It is true that I believed in the process. I was living in the boredom of long, dry days in the hills of New Mexico, where Jaws played for six consecutive months in the only movie theater in Taos. I had a belief in something real below the surface of life or right in the middle of life, but often my own mind kept me asleep or diverted; yet my own mind and life were also all I had. So I began writing out of them. “I see as I progress through the notebooks that this kind of writing gave you who you are. It’s a verification of being human.”
When you begin to write this way—right out of your own mind—you might have to be willing to write junk for five years, because we have accumulated it over many more than that and have been gladly avoiding it in ourselves. We have to look at our own inertia, insecurities, self-hate, fear that, in truth, we have nothing valuable to say. It is true that when we begin anything new, resistances fly in our face. Now you have the opportunity to not run or be tossed away, but to look at them black and white on paper and see what their silly voices say. When your writing blooms out of the back of this garbage and compost, it is very stable. You are not running from anything. You can have a sense of artistic security. If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you. Besides, those voices are merely guardians and demons protecting the real treasure, the first thoughts of the mind.
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
SOMETIMES 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:
Tell about the quality of light coming in through your window. Jump in and write. Don’t worry if it is night and your curtains are closed or you would rather write about the light up north—just write. Go for ten minutes, fifteen, a half hour.
Begin with “I remember.” Write lots of small memories. If you fall into one large memory, write that. Just keep going. Don’t be concerned if the memory happened five seconds ago or five years ago. Everything that isn’t this moment is memory coming alive again as you write. If you get stuck, just repeat the phrase “I remember” again and keep going.
Take something you feel strongly about, whether it is positive or negative, and write about it as though you love it. Go as far as you can, writing as though you love it, then flip over and write about the same thing as though you hate it. Then write about it perfectly neutral.
Choose a color—for instance, pink—and take a fifteen-minute walk. On your walk notice wherever there is pink. Come back to your notebook and write for fifteen minutes.
Write in different places—for example, in a laundromat, and pick up on the rhythm of the washing machines. Write at bus stops, in cafés. Write what is going on around you.
Give me your morning. Breakfast, waking up, walking to the bus stop. Be as specific as possible. Slow down in your mind and go over the details of the morning.
Visualize a place that you really love, be there, see the details. Now write about it. It could be a corner of your bedroom, an old tree you sat under one whole summer, a table at McDonald’s in your neighborhood, a place by a river. What colors are there, sounds, smells? When someone else reads it, she should know what it is like to be there. She should feel how you love it, not by your saying you love it, but by your handling of the details.
Write about “leaving.” Approach it any way you want. Write about your divorce, leaving the house this morning, or a friend dying.
What is your first memory?
Who are the people you have loved?
Write about the streets of your city.
Describe a grandparent.
Write about:
swimming
the stars
the most frightened you’ve ever been
green places
how you learned about sex
your first sexual experience
the closest you ever felt to God or nature
reading and books that have changed your life
physical endurance
a teacher you had
Don’t be abstract. Write the real stuff. Be honest and detailed.
Take a poetry book. Open to any page, grab a line, write it down, and continue from there. A friend calls it “writing off the page.” If you begin with a great line, it helps because you start right off from a lofty place. “I will die in Paris, on a rainy day. . . . It will be a Thursday,” by the poet Cesar Vallejo.3 “I will die on Monday at eleven o’clock, on Friday at three o’clock in South Dakota riding a tractor, in Brooklyn in a delicatessen,” on and on. Every time you get stuck, just rewrite your first line and keep going. Rewriting the first line gives you a whole new start and a chance for another direction—“I don’t want to die and I don’t care if I’m in Paris or Moscow or Youngstown, Ohio.”
What kind of animal are you? Do you think you are really a cow, chipmunk, fox, horse underneath?
Start to generate your own writing material and topics. It is good practice.
Fighting Tofu
DISCIPLINE 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 w
ith 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:
I haven’t written anything in a while. I call a writing friend and make a date with her to meet in a week and go over our work. I have to write something to show her.
I teach writing groups and have to do the assignments I give the class. I didn’t wait for years of writing before I began to teach writing. I was living in Taos, and there were few writers there ten years ago. I needed writing friends, so I began a women’s writing group. In teaching them, I learned to write. Baba Hari Dass, an Indian yogi, says: “Teach in order to learn.”
I’ll wake up in the morning and say, “Okay, Natalie, you have until ten A.M. to do whatever you want. At ten you must have your hand on the pen.” I give myself some space and an outside limit.
I wake up in the morning, and without thinking, washing, talking to anyone, I go right to my desk and begin writing.
These past two months I have been teaching all day, five days a week. I come home very tired and resistant to writing. There is a wonderful croissant place three blocks from my house that makes the best homemade chocolate-chip cookies for thirty cents. They also let you sit there and write forever. About an hour after I am home from work I say to myself, “Okay, Natalie, if you go to the Croissant Express and write for an hour, you can have two chocolate-chip cookies.” I am usually out the door within fifteen minutes since chocolate is one of my driving forces. One problem: on Friday I had the nerve to have four cookies instead of my quota of two, but anything to get me writing. Usually, once I’m in the midst of actually writing, it’s its own greatest reward.
I try to fill a notebook a month. There’s no quota on quality, just quantity—a full notebook, no matter what garbage I write. If it is the 25th of the month and I have only filled five pages and there are seventy more to fill by the end of the month, I have a lot of writing ahead of me in the next five days.
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
THE 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.
When I first graduated college in 1970, I worked as a substitute teacher for the Detroit public school system. It was after the race riots, and there were strong feelings of black power emanating from the students. I was naive, freshly moved to Detroit. Everything was new and I was open. I remember being called to substitute for an English class in an all-black high school. “Great,” I thought. I had been an English major in college. I grabbed my frayed hardcover copy of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and drove to my school assignment. The eleventh-graders entered the classroom at the sounding of the bell—“Hey, girl, what you doin’ here?” It was obvious that they weren’t going to dutifully sit in their seats, but I didn’t care. This was English class and I was in love with literature. “Now, wait a minute. I want to share these poems with you. I love them.” I read them my favorite, “God’s Grandeur” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, which I had often read aloud in college to the dismay of my roommates. I read it to the Detroit English class with that same energy. They were totally silent after I read. Then a student grabbed a book of poems by Langston Hughes, shoved it at me, and said, “Read these.” For the whole fifty minutes we read aloud black poets that the students wanted to hear.
Writers, when they write, need to approach things for the first time each time. A teacher in Elkton called me to the side: “Look under the desks. There’s mud on the floor from their shoes. That’s a good sign. It means spring.” And I look in wonder for the first time.
How to generate writing ideas, things to write about? Whatever’s in front of you is a good beginning. Then move out into all streets. You can go anyplace. Tell me everything you know. Don’t worry if what you know you can’t prove or haven’t studied. I know the fields around Elkton because I say I do and because I want to walk out into them forever. Don’t worry that forever might be the one week you’re there as resident poet or salesman for a tractor company or a traveler on the way west. Own anything you want in your w
riting and then let it go.
Tap the Water Table
DON’T WORRY ABOUT your talent or capability: that will grow as you practice. Katagiri Roshi said, “Capability is like a water table below the surface of earth.” No one owns it, but you can tap it. You tap it with your effort and it will come through you. So just practice writing, and when you learn to trust your voice, direct it. If you want to write a novel, write a novel. If it’s essays you want or short stories, write them. In the process of writing them, you will learn how. You can have the confidence that you will gradually acquire the technique and craft you need.
Instead people often begin writing from a poverty mentality. They are empty and they run to teachers and classes to learn about writing. We learn writing by doing it. That simple. We don’t learn by going outside ourselves to authorities we think know about it. I had a lovely fat friend once who decided he wanted to start exercising. He went to a bookstore to find a book so he could read about it! You don’t read about exercise to lose weight. You exercise to lose those pounds.