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Some thoughts on why I write

“I don’t think the right words exist already in your head, any more than the characters do. They exist somewhere else…” — Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

There’s an idea I’ve been playing with for a while now, ever since I first wrote this post on how meditation and writing might inform one another. Its an idea about where the words come from when we sit down and write our best work. It’s an idea that’s been coming up for me over and over again, both in my reading and in my writing practice, as each day I sit down and confront the blank page. It’s an answer to the question of why writers write.

What if our best writing comes from Wordlessness?

In her book Finding Your Way in a Wild New World, Martha Beck defines Wordlessness to be “a core aspect of your true nature. It connects your consciousness with the deep peace and presence that is the essential you.”

It is my growing belief that it is from Wordlessness that the very best writing comes. That it is only when we let go of rational thought and feel our way into our characters that the magic happens. That it is only when we pause and make space for  the language to flow through us rather than trying to marshal the words from some limited place within us that we manage to write things that are so true they manage to surprise us.

It is for those moments of crystalline presence that I find myself returning to the pen, returning to the empty page. It is for those moments of clarity and breathless grace that I keep seeking — reaching for the edges of something that seems to be nearly infinite.

Because it is in those moments of stillness that I return once more to myself, shedding the weight of worlds and the worries of the day. It is in those moments that I pick up the pen and write.

To quote Anne Lamott once more:

“This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small bordered worlds. When this happens everything feels more spacious.”

How does this goal impact what we write?

It’s a question I’ve been grappling with — especially as I’ve turned my attention more fully from poetry to stories in recent weeks.

For me, poetry is easy — it’s painting with words and it doesn’t have to have a why (although, admittedly, it often does). To my mind poetry is a bit like a literary attempt at flying — exhilarating and terrifying and over too soon — it leaves you feeling breathless and wonderful.

But stories are different, stories have to do more than dazzle the reader with a moment of brilliance. Stories have to connect and compel and propel us forward across pages and pages of words — they have to grab the reader by the hand and pull them forward until the reader laughs and cries and yields and feels giddy with the thrill of it.

It’s a thing that’s not easily done and something I’ve been forced to confront as I’ve begun to work toward what it means to write a really good story.

Which means that though I’ve turned my attention to stories — I find I’m still struggling a bit with the why.

Now it’s your turn! Why do you write? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

 

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This is what I’m thankful for

Happy almost-Thanksgiving! It’s a time when the internet is flooded with musings about two things: turkey and gratitude. And since this isn’t going to be a post about turkey, I thought I’d better make it about gratitude — enjoy!

This is what I’m thankful for

Ten toes tighten in cold sand and I feel the grit scrape against my skin as I’m chilled. A gloomy November sky glowers overhead and the cold Pacific ocean swirls about my toes and sweeps me out to sea and I’m freezing but my heart soars because it knows that this means I’ve come home.

Fingers hover over smooth plastic keys and the cursor blinks at me in a way that should be disconcerting — my wordlessness made comical as the cursor counts the seconds ticking by, each a moment wasted without the writing of a single word. But instead of anger there is stillness because the words are stirring and somewhere deep inside me I know they’re waiting — waiting for the moment I find quiet enough to finally hear their whispers.

The house is cold and I’ve not felt my toes in hours but the water is piping hot and the steam curls up from the mug, dampens as it condenses on cold fingers cupped over the warmth of rising water vapor. I hold the cup in the palms of my hands, raise it to my lips, and sip. I taste the essence of a smile.

Two arms wrap around me strong and warm and I burrow myself into the press of body-upon-body and bask in the rhythm of a heartbeat I know almost like it was my very own. I close my eyes and tighten my grip on the family I hold so very dear.

The first flakes fall and I know it’s winter because the ground goes white and frosted and perfect. The sky opens up and buries old hurts under a fresh new blanket — scrubbed clean and whitewashed, we are made-up and re-created in this moment. The season of imagination looms near, when snow and darkness wrap each house in muffled quiet and dreams of sugarplums come dancing near.

The dawn breaks and night’s grip weakens as the sky is brushed back from black to ever-lightening grey. When I woke the stars still shone, marching ever westward in their dance across the sky. Each light winking out now, as the sun rises to greet the turning of the Earth. A new day dawns and I yet live to see it.

The fragile strength of lungs expands my ribcage, bends soft bones outward until I am larger than the me I was half a breath ago. The poetry of a breath lies in the stillness that awaits — pounding like a heartbeat into the silent passage of air, whispering through the body.

Now, I’d love to hear from you. Let me know what you’re thankful for in the comments below!

Letter to the ancestress I never knew

I heard you.

I never knew you. I still today know nothing about you, and yet I heard you.

You were a voice that reached out to me from beyond the vale of three lifetimes as I retraced our footsteps and found my way back to the country I know you called home.

I heard your whispers in the trees on the banks of Loch Lomond and felt your smiles in the warmth of the sun on my skin as I climbed cliff-sides in the Scottish highlands. I felt the the brush of your breath across my skin in the cool night air.

I never knew you. I have never so much as seen a picture of you, and yet I felt your presence all around me.

—

I grew up a child edited out of my own past, and yet decidedly still connected to the personal history that lurked in shadows and unspoken places. I remained connected to those people and places, always once removed from the stories I grew up with, stories born of parents who did not speak of their parents, and of grandparents who talked only of themselves.

I grew up divorced from the personal history that ties each of us back to belonging, back to one another along the vast network of human lineage, back to the shared heritage that can be traced back to a pair of common ancestors: grandfather and grandmother of the human race.

I grew up alone; separated from this vast network of interconnected lives, of interconnected histories.

I grew up rootless.

—

And yet I discovered myself unexpectedly rooted, tied not to a story or a history of self but to a history of place.

I grew up rooted to a small patch of Pacific coastline, a land of ancient redwoods and rocky beaches and the vicious, aching cold of the ocean’s waves.

I grew up among the trees, and learned to speak with the tongue of that place. I learned to walk among her spirits and greet them in our shared voice. I learned to let the ocean’s rhythm soothe the pace of my own fragile and faltering human heart and learned patience as I watched the winter’s rains linger and the summer’s winds blow.

And one day in the summer’s sun I excavated my heart and buried it by the sea shore, where it might be lulled to sleep, cradled in the rocking palm of the ocean’s tides.

And then I left that heart behind.

—

I wrote the words because they asked me to and I said, “I live in a beautiful world and it has deeply influenced the person I have become. My house is nestled in a clearing, surrounded by redwoods and spruce trees. I live near the ocean, and when the wind comes from the west I can taste its brine on my tongue. This natural beauty has infiltrated my psyche and greatly influenced my outlook on the world. It is a part of me.”

And then the call and came I walked away.

I left behind those rocks and trees I knew so well and moved 3,000 miles away to a place from which I almost couldn’t feel the fragile flutter of my heart.

And I was rootless.

—

I never knew her story, and by extension will never really know my own, lost forever are those chapters of my pre-history.

I grew up in a culture that moves forward without looking back and in doing so I fear we leave behind our stories, our wisdom.

Who today still cares to honor their ancestors, to cherish the guidance left behind in foot-shaped prints upon the Earth?

And this is why I cannot help but wonder, if I could hear her voice today— a voice reaching out from beyond the veil of time—

What would she want to tell me?

Are you paying enough attention?

It’s a thought that plagues me in moments of stillness: moments that capture me, like

great heaving breaths taken
in an instant as
head breaks water’s surface,
and for a shining, crystalline moment

I remember what it is to breathe.

Are you

Or maybe this isn’t an experience you have.

But my life is often an exercise in full-body immersion as I sink into mind and computer and achieve a state that’s nearly

 

dissociated

 

from my body.

And the sudden-ness of breaking free startles me, in the moments when I find myself back inside my body —

often with a thump.

This is when it hits me over the head how the hours have slipped by and I fear that I haven’t really been living. That I have instead been so completely wrapped up inside my mind that I’ve forgotten what it means to have a body. Forgotten what it means to sit in my body, to sit with my body, to

feel myself me.

And maybe if I weren’t me this wouldn’t be so much of a problem. Maybe I would relish the hours spent consumed by other, the moments when self falls so entirely free and I become one with machine.

Or as near to such a thing as can be.

But I find that art requires presence

That I cannot speak without tasting the texture of my tongue.

That I cannot see without knowing the slippery slide of eyelids upon eyes.

That I cannot feel without the dancing rhythm of my heart, thudding away inside my chest.

 

That I cannot know what I am seeing/thinking to speak it without first knowing that this body in it’s infinite
wisdom and fragility
is here and now and right in this very moment           with me.

 

And, so, I ask again:

Are you paying enough attention?

Why you shouldn’t be afraid to publish writing that sucks

One of the realities writers have to face is this: you will write and even publish things that suck.

It’s a truth I’ve had to come to terms with as I’ve started publishing my poetry and writings online. Before I started posting things I was safe: since no one ever read my words, their suckiness (or lack thereof) was effectively irrelevant. Instead, the only thing that really mattered was how much a particular piece of writing amused me, or how much I had enjoyed the process of creating it.

As I’ve started publishing my words online, I’ve had to think more carefully about what it means if I post things that I perceive as fundamentally flawed. My conclusion: it’s more dangerous to let fear of failure paralyze you than to occasionally post writing that sucks.

The dirty secret that means it’s ok to suck

Actually, there are two secrets:

  1. Suckiness is subjective.
  2. Suckiness is a variable function of time, mood, and context.

What I think is the greatest poem ever isn’t going to do it for everyone else. The important thing is to remember that that’s just life and that it’s ok. Not every poem is going to rock the world. Nor should every poem do so. (Or else we’d be in for one very bumpy ride…)

The poem that I read and loved on a particular sunny Saturday may not do it for me on a subsequent gloomy Tuesday. That’s ok too. Sometimes you pick up a book and just can’t get into it, only to pick it up two years later and find it irresistibly compelling.

Our tastes change to suit our needs, and those are forever changing as a function of time.

Take with you whatever is of greatest value right in this particular moment.

So, what does this mean for writers?

At first, these features might sound like bad things, right?

The thought of people hating the words and ideas I’ve labored over is enough to send me to bed on a bad day, and the addendum that I may in fact have no control over other people’s thoughts can make that notion even scarier.

After all, we writers know our words inside out and upside down. We know each and every fragile sentence, with all its potential and its imperfections.

No one knows more clearly than the writer how painfully flawed the writing is.

As a writer I birth first the idea of the writing, and it’s perfect and shimmering and totally, inevitably unattainable. But it lives vividly in the mind that nonetheless I find myself compelled to try it out, to attempt to capture it’s unachievable splendor in ink and fiber, just knowing that it can never work out as well as you thought it could have.

But you still feel compelled to try.

I recently described the writing process to a friend as, “the ooky slog of watching your brilliant idea turn to ash as you attempt to render it in words on a page”.

I stand by my sentiments.

Writing is a process and it’s often an ugly, brutal one, a process that can leave the author feeling gutted, small, and incompetent. It’s a process that, inevitably, will lead to writing that sucks.

Instead of giving up, free yourself by embracing the promise of failure

I’m trying a new strategy with the content on this blog.

It’s not highly curated. I post it as it comes along and I’m not holding much back. I spend time on revisions, but I do it all myself. No one edits the work I post here but me.

And if you pay close attention you’ll notice that the pieces that show up here exist in a state of occasional flux.

Sometimes I come back later and work them over again. Sometimes the words change.

Because change is a part of the writing process. And the phrase that sang in the moment you penned it often falls hopelessly short upon re-reading.

But that’s just life, and it’s all fine.

This means it must be ok to post writing that sucks

The saving grace is that my worst poem may someday be the one that changes someone’s life.

There are far too many variables to ever hope to control for.

So I’m setting my failure free, and attempting instead to achieve only that which is deliciously imperfect.

Because what they’ve forgotten to tell us is that the road to greatness is paved, not with good intentions, but rather with uncountably many imperfections.

I invite you to join me.

Does embracing suckiness have the power to set you free? Let me know in the comments below!