A Writer's Space Page 4

  “I’ve also noticed that it’s important for me to get a balance between writing and marketing. When I focused primarily on marketing for a few days, I became crabby in that way that happens when I am away from a daily connection to my writing. In the midst of this frustrating stretch of marketing efforts, I found that I had to return to my writing. But when I don’t ask myself what am I going to do to market my work, I also get frustrated. So the next step is to use these focusing sentences and become aware of the patterns of work that balance me as a productive writer and a productive saleswoman.”

  Max, a screenwriter, explained: “One day this week I decided that I would only have time to read over a part of my screenplay and, because I had been so specific in my planning, I did manage to make the time to do it, even though I felt really tired. This way of choosing what to write each day feels just right: it helps me feel calm and very clear in my own mind about the writing projects I want to tackle.

  “Yesterday, for instance, because my writing choices were written out, late in the day I happened upon my list and realized that I’d forgotten my intentions. So I squeezed a little writing in. But I’d like to do better than this and not just ‘happen on my list.’ I recognize that I don’t have this habit in place yet and I just have to keep working at it.”

  Each day that you find yourself at home, even for just the few hours before work and the few hours after work, choose to get some writing done and some marketing done. To do that, you may have to crack through your resistance, fight through your fatigue, and have a chat with yourself about why writing is the better choice than flipping on the television. You may have to splash cold water on your face, quiet your fears about entering the mysterious space of your new novel, and skip certain “pressing” duties, such as analyzing the day’s junk mail. None of that may come easily. But you have that choice.

  Home is a funny place. It is the place to unwind, watch a movie, kick off your shoes, and drop your public persona. It is the place to read a magazine, surf the Internet, and return a few phone calls. But if you are a writer, it is also your office. It is your place of business. It is the place where you think hard as well as relax. It is the place where you suffer some as you try to get your writing ideas worked out, so it is not always a cheerful place. It can’t always be a happy, kick-off-your-shoes kind of place: if it is, you aren’t writing and you aren’t selling.

  This means that you have to enter into a complex relationship with your home space, one defined by a critical daily choice: how much of the time you will be “at home” and how much of the time you will be “at work.” Maybe you can make some clear distinctions, for instance that when you are in your study you are “working” and when you leave it you are “at home” again. But such neatness is hard to maintain. What if an idea comes to you unbidden when you are doing the dishes? Will you tell it to come back later, when you’re back in your study? No; you’ll be forced to make the kind of choice we’ve been discussing throughout: to be a writer, or not to be.

  LESSON 9

  The writing life is defined by the succession of choices you make, primary among them whether or not you will write.

  To Do

  1. Answer the following question: “How can I construct my home life around the fact that home is where I both relax and work?”

  2. Every day, make a concrete (though simple) plan for your writing life—for instance, “Today I will write from six A.M. to eight A.M.”

  3. At least several days a week, make a concrete (though simple) plan for your marketing life—for instance, “Today I’ll write two sample columns.”

  4. Choose writing.

  CHAPTER 10

  Your Mind on Brownies

  In the pieces to come we’ll chat about the dark and the light: the dark of emotional disturbance, stolen neurons, and meaning crises, the light of worlds birthed, park-bench musings, and you sitting at your desk with a smile and a bright idea.

  A writer’s space is just like that, dark and light, and more gossamer and golden the more you can manage your moods, write to your satisfaction, and enjoy some successes. As a sensible creature, you certainly don’t expect round-the-clock sunshine. But you do expect some excellent pleasures. Here are some of them.

  It is quiet. You have a lovely idea for a book. You take your laptop out to the living room sofa. No one is around. You boot up your laptop. Your idea is percolating; you can feel some richness coming. You make yourself a cup of white pomegranate tea and pull out the pan of brownies from the refrigerator.

  Should you cut yourself a small piece, a medium-sized piece, or a large piece? This is such a lucky hour that you go for the large. You are ready: big brownie, hot tea, and the fine pressure of delivery. The light is subdued but ample; the world is hushed; you open a new file and see a blank page appear. Even the morning stars stop twinkling so as not to distract you.

  You begin. Nothing is in the way. Your physical space is a joy. Your emotional space is clear. Your neurons are firing. Your fingers move and a sentence appears. It is beautiful from beginning to end, pregnant with meaning, exactly what you intended, and as good a start to this journey as you could have asked for. It is so fine a start that the next sentence tumbles right out, dying to join the first.

  This is a good hour. No sugar blues, only sugar happiness. No doubts, only enthusiasm. No minced ideas, only serendipity. You continue. Whole pages come. On some days 500 words exhaust you; today you find yourself on page nine so suddenly that you wonder if you’re in a parallel universe, one where writing is easy.

  You have no need to reread what you’ve written; you know that it’s working. Another thousand words come and that’s that, that’s all your brain can manage. But you’ve put almost four thousand words down on paper, a twentieth of your book, good words, words as good as words get. You created a world that when you awoke didn’t exist; and you just know that other human beings like yourself will be happy to experience this world, that your imagined world will become their vicarious home for the few hours they visit it.

  You never did finish your brownie. You remember taking a few bites and then you vanished into the writing. Now you heat up your half-cup of tea and luxuriate with it and the excellent remaining brownie chunk. It is very smooth but also very nutty, the perfect brownie, not unlike this perfect writing day.

  As soon as you finish your tea and brownie a wisp of a meaning crisis drifts by: you’ve written, you’ve had your brownie, and now what? But you smile, shake your head, and decide where you will make your next meaningful investment. You will do a little writing business. You are just in the mood for feeling like a real writing professional, someone who segues effortlessly from making magic to selling product.

  You sit back and dream a whole series into existence, one that starts with the book you began to birth this morning and that takes readers on a splendid journey through many volumes. You create the series in an hour and spend another few hours polishing your vision and making sure of your intentions. Then you craft the sales piece describing the series, the rhetorically powerful sales piece that will cause editors to drool and pull out their checkbooks.

  But wait! The day isn’t over yet. While you were dreaming your series into existence you were, unbeknownst to yourself, also still working on your book. Now another few thousand words of that book demand to be gathered. You gather them; it becomes evening; you have hardly moved from your spot all day long. Now for some dinner! Could a writer have a better day?

  Fortunately this doesn’t happen every day or we would be insufferably happy. But we are glad that it happens occasionally. No, the writing life is more than tumbleweed and sandpaper, addictions and mental lapses, chill winds and botched endings. Some days, it is the best thing on earth. Some days, it is the kind of thing that makes even a sad mortal quietly smile. Some days, it is amazing.

  And what if we never experience a perfect writing day? We write anyway. We write anyway, because we are the sort of creature who sees something a
t the age of seven, and something else when we are fifteen, and knows that it is our destiny—one of our destinies—to pull that all together into a fine piece of fiction that would also make an excellent movie. It is only one of our destinies, as we can also go in that other direction, in the direction of not writing. But who wants to go there?

  LESSON 10

  It is your destiny to write, but it is only a potential destiny. Assure your fate by creating right space and living and working there.

  To Do

  1. Make absolutely sure that you have a primary writing space. Then write there, serious in your meaning intentions.

  2. Go there now.

  3. Bring along a brownie and a cup of tea.

  4. Have a splendid writing day. And if it isn’t splendid, write anyway.

  Part III

  Mind Space

  CHAPTER 11

  Your New Impeccability

  Writing is what you do when you compose an email. Creating is what you do when you compose War and Peace. To paraphrase Mark Twain, the first resembles the second as the lightning bug resembles lightning. The movement from composing an e-mail to composing War and Peace isn’t quantitative: it isn’t the process of stringing ten thousand e-mails together. It isn’t the process of writing 250 words every day or writing for an hour every day. Rather, it is the act of stepping off a cliff and tumbling, in total bewilderment, head-over-heels through creative space.

  The writer looking to do some interesting work on her novel, screenplay, essay, or poem is obliged to remember that her mind is not as easy to use as a can opener and that her personality is not as easy to remove as an overcoat. She likely needs to move— not from Boise to New York, not from her Jungian therapist to a Freudian therapist, not from workshop to workshop, but from her current way of being to a different space, to “right inner space.” What does right inner space look like? How do you get there and stay there? Those are our questions.

  The first thing you have to do in order to acquire right inner space is to shed your everyday personality. You have to stop being somebody’s daughter, somebody’s wife, somebody who worries about the weather and the price of apples, somebody who got humiliated in third grade by Mrs. Lester, somebody who hasn’t written enough these past twenty years, somebody who furiously cleans if company is coming, somebody who . . . you need to shed all of that! You need to shed all of that and become a weightless, boundless mind whose body and wardrobe are just along for the ride.

  Unfortunately, you can’t slip out of your personality like a snake discards its skin. Your personality is inside every cell and molecule of your being. Therefore you must disintegrate, evaporate, and vanish, in order to reintegrate, condense, and reappear as a creative writer. Right inner space arrives only after your own magnificent demolition and reconstruction. That’s why you may not have been writing enough. That’s why it may have taken you three years to write a draft of your novel that still isn’t really done or really adequate. You never stopped to blow yourself up. You never stopped being the person bogged down in mind chatter and shackled to the firing of worried thoughts. Picture one of those Las Vegas hotels getting demolished. That’s what needed to happen!

  How are you supposed to accomplish this magnificent demolition and reconstruction? Wait: we had better address the dangers first. The primary danger in agreeing to create, rather than in agreeing to merely write, is that you are agreeing to throw over your everyday being and turn yourself into a vehicle run by your imagination. You are agreeing to stand perplexed for a whole year as your plot works itself out, agitated for every second of that year as this idea and then that idea spills out from your firing neurons, all those tumbling ideas demanding to be understood, evaluated, accepted, or rejected.

  You are agreeing to a new impeccability, where every word, every paragraph, and every idea you set down on paper has to pass muster, not in the first draft but eventually. You are agreeing to bleed for your art on days when your ideas torture you. Do not nod and agree to risk your equanimity and to live tumultuously unless you mean it. Maybe you didn’t quite understand what was being asked of you when, previously, you casually agreed that you were willing to take some risks for the sake of your writing. I hope that the matter is clearer to you now. If it is, it is time to get a new agreement in place.

  Now you are really agreeing to unleash your creativity. You are agreeing to turn over your inner life to your art. You are agreeing to create right inner space in which worlds and not mere sentences are born. In that space great and horrible collisions will occur. You accept that, embrace that, and refuse to flinch from that. In that space worlds regularly explode. Get ready! If you agree, scribble across this page: “I agree!” (Unless this is a library book.)

  It is good to have this agreement in place. I hope that you’re excited. You just agreed to be a creative machine, a creative whirlwind, a creative daredevil. Congratulations! Now we can begin.

  The first step in creating right inner space is that you vanish. You manage your personality, your neuroses, your dramas, your foments, your excuses, your doubts, your regrets, your parents’ admonitions, the constricting feel of your first-grade classrooms and become no one, everyone, and a god or a goddess. You become your potential! You actually become your potential.

  You do this shedding in the following way: by recovering those billions of neurons that are presently trapped thinking thoughts of no particular use to you. You become a truly creative person by recovering your mind. More on that in a moment.

  LESSON 11

  To be a writer you must write, but being a writer is not about writing. The next time you worry your brain about whether you can write, slap yourself hard. Everyone can write. Your worry should be whether you are brave enough to vanish into the depths of your neuronal circuitry and come back with creations. You are a diver, not a writer; an explorer, not a writer; an inventor, not a writer; a magician, not a writer.

  To Do

  1. Agree to be creative. Don’t agree if you don’t mean it.

  2. Agree to give up every excuse you have ever employed to avoid getting your writing done. You know what they are: that you are too busy, too tired, too far behind, too burdened by that mean-spirited spouse, too tall to sit comfortably at your desk, too unhappy, too computer illiterate, too constrained by responsibilities, too cold in the morning, too. . . .

  3. Stop being the you that doesn’t serve you.

  4. Open up to a great piece of fiction-shaped or nonfiction-shaped imagining. Begin it!

  CHAPTER 12

  Self-Help for Neurons

  How can you release your billions of neurons from their slavish grip on remembering your brother-in-law’s telephone number and your favorite color? Well, first the idea has to make sense to you. You have to agree with my contention that knowing the birthdates of everyone in your family, down to Cousin Marvin and Aunt Rose, costs you whole books and whole decades of your writing life.

  You have to recognize the following: that minding a worry as if you are minding an infant, such that the worry is never far from consciousness and losing sight of it for an instant causes you to start scurrying around the apartment searching for it, is not some innocent neurotic handicap but a complete self-theft program. It is the perfect way to steal billions of neurons from your meager many billions, leaving you stupider and less imaginative. How clever is that?

  It is time to stop giving away billions of your neurons to task maintenance, memory maintenance, and worry maintenance. Isn’t it?

  It is one thing to have a worry when it is appropriate to have a worry. The day before your Nobel Prize acceptance speech, it is appropriate to put in for a wake-up call and to worry that your request hasn’t quite registered in the eyes of the handsome Swedish desk clerk. Given your worry, you say, “Did you get that? I need to get up tomorrow. The king is expecting me.” Experience teaches us whether or not the quality of the clerk’s response reassures us or continues to worry us. If it continues to worry us, we sidl
e down the counter to another clerk, smile, and exclaim, “I need a wake-up call tomorrow at five A.M.! Can you help me?” We continue smiling when she pushes a few buttons and curtly replies, “Sir, that has been taken care of!”

  Then we forget about it.

  If we’ve been worried about that wake-up call for the three months leading up to Stockholm, we probably haven’t written our acceptance speech yet, and shame on us! On the other hand, if we know perfectly well that there are plenty of things to worry about, from today’s gulag to the escalating price of tangerines, but refuse to turn over a single neuron to mere unproductive worry, then we’ll have sufficient neurons available to write a really excellent acceptance speech, like the one Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, so fine a speech that it is available in paperback.

  A famous Zen parable, slightly mangled in the retelling, goes as follows. Master and disciple are out walking. They come to a deep, fast-rushing stream and encounter a damsel in distress who, perhaps because she prefers not to get her skirt wet, is stuck on this side of the stream. She asks the master to carry her across. Because of the ascetic tradition that they practice, the disciple presumes that the master will say no.

  Lo and behold, the master agrees and carries her across. Master and disciple proceed on their merry way, the disciple brooding about (or envious of) the fact that his teacher got to touch a lady. Back at the monastery, the disciple confronts the master, exclaiming, “How could you do that? We are expressly forbidden to touch a woman!” The master smiles benignly (or else whacks him with a stick—I forget) and replies, “Are you still thinking about that woman? I left her at the riverbank and look, you are still carrying her around!”