Write While Living Your Life

“The problem is, too many writers today are afraid to be still.”

So says Silas House, the author of four novels, several plays and a creative non-fiction book. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/01/the-art-of-being-still/ Writing in the Opinionator column of The New York Times, House maintains that many of us writers talk about writing, attend conferences, write and cartoon on FB, rather than write.

How do we write as we lead our busy lives? We learn to be still in our heads or House says “to achieve the sort of stillness that allows our senses to become heightened.” Or, as House says quoting Joyce Dyer “seeing like an animal.”

As a writer, when I am stuck in a line at Rite Aid, I challenge myself to come up with the color of the scarf on the lady in front of me, sky blue, the color of the ocean as a thunder storm comes on, the blue of Paul Newman’s eyes? Or is it periwinkle? Turquoise? I am still in my mind. And, serendipitously, I am not writhing with impatience as the line crawls along.

I remember waiting, more than once, for a cross-town bus on 67th and Lexington in New York City. All the other passengers were stepping forward, looking left for the bus, and then returning to the standing position – when is that bus going to arrive? Instead of copying this native practice, I would switch into my writer’s mind and decided to create an image/moment (as Jack Grapes would call it), in my mind. How would I describe The Armory in front of me? What is the light and what are the sounds of this moment. Smells? The costume on the others around me? And their characteristics? I do not write this down. I’m keeping still and engaging in an exercise that keeps me alive as a writer.

I invite all of you to do this. Transform washing the dishes into a writing exercise. How would your main character behave in this exact moment? While driving to the market, who do you see along the way? How are they dressed? What can you tell about these characters by the way they move?

Silas House reiterates all of this, and in a more specific way, in his piece.  HYPERLINK "http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/01/the-art-of-being-still/" Check it out.

House concludes, the age-old truth that we all know somewhere inside of us:  “There is no way to learn how to do this except by simply doing it. We must use every moment we can to think about the piece of writing at hand, to see the world through the point of view of our characters, to learn everything we can that serves the writing….It must be the way we live our lives.”

Exercise: Listen to the rhythm and tone of people talking in elevators, at the table next to you in a café. At the dinner table. Overhear stories. Listen to accents and new words. Every time you hear a new word, look it up, put it in a sentence. And, if in a café, bring out the journal and start writing down what you hear. And, if you are working on a character, imagine him with you at your table. What would he say about that strange looking bum in the corner?

This exercise has as many possibilities as there are moments in our day.

Connect With Your Inner Voice

June is a perfect time to begin a relationship to your inner writer. There are five spots left. Register early and get the discount!

Stealing Like an Artist

So, here’s what happens when you steal like an artist.

Check this out. A 34-year-old Brooklyn artist, Adam Parker Smith “meticulously stole” from 77 artists, “sketchbooks, video, architectural objects, art making devices and more.” These pieces were taken from his favorite artist friends in order to put together a show of their work, called “Thanks.” The artists targeted knew nothing about the show until a couple of weeks before it opened. Many of the artists consigned their works to the gallery so they would get the proceeds of the sale of their work. The gallery owner, Lauren Scott Miller, said she thought of Parker Smith as both curator and conceptual artist: “He’s very thoughtful about each acquisition.” Most of the artists whose work was lifted were amused. “Any difficulty I had that he had breached a trust was overwhelmed by the humor I found in the overall project.” Parker Smith said, “This project has this gimmick that I’m stealing from everybody but it’s really about community.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/29/arts/design/adam-parker-smiths-thanks-at-lu-magnus-gallery.html

So what does this have to do with writers? Austin Kleon encourages us to steal from our favorite authors, to discover our cultural antecedents and to honor them. In the wonderful, A Different Sun by Elaine Neil Orr, the author acknowledges this debt in the introductory pages of the novel: “I sing praises to my muses.” And then she lists the authors whose work she admires.

Exercise (stolen from my own blog)

Identify an author you admire. Take a couple of pages of her work and break it down. Read it aloud. How does she create sentences? Pronoun the verb—in that order or another? Does she repeat? Is her writing full of metaphor? If so, how does she pull the metaphors onto the page? And then read it aloud again. And again. Print out the magnifying glass and go into the minute details of the workings of this machine. Start a journal entry and, one page in, begin to imitate or “steal from” your designated author. Write in the same rhythm and choose a similar structure to the sentences. Write for three pages. And then go back to your own voice. What have you learned? Read your piece aloud.

A Quote From a Friend

 This quote came to me from a friend who read my latest blog. Isn't it terrific?

" In many shamanic societies if you came to a medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, the would ask one of four questions.

When did you stop dancing?

When did you stop singing?

When did you stop being enchanted by stories?

When did you stop finding comfort in the sweet territory of silence?

Where we have stopped dancing, singing, being enchanted by stories, or finding comfort in silence is where we have experienced the loss of soul.

Dancing, singing, storytelling, and silence are the four universal healing salves.”

Rituals

    About eight years ago, I was rewriting my novel, working on a scene thats deals with the losses my heroine suffered in her early twenties. The more I wrote, the more my character’s feelings swamped me. When I finished work for the day, I couldn’t seem to separate from her misery.  It was as though I had shape shifted and didn’t know how to come back. I asked my writer friend Vici, who is in her own right a shape shifter and shaman, to talk to me about rituals sfor getting in and getting out of writing, unscathed.

    I had thought I had invented the shape shifting metaphor for writing, but Vici assured me that I had tapped into a mythic concept, which is common to all ancient tribal cultures and all creative people. Shape shifting, it turns out, is something we writers do all the time.  We dwell, as Vici said, “in the realms of the betwixt and between, becoming other people genders, animals, even species; we travel through time and space; we speak in tongues not our own.”  Doesn’t this sound familiar? And we can use rituals to open and close the doors between our worlds. Just as other shape shifters do.

    Vici cautioned that to be successful, we writers must use rituals that allow the gates to open and shut, safely.  We do not want to allow unwanted or uninvited energies to “cross the threshold” with us.  If you practice a religion, you might want to use a set of rituals from this belief system. If you are not bound to any tribe or set of beliefs, you are, of course, free to choose rituals that work for you. But, Vici continues, “The only requirement is that the ritual speaks to our own imagination, powerfully enough to clarify our intentions and strengthen our will.” Further, quoting Starhawk, she reminded me, ritual “is a patterned movement of energy designed to accomplish a purpose.” Our purpose might be, as mine was, to keep my characters on the page and out of my life, or, as my intention is every day, to keep my butt in the chair and to prevent myself from running, screaming, from the room. Whatever it is, rituals can become our greatest ally as we shape shift.

    Remember the scene, I think it was in Shakespeare in Love, when Will tossed salt over his shoulder before he sat down to write? Steven Pressfield in The War of Art, talks about his elaborate and very effective ritual.  He argues that if we consciously invoke what he calls “the muse,” through ritual, and respectfully obey her maxim to write, we will be successful. His success proves the wisdom of this advice.

Exercise: Write in your journal, describing the rituals that have informed your life, whether they are based on your religion, your love of Greek myths, hip-hop. video games or sports. You will discover that you have had many in your life. Now look at your present day life. Which rituals remain? Write about those. Now imagine all of these stirring in a pot; reduce the heat and take the essence of all of them to create your own writing ritual. Reread Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art and check out his ritual. It is in the first chapter titled “What I Do.” It will inspire you!

"Don't Wait Until You Know Who You Are to Get Started"

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“Don’t wait until you know who you are to get started.”

            Austin Kleon in Steal Like An Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative.”( Workman, 2012.)

Steal Like An Artist is a book to keep close by you as you work.  Kelon’s first point among the ten is  “Steal Like An Artist.” He quotes from artists of all sorts. For example, Kobe Bryant, the basketball star, says, “There isn’t a good move that isn’t an old move.”  Bryant says that all his moves were copied from his heroes—he watched tapes of them until his could do what they did, but he had to adopt what he learned to his own body. So, it might be Michael Jordan as channeled by Kobe Bryant.

Kleon encourages us to bow toward and imitate our cultural ancestors until we have combined all of them into our own rich mixture.  “Nobody is born with a style or a voice. In the beginning we learn by pretending to be our heroes.”

 Yoko Ono says, “Start copying what you love. Copy. Copy. Copy. Copy. At the end of the copy you will find yourself.” Daunting on the one hand, but straightforward on the other. Pick someone you respect and copy.

Last summer I invited my students to copy, copy, copy the writer they most admired. The voices of Eudora Welty, Rainer Maria Rilke and Ernest Hemingway, channeled by my students, filled the room. How did the students accomplish this? They studied the machinery of each writer, examining the structure of the language, the voice, the inner workings of each sentence. Like taking a clock apart and putting it back together. My students learned a lot and the writing improved. And they got to spend a bunch of time with their heroes.

You too can do this. You just have to let go of your resistance to “stealing” and put on your analytic hat. Answer that question – how did he do it?

Exercise: Identify an author you admire. Take a couple of pages of her work and break it down. Read it aloud. How does she create sentences? Pronoun then verb—in that order or another? Does she repeat? Is her writing full of metaphor? If so, how does she pull the metaphors onto the page? And then read it aloud again. And again.

Print out the magnifying glass and go into the minute details of the workings of this machine.

Start a journal entry and, one page in, begin to imitate or “steal from” your designated author. Write in the same rhythm and choose a similar structure to the sentences. Write for three pages. And then go back to your own voice. What have you learned? Read your piece aloud.

Reflect Upon Your Present Blessings

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Reflect upon your present blessings, of which

every man has plenty;

not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.

Charles Dickens

It’s a good idea as a writer to step back from your narrative, dialogue, description and make a comment about life.  We all long for wisdom – we want to be set right or awakened or turned up side down, if only for a moment, and we are happy to find tidbits of wisdom tossed into a work of fiction.  Let’s take a tip or two from the Greeks:

The greatest griefs are those we cause ourselves.

Sophocles Oedipus Rex

We know this, don’t we, but isn’t it helpful to be reminded of in the middle of an extraordinary play!  This thought becomes part of our take-away from the evening, consciously or unconsciously.

Unwanted favors gain no gratitude.

Oedipus at Colonus.

How often do we imagine we are helping someone when in fact we are just bothering them?  I call this part of me Lady Bountiful, the part of me that gets thrills from playing the helpful benefactor, often, it turns out, to people who are not interested in my help. Sophocles, yes Sophocles, can jolt me to awareness about this.

Philosophy tossed into the middle of the narrative stops the reader and gives us pause.  Abraham Verghese, in his novel Cutting for Stone, offers this thought:

It was a sacred object.  But for a four-year old, everything is sacred and ordinary.

We stop to think, is this true for me?  Does the child in me treat everything as sacred? Should I?

Commenting on his wife’s remark, late in life, that she hates him, the narrator of John Updike’s  My Father’s Tears, says this: 

As well as love one another, we hate one another and even ourselves.

I read this and stop and think. I suddenly feel melancholic, hating to think this might be true of all marriages, of all relationships. The narrator has snagged my attention and won’t let go.

Hope is the deep orientation of the human soul that can be held at the darkest times.

Vaclav Havel

Havel knows what he is talking about, having been involved in the Polish fight for freedom.

Exercise: Take a look at your work.  Do you stop to impart wisdom from time to time?  Choose a piece you are writing, or simply begin a piece in your journal.  Half way through, stop and ask yourself, what am I trying to say here?  What can I say to stop my reader short, to make her pause and reflect?