Writing Down The Bones: Freeing The Writer Within (4 page)

Actually, when I look at my old notebooks, I think I have been a bit self-indulgent and have given myself too much time to meander in my discursive thoughts. I could have cut through sooner. Yet it is good to know about our terrible selves, not laud or criticize them, just acknowledge them. Then, out of this knowledge, we are better equipped to make a choice for beauty, kind consideration, and clear truth. We make this choice with our feet firmly on the ground. We are not running wildly after beauty with fear at our backs.

A List of Topics for Writing Practice

S
OMETIMES WE SIT
down to write and can’t think of anything to write about. The blank page can be intimidating, and it does get boring to write over and over again for ten minutes of practice, “I can’t think of what to say. I can’t think of what to say.” It is a good idea to have a page in your notebook where you jot down, as they come to you, ideas of topics to write about. It could be a line you heard. For example, at a restaurant I complained to one waiter about another one. His response: “I know he’s odd, but if they dance to a different drummer I say, ‘Just let them dance.’” It could be a flash of memory: your grandfather’s false teeth; how the lilacs smelled last June when you weren’t there; who you were in your saddle shoes at eight years old. It could be anything. Add to the list anytime you think of something. Then when you sit down to write, you can just grab a topic from that list and begin.

Making a list is good. It makes you start noticing material for writing in your daily life, and your writing comes out of a relationship with your life and its texture. In this way, the composting process is beginning. Your body is starting to digest and turn over your material, so even when you are not actually at the desk physically writing, there are parts of you raking, fertilizing, taking in the sun’s heat, and making ready for the deep green plants of writing to grow.

If you give your mind too much time to contemplate a beginning when you sit down to write, your monkey mind might meander over many topics and never quite get to putting a word on the page. So the list also helps to activate your writing quickly and cut through resistance. Naturally, once you begin writing you might be surprised where your mind takes the topic. That’s good. You are not trying to control your writing. You are stepping out of the way. Keep your hand moving.

But until you get your own list, here are some writing ideas:

Start to generate your own writing material and topics. It is good practice.

Fighting Tofu

D
ISCIPLINE
has always been a cruel word. I always think of it as beating my lazy part into submission, and that never works. The dictator and the resister continue to fight:

“I don’t want to write.”

“You are going to write.”

“I’ll write later. I’m tired.”

“You’ll write now.”

All the while my notebook remains empty. It’s another way that ego has to continue to struggle. Katagiri Roshi has a wonderful term: “fighting the tofu.” Tofu is cheese made out of soybeans. It is dense, bland, white. It is fruitless to wrestle with it; you get nowhere.

If those characters in you want to fight, let them fight. Meanwhile, the sane part of you should quietly get up, go over to your notebook, and begin to write from a deeper, more peaceful place. Unfortunately, those two fighters often come with you to your notebook since they are inside your head. We can’t always leave them in the backyard or basement or at the day-care center. So you might have to give them five or ten minutes of voice in your notebook. Let them carry on in writing. It is amazing that when you give those voices writing space, their complaining quickly gets boring and you get sick of them.

It’s just resistance. Ego can be very creative and make up remarkable resistive tactics. My friend who was beginning her first novel said that she would sit at the typewriter for the first ten minutes and just write about what a terrible writer she was, what a jerk she was to even attempt a novel. Then she pulled out that sheet of paper, tore it up, and began on the task at hand—the next chapter of her novel.

It is important to have a way worked out to begin your writing; otherwise, washing the dishes becomes the most important thing on earth—anything that will divert you from writing. Finally, one just has to shut up, sit down, and write. That is painful. Writing is so simple, basic, and austere. There are no fancy gadgets to make it more attractive. Our monkey minds would much rather discuss our resistances with a friend at a lovely restaurant or go to a therapist to work out our writing blocks. We like to complicate simple tasks. There is a Zen saying: “Talk when you talk, walk when you walk, and die when you die.” Write when you write. Stop battling yourself with guilt, accusations, and strong-arm threats.

But after saying all this, I will tell you a few tricks I have done in the past to nudge me along:

You can make up all kinds of friendly tricks. Just don’t get caught in the endless cycle of guilt, avoidance, and pressure. When it is your time to write, write.

Trouble with the Editor

T
HE MORE CLEARLY
you know the editor, the better you can ignore it. After a while, like the jabbering of an old drunk fool, it becomes just prattle in the background. Don’t reinforce its power by listening to its empty words. If the voice says, “You are boring,” and you listen to it and stop your hand from writing, that reinforces and gives credence to your editor. That voice knows that the term boring will stop you dead in your tracks, so you’ll hear yourself saying that a lot about your writing. Hear “You are boring” as distant white laundry flapping in the breeze. Eventually it will dry up and someone miles away will fold it and take it in. Meanwhile you will continue to write.

Elkton, Minnesota: Whatever’s in Front of You

I
WALK INTO THE
classroom in Elkton, Minnesota. Early April the fields around the school are wet, unplowed, not seeded yet. And the sky is deep gray. I tell the twenty-five eighth-graders that I am a Jew after I hear that
rabbis
is one of their spelling words. None of them has ever seen a Jew before. I am aware that everything I do now for the next hour represents “Jew.” I walk in eating an apple: all Jews now will eat apples. I tell them I have never lived in a small town: now no Jew has ever lived in the country. One student asked if I knew anyone in a concentration camp. And we talk about the Germans: many are of German descent.

They are very warm and there’s a beautiful depth of vulnerability about them. They know what well the water they drink comes from, that their cat who ran away two years ago will not return, how their hair feels against their heads as they run. I don’t have to give them any rules about poetry. They live in that place already. Close to things. So I ask them, “Where do you come from, who are you, what makes you?” I tell them I’m from the city but I know these fields. In writing you can know everything. You can be here and know the streets of New York. You can have parts of others live in you: “I am the wing of the crow that left and will not return.”

So this is one way to generate writing. I didn’t have a plan before I went into class. I tried to be present, unafraid, open, and the situation gave me the subject. I know this is true wherever I go. The trick is to keep your heart open. In an inner-city school in downtown Manhattan I might come to a class armored with all kinds of ready-to-fix writing exercises, because I would be more scared. I was brought up in New York and have heard many stories. That would be a loss for everyone, mostly for myself. If I’m afraid, my writing’s bent, untruthful to what is real. “But there is cause for fear there!” No, that’s going in with a preconceived idea.