling: “I’ve finished a book. Soon maybe I can be a human being again.” I walked home relieved and happy. The next morning I cried. By the afternoon I felt wonderful.

On Tuesday I told my writing class: “The book took a year and a half to write. At least half of the chapters came out whole the first time. The biggest struggle was not with the actual writing, but working out the fear of success, the fear of failure, and finally burning through to just pure activity.” The last month and a half I wrote seven days a week. I finished one chapter and began another. That simple. The parts of me that were screaming for Häagen Dazs ice cream, for friends, for daydreaming, I did not listen to.

Anything we fully do is an alone journey. No matter how happy your friends may be for you, how much they support you, you can’t expect anyone to match the intensity of your emotions or to completely understand what you went through. This is not sour grapes. You are alone when you write a book. Accept that and take in any love and support that is given to you, but don’t have expectations of how it is supposed to be.

This is important to know. We have an idea that success is a happy occasion. Success can also be lonely, isolating, disappointing. It makes sense that it is everything. Give yourself the space to feel whatever you feel, and don’t feel as though you shouldn’t have a wide range of emotions. Katagiri Roshi once told me, “That’s very nice if they want to publish you, but don’t pay too much attention to it. It will toss you away. Just continue to write.” Two days ago I told my father, “I’m going to jump off the Empire State Building.” He said, “Do you have to pick such a high building?” I tell myself, “Natalie, this book is done. You will write another one.”

AFTERWORD

An Interview with the Author

Q: Do you think there’s a connection between place and the inspiration to write
?

I think land and environment are very important. Often, for instance in a novel, place is the third character. It’s palpable in really good novels. But I don’t think you have to be in a gorgeous place to write. I don’t think you have to be in your heart’s song. I think you just have to be where you are. In other words, if you’re in Cincinnati, if you can really eat Cincinnati, know the streets and the weather, the trees, how the light looks at the end of your workday, that’s what’s important. Now, for me, I had a great love for Taos. It was almost a lover. And it was actually painful because I couldn’t always be there. And, especially at the beginning, I couldn’t make a living there. And yet Taos was my passion. But once I got to live there fulltime, as I do now, then I remembered Katagiri Roshi, my Zen teacher, saying, “Even paradise gets stinky,” and he was right. When you know a place well, it’s a place. You might love it deeply, but it’s a place that has good and bad things. But having this place gives you a freedom to go anyplace and appreciate and love other places. Which wasn’t true for me before, because I was always fighting where I was, because I wanted to be in Taos.

Don’t do that to yourself—“I am here, but I should be there.” It was torture for me. Wherever you are is the place to be writing from. Don’t use the excuse that you are not in the right place. There is no perfect place. Just pick up your pen, record the details of where you are. Writing will show you that you are in the perfect place right now. Land is the earth. Earth is your life, moment by moment.

Q: What are the “I can’t write because” excuses that you hear the most?

People offer me thousands of excuses about why they can’t write. “I’m afraid to let myself out.” “I’m afraid to follow what I really want.” “I can’t do it now but it’s my deepest dream.” “I can’t do it now because I have a family.” “I have to make a living.” “I am scared that I’m not good enough.” “I’m afraid my father will kill me if I write about him.” I don’t pay attention at that level. All I see is that they are using some excuse, that they want something and they are not stepping forward and taking hold of it. Over the years what I’ve watched is that people don’t let themselves burn. They don’t let their passion be alive and then feed it. But I don’t listen to their excuses. After a while it’s boring. Just like my complaining is boring. It’s monkey mind. It doesn’t really matter what the excuse is. I can hear you saying, “Well, but isn’t it true? What if they do have six children and they need to feed them and they need a job?” Absolutely. But if they burn to write, they also have to find time to write, even if it’s one-half hour a week. They can’t put it off till they’re sixty. They might die at fifty-nine. You have to somehow address your whole life. We can’t put things off. Now, you could say, “Well, Natalie, you don’t have children. You don’t have this. You don’t have that.” It’s not about that. I remember being in a group where a woman was saying, “Oh, I feel so lonely”; you know, “I have so many kids and I have a husband and I’m so busy but I still feel lonely.” And I said, “That’s odd. I don’t have any of that and I feel lonely.” I think it’s the human predicament. We give a lot of names to our excuses, to the reasons we don’t want to write or we’re afraid to. Finally, if you want to write, you have to just shut up, pick up a pen, and do it. I’m sorry there are no true excuses. This is our life. Step forward. Maybe it’s only for ten minutes. That’s okay. To write feels better than all the excuses.

I had a group of students a few years ago who’d studied with me many times. I went around the room and said to them, “Well, what do you need now?” And they started in: “Well, you know, I haven’t been writing because my wife is such and such and my life is such and such.” I looked at them and said, “You know what to do, pick up a pen and write.” And their faces lit up and they said, “Oh, okay.” And I said, “Wait a minute. You traveled all the way from Chicago, from Boston, Kentucky, L.A., you’ve taken three other seminars with me. You already know this.” They said, “Yeah, but we needed to hear it again.” I was aghast. I said, “You came all the way here just to hear it?” They said yes. Something so simple and obvious, but we keep missing it. We need to discover it over and over. I remember this particular person I’m thinking of, his face was just glowing after I said it again, because he had thought this time it wouldn’t work, that this time there was really a problem big enough—and he was believing it—that it was so solid he could not write. He was so relieved to come back to this direct phrase: shut up and write. We have tremendously strong monkey minds that are very creative and always thinking of new reasons why we can’t write. Don’t believe your excuses.

Q: What is monkey mind?

Monkey mind is actually a Buddhist term. We could also call monkey mind the editor or the critic. Something that creates busyness to keep us away from our true heart. Our whole culture is built on busyness. And that’s why we’re so unhappy. But we love busyness. We have to understand it. There’s busyness, there’s monkey mind, and then there’s our true heart. What does our true heart want? We have to give it at least 50 percent. Otherwise we fill our whole life with busyness. I have to do this, I’m going here, I’m making that. Daily life is very seductive. Weeks go by and we forget who we are.

Q: What about talent?

I think talent is like a water table under the earth—you tap it with your effort and it comes through you. I see many students who come to me who can naturally write beautifully. You can’t believe it—the first time they pick up a pen, the rest of my students’ mouths hang open. But sometimes it’s too easy for them, so these people don’t believe that what they wrote was good. Sometimes it just doesn’t mean that much to them. But someone I see sitting in the corner of the room, who struggles the whole time, who seems a little nerdy, a little bland—ah, but three years later the person is still showing up. After a while, this writer’s little coal is beginning to glow. That’s wonderful.

I never thought of myself as talented. No one ever told me I had any talent. Anytime I went to a palm reader, an astrologer, I was told I should be an accountant. So it was my effort, my determination, that made new lines in my palm. I guess I’ve always believed in human effort. Human effort is not just the hard physical work of putting your shoulder to the grindstone. What I’m talking about is work that wakes us up. We all have that ability within us. Talent has nothing to do with waking up. I’m talking about being aware and mindful as a writer. Knowing the names of trees and plants, noticing the sun and how it’s hitting the chrome on a car. That comes with practice. It’s pretty nice to be talented. If you are, enjoy, but it won’t take you that far. Work takes you a lot further.