Writing Down The Bones: Freeing The Writer Within (7 page)

And in using them, you are not only baking cakes and buzzing around the oven. In writing with detail, you are turning to face the world. It is a deeply political act, because you are not just staying in the heat of your own emotions. You are offering up some good solid bread for the hungry.

Living Twice

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RITERS LIVE TWICE.
They go along with their regular life, are as fast as anyone in the grocery store, crossing the street, getting dressed for work in the morning. But there’s another part of them that they have been training. The one that lives everything a second time. That sits down and sees their life again and goes over it. Looks at the texture and details.

In a rainstorm, everyone quickly runs down the street with umbrellas, raincoats, newspapers over their heads. Writers go back outside in the rain with a notebook in front of them and a pen in hand. They look at the puddles, watch them fill, watch the rain splash in them. You can say a writer practices being dumb. Only a dummy would stand out in the rain and watch a puddle. If you’re smart, you get in out of the rain so you won’t catch cold, and you have health insurance, in case you get sick. If you’re dumb, you are more interested in the puddle than in your security and insurance or in getting to work on time.

You’re more interested, finally, in living life again in your writing than in making money. Now, let’s understand—writers do like money; artists, contrary to popular belief, do like to eat. It’s only that money isn’t the driving force. I feel very rich when I have time to write and very poor when I get a regular paycheck and no time to work at my real work. Think of it. Employers pay salaries for time. That is the basic commodity that human beings have that is valuable. We exchange our time in life for money. Writers stay with the first step—their time—and feel it is valuable even before they get money for it. They hold on to it and aren’t so eager to sell it. It’s like inheriting land from your family. It’s always been in your family: they have always owned it. Someone comes along and wants to buy it. Writers, if they are smart, won’t sell too much of it. They know once it’s sold, they might be able to buy a second car, but there will be no place they can go to sit still, no place to dream on.

So it is good to be a little dumb when you want to write. You carry that slow person inside you who needs time; it keeps you from selling it all away. That person will need a place to go and will demand to stare into rain puddles in the rain, usually with no hat on, and to feel the drops on her scalp.

Writers Have Good Figures

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HAT PEOPLE DON’T
realize is that writing is physical. It doesn’t have to do with thought alone. It has to do with sight, smell, taste, feeling, with everything being alive and activated. The rule for writing practice of “keeping your hand moving,” not stopping, actually is a way to physically break through your mental resistances and cut through the concept that writing is just about ideas and thinking. You are physically engaged with the pen, and your hand, connected to your arm, is pouring out the record of your senses. There is no separation between the mind and body; therefore, you can break through the mind barriers to writing through the physical act of writing, just as you can believe with your mind that your hand won’t stop at the wood, so you can break a board in karate.

After one writing class a student, in amazement, said, “Oh, I get it! Writing is a visual art!” Yes, and it’s a kinesthetic, visceral art too. I’ve told fourth-graders that my writing hand could knock out Muhammad Ali. They believed me because they know it is true. Sixth-graders are older and more skeptical. I’ve had to prove it to them by putting my fist through their long gray lockers.

When I look around at people writing, I can tell just by their physical posture if they have broken through or not. If they did, their teeth are rattling around in their mouth, no longer tight in their gums; their hearts might be pounding hard or aching. They are breathing deeply. Their handwriting is looser, more generous, and their bodies are relaxed enough to run for miles. This is why I say all writers, no matter how fat, thin, or flabby, have good figures. They are always working out. Remember this. They are in tune, toned up, in rhythm with the hills, the highway, and can go for long stretches and many miles of paper. They move with grace in and out of many worlds.

And what great writers actually pass on is not so much their words, but they hand on their breath at their moments of inspiration. If you read a great poem aloud—for example, “To a Skylark” by Percy Bysshe Shelley—and read it the way he set it up and punctuated it, what you are doing is breathing his inspired breath at the moment he wrote that poem. That breath was so powerful it still can be awakened in us over 150 years later. Taking it on is very exhilarating. This is why it is good to remember: if you want to get high, don’t drink whiskey; read Shakespeare, Tennyson, Keats, Neruda, Hopkins, Millay, Whitman, aloud and let your body sing.

Listening

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T SIX YEARS OLD
I was sitting at my cousin’s piano in Brooklyn making believe I was playing a song and singing along with it: “In the gloaming, oh my darling . . .” My cousin, who was nine years older, sat down beside me on the piano stool and screamed to my mother, “Aunt Sylvia, Natalie is tone-deaf. She can’t sing!” From then on, I never sang and I rarely listened to music. When I heard the scores from Broadway shows on radio, I just learned the words and never tried to imitate the melody. As I grew older my friends and I played a game, Name That Tune. I would hum something and they would break into peals of laughter, not possibly believing I was actually humming “Younger Than Springtime” from South Pacific. This was a way I received attention, though my young heart secretly longed to be Gypsy Rose Lee. After all, I knew all the words to all the songs. But basically, the world of music was not available to me. I was tone-deaf: I had a physical defect, like a missing foot or finger.

Several years ago I took a singing lesson from a Sufi singing master, and he told me there is no such thing as tone-deafness. “Singing is 90 percent listening. You have to learn to listen.” If you listen totally, your body fills with the music, so when you open your mouth the music automatically comes out of you. A few weeks after that, I sang in tune with a friend for the first time in my life and thought for sure I had become enlightened. My individual voice disappeared and our two voices became one.

Writing, too, is 90 percent listening. You listen so deeply to the space around you that it fills you, and when you write, it pours out of you. If you can capture that reality around you, your writing needs nothing else. You don’t only listen to the person speaking to you across the table, but simultaneously listen to the air, the chair, and the door. And go beyond the door. Take in the sound of the season, the sound of the color coming in through the windows. Listen to the past, future, and present right where you are. Listen with your whole body, not only with your ears, but with your hands, your face, and the back of your neck.

Listening is receptivity. The deeper you can listen, the better you can write. You take in the way things are without judgment, and the next day you can write the truth about the way things are. Jack Kerouac in his list of prose essentials said, “Be submissive to everything. Open. Listening.” He also said, “No time for poetry, but exactly what is.” If you can capture the way things are, that’s all the poetry you’ll ever need.

Rabbi Zalman Schachter once told a group of people at the Lama Foundation that when he was in rabbinical school the students were not allowed to take notes. They had to just listen, and when the lecture was done they were expected to know it. The idea was that we can remember everything. We choose and have trained our minds to repress things.

After something is read in class, I often have the students do a “recall”: “As close as you can to the exact words of what was said or written, repeat anything that was strong for you. Don’t step away and say, ‘I liked when she talked about the farmland.’ Give us exact details: ‘Standing in the field, I was lonelier than a crow.’” Besides opening and receiving what was said, this kind of deep, nonevaluative listening awakens stories and images inside you. By listening in this way you become a clear mirror to reflect reality, your reality and the reality around you.

Basically, if you want to become a good writer, you need to do three things. Read a lot, listen well and deeply, and write a lot. And don’t think too much. Just enter the heat of words and sounds and colored sensations and keep your pen moving across the page.

If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you. Maybe it’s not quite that easy, but if you want to learn something, go to the source. Basho, the great seventeenth-century Haiku master, said, “If you want to know about a tree, go to the tree.” If you want to know poetry, read it, listen to it. Let those patterns and forms be imprinted in you. Don’t step away from poetry to analyze a poem with your logical mind. Enter poetry with your whole body. Dogen, a great Zen master, said, “If you walk in the mist, you get wet.” So just listen, read, and write. Little by little, you will come closer to what you need to say and express it through your voice.

Be patient and don’t worry about it. Just sing and write in tune.

Don’t Marry the Fly

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ATCH WHEN YOU
listen to a piece of writing. There might be spaces where your mind wanders. We sometimes respond with comments such as “I don’t know, it got too deep for me” or “There was just too much description, I couldn’t follow it.” Often the problem is not in the reader but in the writing.

These are places where the writer went back on himself, became diverted in his own mind’s enjoyment, forgetting where the story was originally heading.

A writer might be writing about a restaurant scene but become obsessed with the fly on the napkin and begin to describe, in minute detail, the fly’s back, the fly’s dreams, its early childhood, its technique for flying through screen windows. The reader or listener becomes lost because right before that the waiter had come to the table in the writing and the listener is waiting for him to serve the food. Also, the writer may not be clear on his true direction or not directly present with his material. This creates a blur in the writing. It is some area that is fuzzy and so loses the reader’s attention because it makes a little gap, letting the reader’s mind wander away from the work.

A responsibility of literature is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander. The fly on the table might be part of the whole description of a restaurant. It might be appropriate to tell precisely the sandwich that it just walked over, but there is a fine line between precision and self-indulgence.

Stay on the side of precision; know your goal and stay present with it. If your mind and writing wander from it, bring them gently back. When we write, many avenues open up inside us. Don’t get too far afield. Stay with the details and with your direction. Don’t be self-absorbed, which eventually creates vague, muddy writing. We might really get to know the fly but forget where we are: the restaurant, the rain outside, the friend across the table. The fly is important, but it has its place. Don’t ignore the fly; don’t become obsessed with it. Irving Howe wrote in his introduction to
Jewish American Stories
that the best art
almost
becomes sentimental but doesn’t. Recognize the fly, even love it if you want, but don’t marry it.

Don’t Use Writing to Get Love

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BOUT FIVE YEARS
ago a friend was mugged on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She told me later that she threw up her arms and immediately yelled, “Don’t kill me, I’m a writer!” “How odd,” I thought at the time. “Why did she think that would save her?”

Writers get confused. We think writing gives us an excuse for being alive. We forget that being alive is unconditional and that life and writing are two separate entities. Often we use writing as a way to receive notice, attention, love. “See what I wrote. I must be a good person.” We
are
good people before we ever write a word.

A few years ago, after every reading I gave, no matter how well everyone appreciated my work, I felt lonely and terrible. I blamed it on my writing. It wasn’t my work that was the problem. I was going through a divorce and had very low self-esteem.
I
needed support—not my poetry. I confused the two. I forgot that I am not the poem. The poems were healthy; I wasn’t.
I
needed care. From then on I always invited a friend to be my “date” at public events. I told the friend that as soon as I was finished reading, “Come right up to me, hug me, tell me how beautiful I looked and how wonderful I am. I don’t care if I totally bombed out that night. Tell me I am wonderful.” A week later I can take a close look at my performance. That night, “Tell me I’m wonderful.”

As writers we are always seeking support. First we should notice that we are already supported every moment. There is the earth below our feet and there is the air, filling our lungs and emptying them. We should begin from this when we need support. There is the sunlight coming through the window and the silence of the morning. Begin from these. Then turn to face a friend and feel how good it is when she says, “I love your work.” Believe her as you believe the floor will hold you up, the chair will let you sit.

I had a student who sent me two short stories to read, and then the following week we had an hourlong conference. I hadn’t worked with her in a year and a half, and I was impressed by her progress. I told her, “The stories are complete, touching, very beautiful.” I began to notice about twenty minutes into the conference that she was becoming angry. “I think you are charging me too much.” What she was really saying was, “You haven’t done your work. You didn’t spend time ripping them apart. I didn’t come here to hear compliments. These couldn’t possibly be so good. You are exaggerating.” “Listen, you have to believe me. This is terrific work. It’s ready for publication.” I suggested she send it out. Within a month one of the stories was accepted by a very fine magazine. Not only was she paid, but they told her that they had recently decided to stop publishing short stories, but “This was so good, we changed our minds.”