Writing Down The Bones: Freeing The Writer Within (10 page)

Talk Is the Exercise Ground

G
ET TOGETHER WITH
a good friend and tell stories. Tell about the time you had your palm read in Albuquerque, how you sat zazen in a chicken coop in Arroyo Seco, New Mexico, with your friend Sassafras, how your mother eats cottage cheese and toast every morning.

When you tell friends stories, you want them to listen, so you make the stories colorful; you might exaggerate, even add a few brilliant white lies. And your friends don’t care if it’s all not precisely as it was ten years ago; it is now and they are entranced. A writing friend once said to me when I met him for lunch: “Tell me the best piece of gossip you heard in the last month. And if you don’t know any, make it up.” Grace Paley, a New York short story writer, said, “It is the responsibility of writers to listen to gossip and pass it on. It is the way all storytellers learn about life.”

It is good to talk. Do not be ashamed of it. Talk is the exercise ground for writing. It is a way we learn about communication—what makes people interested, what makes them bored. I laugh with friends and say, “We are not gossiping cruelly. We are just trying to understand life.” And it is true. We should learn to talk, not with judgment, greed, or envy, but with compassion, wonder, and amazement.

I remember sitting after a concert in the New French Bar in downtown Minneapolis with a writing friend and telling her about how I became a Buddhist. Because of the intensity of her listening, the story, which I had told many times, took on a great brilliance. I remember the light off the wineglasses, the taste of my chocolate mousse. I knew then that I had to write the story—there was great material in it.

Talk is a way writers can help each other find new directions. “Hey, that’s great; have you written about it?” “That’s a good line, ‘I lived here six years and can’t remember a thing, not a thing.’ Write it down and begin a poem with it.” Once I came home from a visit in Boston and said to a friend in passing, “Oh, he’s crazy about her.” She was in the process of writing a mystery novel in those days and honed in, “How can you tell he was crazy about her? Tell me what actions he did.” I laughed. You can’t make general statements around writers—they want me not to “tell” but to “show” with incidents.

Another friend told me about her father who left the family suddenly when she was twelve and became a born-again Christian and embezzled money from the churches of three states. It was her personal tragedy. I told her it was a great story. Her face lit up. She realized she could transform her life in a new way—as material for writing.

Talk is a way to warm up for the big game—the hours you write alone with your pen and notebook. Make a list of all the stories you have told over and over. That’s a lot of writing to be done.

Writing Is a Communal Act

A
STUDENT SAID,
“I’m reading so much Hemingway, I’m afraid I’m beginning to sound like him. I’m copying him and not having my own voice.” That’s not so bad. It’s a lot better to sound like Ernest Hemingway than like Aunt Bethune, who thinks Hallmark greeting cards contain the best poetry in America.

We always worry that we are copying someone else, that we don’t have our own style. Don’t worry. Writing is a communal act. Contrary to popular belief, a writer is not Prometheus alone on a hill full of fire. We are very arrogant to think we alone have a totally original mind. We are carried on the backs of all the writers who came before us. We live in the present with all the history, ideas, and soda pop of this time. It all gets mixed up in our writing.

Writers are great lovers. They fall in love with other writers. That’s how they learn to write. They take on a writer, read everything by him or her, read it over again until they understand how the writer moves, pauses, and sees. That’s what being a lover is: stepping out of yourself, stepping into someone else’s skin. Your ability to love another’s writing means those capabilities are awakened in you. It will only make you bigger; it won’t make you a copy cat. The parts of another’s writing that are natural to you will become you, and you will use some of those moves when you write. But not artificially. Great lovers realize that they are what they are in love with. That is what happened to Allen Ginsberg when he wanted to write so that Jack Kerouac could understand him: “. . . being in love with Jack Kerouac he discovered he was Jack Kerouac: that’s something love knows.”
⁹
You are Ernest Hemingway on a safari when you read
Green Hills of Africa
, and then you are Jane Austen looking at Regency women and then Gertrude Stein doing her own Cubism in words, and then you are Larry McMurtry in Texas walking to the pool hall in a dusty town.

So writing is not just writing. It is also having a relationship with other writers. And don’t be jealous, especially secretly. That’s the worst kind. If someone writes something great, it’s just more clarity in the world for all of us. Don’t make writers “other,” different from you: “They are good and I am bad.” Don’t create that dichotomy. It makes it hard to become good if you create that duality. The opposite, of course, is also true: if you say, “I am great and they aren’t,” then you become too proud, unable to grow as a writer or hear criticism of your work. Just: “They are good and I am good.” That statement gives a lot of space. “They have been at it longer, and I can walk their path for a while and learn from them.”

It’s much better to be a tribal writer, writing for all people and reflecting many voices through us, than to be a cloistered being trying to find one peanut of truth in our own individual mind. Become big and write with the whole world in your arms.

Even if we go off alone to write in the wilderness, we have to commune with ourselves and everything around us: the desk, the trees, the birds, the water, the typewriter. We are not separate from everything else. It’s only our egos that make us think we are. We build on what came before us, even if our writing is a reaction to it or we try to negate the past. We still write with the knowledge of what’s at our backs.

It’s also good to know some local people who are writing and whom you can get together with for mutual support. It is very hard to continue just on your own. I tell my students in a group to get to know each other, to share their work with other people. Don’t let it just pile up in notebooks. Let it out. Kill the idea of the lone, suffering artist. We suffer anyway as human beings. Don’t make it any harder on yourself.

One Plus One Equals a Mercedes-Benz

I
ALWAYS TELL
my students, especially the sixth-graders, the ones who are becoming very worldlywise: Turn off your logical brain that says 1 + 1 = 2. Open up your mind to the possibility that 1 + 1 can equal 48, a Mercedes-Benz, an apple pie, a blue horse. Don’t tell your autobiography with facts, such as “I am in sixth grade. I am a boy. I live in Owatonna. I have a mother and father.” Tell me who you really are: “I am the frost on the window, the cry of a young wolf, the thin blade of grass.”

Forget yourself. Disappear into everything you look at—a street, a glass of water, a cornfield. Everything you feel, become totally that feeling, burn all of yourself with it. Don’t worry—your ego will quickly become nervous and stop such ecstasy. But if you can catch that feeling or smell or sight the moment you are one with it, you probably will have a great poem.

Then we fall back on the earth again. Only the writing stays with the great vision. That’s why we have to go back again and again to books—good books, that is. And read again and again the visions of who we are, how we can be. The struggle we go through as human beings, so we can again and again have compassion for ourselves and treat each other kindly.

Be an Animal

W
HEN YOU ARE
not writing, you are a writer too. It doesn’t leave you. Walk with an animal walk and take in everything around you as prey. Use your senses as an animal does. Watch a cat when he sees something moving in the room. He is perfectly still, and at the same time, his every sense is alive, watching, listening, smelling. This is how you should be when you are in the streets. The cat’s mind is not thinking about how much money he needs, or whom to write a post-card to when he visits Florence: he is watching the mouse or the marble rolling across the floor or the light reflecting in crystal. He is ready with all of him to pounce. Now, you don’t have to get down on all fours and twitch your tail. Only be still—some part of you, at least—and know where you are, no matter how busy you are.

My friend who went with me to Europe had a phobia about getting lost. She’d never learned to read a city map or pick up simple signals, like “We were in this piazza yesterday. There, across the street, is the Savoy Hotel, where we bought concert tickets, so that must be the turn.” Because she was scared, she lost all touch with her common sense, with the natural senses that we rely on as our survival tools. That place in us that is aware and that is always awake. Katagiri Roshi said: “You are Buddha right now!” Only we forget when we are busy or frightened, as my friend was. Afraid of being lost, she became lost.

As writers we have to walk in the world in touch with that present, alert part of ourselves, that animal sense part that looks, sees, and notices—street signs, corners, fire hydrants, newspaper stands.

Also, right before you are planning to write, a good preparation is to become an animal. Move slowly, stalking your prey, which is whatever you plan to write about, no matter what else you might be doing at the moment—taking out the garbage, walking to the library, watering the garden. Get all your senses intent. Turn off your logical mind—empty, no thoughts. Let your words come from your belly. Bring your brain down to your stomach and digest your thoughts. Let them give nourishment to your body. Have a round belly, like Buddha, breathing all the way inside. Don’t hold in your stomach. Be patient and measured. Let the writing percolate below the level of thought forms, in the subconscious and through your veins.

Then, when you finally pounce, let’s say at ten A.M., your designated time to write that day, add the pressure of timed writing. Write for an hour, or twenty minutes, whatever amount you decide, but write for all it’s worth. Keep your hand moving, pour out everything, straight from your veins, through your pen and onto paper. Don’t stop. Don’t doodle. Don’t daydream. Write until you’re spent.

But don’t worry. This isn’t your last chance. If you missed the mouse today, you’ll get it tomorrow. You never leave who you are. If you are a writer when writing, you also are a writer when you are cooking, sleeping, walking. And if you are a mother, a painter, a horse, a giraffe, or a carpenter, you will bring that into your writing, too. It comes with you. You can’t divorce yourself from parts of yourself.

Best come to writing whole with everything in you. And when you’re done writing, best to walk out in the street with everything you are, including your common sense or Buddha nature—something good at the center, to tell you the names of streets, so you won’t get lost. Something to tell you you can come back to your writing tomorrow and stay with your writing in the hours in between, when you are an animal, out stalking the city.

Make Statements
and Answer Questions

I
N THE EARLY
seventies there was a study done on women and language that affected me very deeply and also affected my writing. One of the things the study said was that women add on qualifiers to their statements. For instance, “The Vietnam war is awful, isn’t it?” “I like this, don’t you?” In their sentence structure women were always looking for reinforcement for their feelings and opinions. They didn’t just make statements and stand behind them: “This is beautiful.”  “This is terrible.” They needed encouragement from outside themselves. (By the way, what they found to be true for women they also mentioned was true for minorities.)

Another thing women did in their speech was to use a lot of words like
perhaps, maybe, somehow
. Indefinite modifiers. For instance, “Somehow it happened.” As though the force were beyond understanding and left the woman powerless. “Maybe I’ll go.” Again, not a clear assertive statement like “Yes, I’ll go.”

The world isn’t always black and white. A person may not be sure if she can go some place, but it is important, especially for a beginning writer, to make clear, assertive statements. “This is good.” “It was a blue horse.” Not “Well, I know it sounds funny, but I think perhaps it was a blue horse.” Making statements is practice in trusting your own mind, in learning to stand up with your thoughts.

After I read the article, I went home and looked at a poem I had just written. I made myself take out all vague, indefinite words and phrases. It felt as though I were pulling towels off my body, and I was left standing naked after a shower, exposing who I really was and how I felt. It was scary the first time, but it felt good. It made the poem much better.

So even though life is not always so clear, it is good to express yourself in clear, affirmative statements. “This is how I think and feel.” “This is who I am in this moment.” It takes practice, but it is very rewarding.

But while you are practicing writing, do not worry if you see yourself using those indefinite words. Don’t condemn yourself or be critical. Just be aware of it. Keep writing. When you go back over it, you can cut them out.

Another thing you should watch out for are questions. If you can write a question, you can answer it. When you are writing, if you write a question, that is fine. But immediately go to a deeper level inside yourself and answer it in the next line. “What should I do with my life?” I should eat three brownies, remember the sky, and become the best writer in the world. “Why did I feel weird last night?” Because I ate pigeon for dinner and I wore my shoes on the wrong feet and because I am unhappy. “Where does the wind come from?” It comes from the memory of pioneers on the Croix River. It loves the earth as far as the Dakotas.