Elizabeth Percer's Blog, page 2
March 15, 2017
Writer’s Log, March 15th: Mistakes Will Be Made
When I was a little kid, there was this great little ditty on Sesame Street that went something like this: “Everyone makes mistakes, oh yes they do! Your mother and your brother and your dad and sister, too, woo! Big people, little people, everyone makes mistakes! Everyone makes mistakes! So why can’t you?”
Clearly, this particular televised teaching moment stuck with me because it’s still in my head several decades later. But what also stuck were the images that went along with it: silly, clumsy, “Aw, shucks!” moments like spilling milk. It both gripped and terrified me at the time. On the one hand, the crazy-making work I was already doing to try to fix my imperfect family by trying to perfect myself made me want to stand up and shout at the television: “Hold up a second here! I can make a mistake and it will actually be OK?!” And on the other hand, I wasn’t buying it for a minute. I knew that mistakes so much worse than spilling milk were happening all around me, and if everyone I knew was doing their best to pretend they weren’t, clearly these mistakes were to be avoided at all costs.
Is it any wonder that I became ever so slightly tightly wound?
These days, failure and mistakes are all the rage. You can’t open a magazine or watch a TED talk without the “gift” of failure being promenaded around like some kind of one-eyed pet from the pound that miraculously managed to get adopted into an adoring family despite its incurable flatulence and compulsion to eviscerate squirrels. And while I would agree that you absolutely cannot succeed without embracing failure, and that we would clearly all be better off if we learned to compassionately accept our mistakes, it’s one thing to hear these things from people on the other side – another thing entirely to know how to live through it.
Case in point: weathering failure is a lot easier for some of us than it is for others. It’s never easy, but I’d wager that the extroverted entrepreneur with crocodilian emotional skin is going to be able to sail over his gaffes a little more easily than, say, your average artist who spent most of the recesses of her childhood crying in the bathroom and angry at herself for crying in the bathroom. You’re supposed to get over slights in this country, develop a thick skin. But how can anyone with a thick skin let the world penetrate her enough to inspire the kind of creativity and insight we all want to see on the page, canvas, or dance floor? In other words, you can’t work deftly with the nuances and complexity of our collective experience if you’ve got falconer’s gloves on your hands.
What’s more, very few of us ever get comfortable with failure or mistakes of any kind. No matter what we may say at dinner parties, past failures or mistakes never dissolve into neatly shelved packages of experience. I promise you that every time that rock star thinks of the time she fell off the stage, she shudders. And every time that slick novelist trounces out the number of times he was rejected by major publishers before hitting it big, he’s secretly clenching something.
And how, exactly, is knowing this actually helpful? Well, it took that little kid I described above almost three decades to really venture into taking those kinds of life-changing risks because every time she stumbled, she wondered why it hurt so much. What she didn’t know is that a life well-lived is going to hurt and heal so much more than she could have ever imagined. Failure is necessary to success not just because it helps you to learn from your mistakes, but because it helps you grow familiar with failure itself, to know that you can live with and beyond it even if you never get used to it, despite how much it stings every time it jumps out to bit you in the ass.
So yes, everyone does makes mistakes, and most of the time, a lot more than milk will be at stake. And you do need to fail in order to get to the next stage of discovery, but don’t be disappointed in yourself if that failure really, really hurts. The trick is not to become wise about failure after the fact, but to know that you can open your arms wide to failure in the moment, feel it pummel you with all its strength, and still get through. You can even laugh about it while its happening, or openly weep – better yet, do both.
OK: I promise this is happening. As I’ve been composing this, my phone has been buzzing nonstop under my butt. I just looked at it, and found out that my nephew, who despite a score of 1600 on the SATS and a straight A average at Andover was unceremoniously rejected from *insert obnoxiously top school here* a few weeks ago. It was his first big “failure,” and he was sure life was not going to go on, but we all grieved with him and got angry and messy and worried, just like good families do. And looky here: He just got into MIT!!! I’m so glad we all wept and groused and felt our stomach pains. The joy is that much more enormous!!!!
Clearly, this particular televised teaching moment stuck with me because it’s still in my head several decades later. But what also stuck were the images that went along with it: silly, clumsy, “Aw, shucks!” moments like spilling milk. It both gripped and terrified me at the time. On the one hand, the crazy-making work I was already doing to try to fix my imperfect family by trying to perfect myself made me want to stand up and shout at the television: “Hold up a second here! I can make a mistake and it will actually be OK?!” And on the other hand, I wasn’t buying it for a minute. I knew that mistakes so much worse than spilling milk were happening all around me, and if everyone I knew was doing their best to pretend they weren’t, clearly these mistakes were to be avoided at all costs.
Is it any wonder that I became ever so slightly tightly wound?
These days, failure and mistakes are all the rage. You can’t open a magazine or watch a TED talk without the “gift” of failure being promenaded around like some kind of one-eyed pet from the pound that miraculously managed to get adopted into an adoring family despite its incurable flatulence and compulsion to eviscerate squirrels. And while I would agree that you absolutely cannot succeed without embracing failure, and that we would clearly all be better off if we learned to compassionately accept our mistakes, it’s one thing to hear these things from people on the other side – another thing entirely to know how to live through it.
Case in point: weathering failure is a lot easier for some of us than it is for others. It’s never easy, but I’d wager that the extroverted entrepreneur with crocodilian emotional skin is going to be able to sail over his gaffes a little more easily than, say, your average artist who spent most of the recesses of her childhood crying in the bathroom and angry at herself for crying in the bathroom. You’re supposed to get over slights in this country, develop a thick skin. But how can anyone with a thick skin let the world penetrate her enough to inspire the kind of creativity and insight we all want to see on the page, canvas, or dance floor? In other words, you can’t work deftly with the nuances and complexity of our collective experience if you’ve got falconer’s gloves on your hands.
What’s more, very few of us ever get comfortable with failure or mistakes of any kind. No matter what we may say at dinner parties, past failures or mistakes never dissolve into neatly shelved packages of experience. I promise you that every time that rock star thinks of the time she fell off the stage, she shudders. And every time that slick novelist trounces out the number of times he was rejected by major publishers before hitting it big, he’s secretly clenching something.
And how, exactly, is knowing this actually helpful? Well, it took that little kid I described above almost three decades to really venture into taking those kinds of life-changing risks because every time she stumbled, she wondered why it hurt so much. What she didn’t know is that a life well-lived is going to hurt and heal so much more than she could have ever imagined. Failure is necessary to success not just because it helps you to learn from your mistakes, but because it helps you grow familiar with failure itself, to know that you can live with and beyond it even if you never get used to it, despite how much it stings every time it jumps out to bit you in the ass.
So yes, everyone does makes mistakes, and most of the time, a lot more than milk will be at stake. And you do need to fail in order to get to the next stage of discovery, but don’t be disappointed in yourself if that failure really, really hurts. The trick is not to become wise about failure after the fact, but to know that you can open your arms wide to failure in the moment, feel it pummel you with all its strength, and still get through. You can even laugh about it while its happening, or openly weep – better yet, do both.
OK: I promise this is happening. As I’ve been composing this, my phone has been buzzing nonstop under my butt. I just looked at it, and found out that my nephew, who despite a score of 1600 on the SATS and a straight A average at Andover was unceremoniously rejected from *insert obnoxiously top school here* a few weeks ago. It was his first big “failure,” and he was sure life was not going to go on, but we all grieved with him and got angry and messy and worried, just like good families do. And looky here: He just got into MIT!!! I’m so glad we all wept and groused and felt our stomach pains. The joy is that much more enormous!!!!
Writer's Log, March 7th: Systems Check
In case it’s not already abundantly obvious, letting go isn’t my strong suit. Case in point: this morning, while trying to figure out how best to get the news out about my upcoming paperback, I got sucked into same pretty gnarly marketing quicksand. Before long, I was flailing about in a sea of Tumblr and Instagram and Twitter. Even so, I was sure I was doing great, industrious work, ready to conquer any and all social media platforms with the fumes of enthusiasm alone. But then I noticed that my stomach was in knots. And that I was having just the most minor problem possible with breathing.
Letting go sounds so easy, but it’s actually one of the hardest things for anyone to do. We see a problem, and we armor up. We feel a need, and we chase it. Yet even if you were raised in the cold and suspicious cities of Massachusetts, where vigilance is a badge of honor and crustiness lends one an air of authority, you still need to learn to let go. Especially when the important stuff is at stake. Why? I don’t know why, pigeons. No one does.
But here’s something I do know: Every time I get all tangled up in my own leash (aka my own best efforts), the only way I can start breathing fully and easily again is if I step away from the mental chatter and do a systems check. This is not exactly an act of recognizing that I need to let go and just blithely releasing all my cares into the universe like some kind of rainbow-farting unicorn. No, it's more like control is my red balloon, and no matter how old I get it’s going to be really hard to convince me to release it from my sweaty grip. Still, I've managed to cobble together a way toward letting go anyway, sort of like distracting my inner self from the red balloon by offering it some candy or brownies made special in Northern California. And because I am at the level of Letting Go for Dummies, I thought I’d share my baby steps with you in case you sometimes feel like you’re constantly playing whack-a-mole with all the things you think you should be doing with your life.
Here’s how it goes: First, I stop what I’m doing. That sounds pretty obvious, but when you’re on a runaway train to nowhere, it can be a lot harder than it sounds. Still, it can be done, even if your first and lasting efforts aren't all that pretty. Sometimes, all I can do is manage to hurl myself off that train, or at least stop trying to drive it. But by hook or by crook, I eventually figure out how to stop long enough to check in with myself. Not in a profound, existential sense; I’m not that evolved. It’s more like how you’d check in with a kindergartener: Does anything hurt? Are you feeling OK? Have you forgotten to eat? Does it maybe look like you’re about to throw a shovel at someone’s head? Then I note the anomalies: maybe a knot in my stomach, or a tightness in my chest, or maybe my eyebrows have gone so far up my forehead that they’re threatening to merge with my hairline. I like to think of it as a personal systems check, knowing that I can only do my best work if all parts of me are on board.
Because if you’re anything like me, with a mind that has a tendency to Shanghai every activity or endeavor, I sometimes forget about the rest of me. You know, little parts like my physical and emotional well-being. The parts that hunker down and seize up when I’m trying to do what I think I should be doing, or write what I think others want to read, or live a life that would be somehow more acceptable than the one I’ve been given.
Years ago, my sister, who studied opera for many years, had the privilege of meeting the great soprano Beverly Sills. It’s hard not to watch any opera singer without feeling as though they must be expending every eye-popping physical effort they can to make that sound. But what Ms. Sills told her couldn’t be further from the truth. Singing, she said, at its best, should feel like nothing. Your body just becomes a vessel for that sound, and everything you do up until and including that point is prepare your body to fill with music and then release it.
Imagine if we did that in life, too. Or just now, in this moment, with this particular life entirely at your disposal, as it’s always been: just fill it up with music and let it go.
Letting go sounds so easy, but it’s actually one of the hardest things for anyone to do. We see a problem, and we armor up. We feel a need, and we chase it. Yet even if you were raised in the cold and suspicious cities of Massachusetts, where vigilance is a badge of honor and crustiness lends one an air of authority, you still need to learn to let go. Especially when the important stuff is at stake. Why? I don’t know why, pigeons. No one does.
But here’s something I do know: Every time I get all tangled up in my own leash (aka my own best efforts), the only way I can start breathing fully and easily again is if I step away from the mental chatter and do a systems check. This is not exactly an act of recognizing that I need to let go and just blithely releasing all my cares into the universe like some kind of rainbow-farting unicorn. No, it's more like control is my red balloon, and no matter how old I get it’s going to be really hard to convince me to release it from my sweaty grip. Still, I've managed to cobble together a way toward letting go anyway, sort of like distracting my inner self from the red balloon by offering it some candy or brownies made special in Northern California. And because I am at the level of Letting Go for Dummies, I thought I’d share my baby steps with you in case you sometimes feel like you’re constantly playing whack-a-mole with all the things you think you should be doing with your life.
Here’s how it goes: First, I stop what I’m doing. That sounds pretty obvious, but when you’re on a runaway train to nowhere, it can be a lot harder than it sounds. Still, it can be done, even if your first and lasting efforts aren't all that pretty. Sometimes, all I can do is manage to hurl myself off that train, or at least stop trying to drive it. But by hook or by crook, I eventually figure out how to stop long enough to check in with myself. Not in a profound, existential sense; I’m not that evolved. It’s more like how you’d check in with a kindergartener: Does anything hurt? Are you feeling OK? Have you forgotten to eat? Does it maybe look like you’re about to throw a shovel at someone’s head? Then I note the anomalies: maybe a knot in my stomach, or a tightness in my chest, or maybe my eyebrows have gone so far up my forehead that they’re threatening to merge with my hairline. I like to think of it as a personal systems check, knowing that I can only do my best work if all parts of me are on board.
Because if you’re anything like me, with a mind that has a tendency to Shanghai every activity or endeavor, I sometimes forget about the rest of me. You know, little parts like my physical and emotional well-being. The parts that hunker down and seize up when I’m trying to do what I think I should be doing, or write what I think others want to read, or live a life that would be somehow more acceptable than the one I’ve been given.
Years ago, my sister, who studied opera for many years, had the privilege of meeting the great soprano Beverly Sills. It’s hard not to watch any opera singer without feeling as though they must be expending every eye-popping physical effort they can to make that sound. But what Ms. Sills told her couldn’t be further from the truth. Singing, she said, at its best, should feel like nothing. Your body just becomes a vessel for that sound, and everything you do up until and including that point is prepare your body to fill with music and then release it.
Imagine if we did that in life, too. Or just now, in this moment, with this particular life entirely at your disposal, as it’s always been: just fill it up with music and let it go.
Writer’s Log, February 28th: Plot Pitfalls
Plot is such a slippery little sucker. It should be simple enough – plot is just what a story is about, after all – but it never is. So today I’m going to briefly outline what I think are the two most common plot pitfalls, but – as always! – I encourage you to share your own reflections and battle scars below.
Plot Pitfall #1: No matter how hard you try, you can’t come up with an interesting story arc to save your life.
This is a very common problem, but it’s actually one problem disguised as another. The reason why you can’t come up with an interesting story arc is because story arcs are rarely interesting when they’re distilled into their bare events. Take any great classic – oh, say, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, for instance – and break it down into the broadest brush strokes: Boy meets girl; boy and girl fall in love; their parents don’t like their choices for reasons that make no sense to them; they try to run away together; their plans fail; they both end up dead. The end.
Gripping, isn’t it?
Your plot, when described alone, will never be as interesting as your story or novel, though you can punch it up however you want in order to get the attention of an agent/editor/Romeo/Juliet (this is what editors do when they create back copy on a book, incidentally). But in all honesty, if your plot were interesting enough on its own, you wouldn’t need to write a story or novel about it.
It’s useful, however, to eventually be able to identify what your plot is, and for some of us this happens sooner rather than later. Still, I would strongly discourage you from distilling your plot into events alone. A good plot is a series of events that lead to major consequences in your characters’ lives, consequences that affect them indelibly. My favorite distillation of the difference between a sequence of dramatic events and a plot is quite simple. The former goes something like this: The king died, then the queen died. The latter, on the other hand, goes something like this: The king died, then the queen died of a broken heart. (This is not my example, btw, though for the life of me I can’t remember where I read it. Feel free to scold and inform me in the comments.)
Plot Pitfall #2: Your plot refuses to stay put.
Oh boy, this is such a doozy. Just when you think you’ve got a nice, well-behaved little plot underhand, it slips out from under you, usually when you’ve just begun to dive into it. This will always be frustrating, but I hope that it happens to each and every one of you. Because if your plot doesn’t shift with your writing, then you’re probably controlling your writing a little too tightly. Remember that writing comes from the mind and the heart, things that are powerful, reactive, growing, and underexplored. And if you’re writing with all your heart and a fully engaged mind, your work with be powerful, reactive, growing and revealing. That’s the best possible scenario, and plot can
adjust to accommodate.
The bottom line is that while narratives seem to follow a logic line, they are rarely created in a linear fashion. So while you do eventually want to wind up with a sequence of events that it wouldn’t take a doctorate in abstract expressionism to decipher, don’t worry if you lose your hold on plot every now and again as the writing unfolds. Plot is there to serve you, after all, to give your readers something relatable to hold on to as you take them into the tantalizingly unfamiliar and rich terrain of your unique voice. That, after all, is the ultimate reward, and the authority that you listen to first and last.
And here’s the clincher, which I’m forced to sneak in at the end so I don’t make you hysterical right from the outset: it’s entirely possible that you never find your way to a plot that sticks. That’s fine. The point is to get your writing out there, not someone else’s. I promise you that you are perfectly capable of coming up with a good plot if you want to, but if it’s not coming despite all your efforts, and if those efforts are painful and draining, you might need to reevaluate your priorities. Maybe you are a poet, or a potter, and not a novelist. Who cares? Well, actually, I do; what I wouldn’t give to have a few more unapologetic poets and potters out there in the world. As always, the work of your writing – of your artistry – shouldn’t involve the kind of suffering that diminishes you. Challenge should always contribute to growth, and if it’s not, go have an ice cream, get some rest, and come back to it in the morning. Your truth will always be there.
Plot Pitfall #1: No matter how hard you try, you can’t come up with an interesting story arc to save your life.
This is a very common problem, but it’s actually one problem disguised as another. The reason why you can’t come up with an interesting story arc is because story arcs are rarely interesting when they’re distilled into their bare events. Take any great classic – oh, say, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, for instance – and break it down into the broadest brush strokes: Boy meets girl; boy and girl fall in love; their parents don’t like their choices for reasons that make no sense to them; they try to run away together; their plans fail; they both end up dead. The end.
Gripping, isn’t it?
Your plot, when described alone, will never be as interesting as your story or novel, though you can punch it up however you want in order to get the attention of an agent/editor/Romeo/Juliet (this is what editors do when they create back copy on a book, incidentally). But in all honesty, if your plot were interesting enough on its own, you wouldn’t need to write a story or novel about it.
It’s useful, however, to eventually be able to identify what your plot is, and for some of us this happens sooner rather than later. Still, I would strongly discourage you from distilling your plot into events alone. A good plot is a series of events that lead to major consequences in your characters’ lives, consequences that affect them indelibly. My favorite distillation of the difference between a sequence of dramatic events and a plot is quite simple. The former goes something like this: The king died, then the queen died. The latter, on the other hand, goes something like this: The king died, then the queen died of a broken heart. (This is not my example, btw, though for the life of me I can’t remember where I read it. Feel free to scold and inform me in the comments.)
Plot Pitfall #2: Your plot refuses to stay put.
Oh boy, this is such a doozy. Just when you think you’ve got a nice, well-behaved little plot underhand, it slips out from under you, usually when you’ve just begun to dive into it. This will always be frustrating, but I hope that it happens to each and every one of you. Because if your plot doesn’t shift with your writing, then you’re probably controlling your writing a little too tightly. Remember that writing comes from the mind and the heart, things that are powerful, reactive, growing, and underexplored. And if you’re writing with all your heart and a fully engaged mind, your work with be powerful, reactive, growing and revealing. That’s the best possible scenario, and plot can
adjust to accommodate.
The bottom line is that while narratives seem to follow a logic line, they are rarely created in a linear fashion. So while you do eventually want to wind up with a sequence of events that it wouldn’t take a doctorate in abstract expressionism to decipher, don’t worry if you lose your hold on plot every now and again as the writing unfolds. Plot is there to serve you, after all, to give your readers something relatable to hold on to as you take them into the tantalizingly unfamiliar and rich terrain of your unique voice. That, after all, is the ultimate reward, and the authority that you listen to first and last.
And here’s the clincher, which I’m forced to sneak in at the end so I don’t make you hysterical right from the outset: it’s entirely possible that you never find your way to a plot that sticks. That’s fine. The point is to get your writing out there, not someone else’s. I promise you that you are perfectly capable of coming up with a good plot if you want to, but if it’s not coming despite all your efforts, and if those efforts are painful and draining, you might need to reevaluate your priorities. Maybe you are a poet, or a potter, and not a novelist. Who cares? Well, actually, I do; what I wouldn’t give to have a few more unapologetic poets and potters out there in the world. As always, the work of your writing – of your artistry – shouldn’t involve the kind of suffering that diminishes you. Challenge should always contribute to growth, and if it’s not, go have an ice cream, get some rest, and come back to it in the morning. Your truth will always be there.
Writer’s Log, February 21st: Finding Your Subject Matter
I love talking about subject matter, because it’s a sneaky way of talking about writer’s block. As most of you already know, I'm making it a personal mission to dissolve the myth of writer’s block. This is partly due to the fact that to suggest a state of mind exists that inhibits all writing for no good reason is enough to block writers in and of itself. Even if you’ve never experienced such a thing yourself, hearing others talk about it is like telling children that they don’t need to worry about the monsters under their beds. Writers have enough to contend with without having mythological states of mind lurking in the recesses of their psyches.
More importantly, I don't like the idea of writer's block because it grossly misstates the conditions that get in our way, therefore making them much harder to overcome. I don't mean for a minute to suggest that that writers don’t get stuck. We do. Every single one of us has known the agony of feeling we should be writing when we’re not, or approaching the page with every intention of getting something down, only to have it stare back at us with its infuriating white blankness. But there are very good, very simple reasons for these stalemates, and they don’t include the sudden inability to write, or a cessation of all creative energies without reason, or a muse who is MIA. In actuality, these stalemates usually result from a misalignment between what we think we should be writing and what we actually have to say.
First, the bad news. Sometimes, we don’t have anything interesting to say. It happens. Nothing in nature blooms all the time. In fact, trying to force oneself to bloom when your creativity needs to regenerate is the quickest way to leap into an endless cycle of mediocre output. Unfortunately, modern society has taught us to believe that when it comes to good work, quantity equals quality, and that if we’re not writing it must be because we’re lazy/stupid/untalented artists (which is also exactly -- and conveniently! -- how our society continues to destroy artistic impulses). It takes a huge leap of counter-cultural faith to stand up to this pervasive line of nonsense, but it can change your life to do just that.
To begin with, you can challenge how you react to that blank page. When you don’t have anything interesting to say, it doesn’t mean you need to just stand around agonizing and waiting for the moment when you do. In fact, this is another surefire way to shoot yourself in your own foot, creatively speaking. Instead, you need to put down your pencils and get yourself out into the world. Serve, volunteer, listen, read, move. Pick a verb and go with it, but makes sure it involves getting your head out of the sand and filling your hands with an activity that is directly connected to your heart. Subject matter, in other words, is generated from a life well-lived, and if you find yourself with nothing to say, the first thing you need to look at is how deep the impression of your butt is on your chair.
But Dr. Percer, my Greek Chorus of students is whining, what if I go to Africa and build houses and come home with all sorts of material and still find myself staring down the blank page? Can’t I plead writer’s block at that point? Sorry, but no. If you think you have nothing to write about, it’s probably because you’ve made the common mistake of assuming that when you come home from building houses in Africa you should write about building houses in Africa. But subject matter rarely works like that. If the first most common form of subject-matter-related writer’s block is a failure to allow for the regenerative phases of your creative life, the second is an unrelenting policing of what you think you should or should not be writing about.
Here’s the only thing to worry about when it comes to subject matter: you need to find a subject, and it should matter to you. It doesn’t need to matter to anyone else. It doesn’t need to be encapsulated into an elevator pitch before you even begin – in fact, elevator pitches can become the basis for some of the worst creative shackles. You don’t even need to know why it matters to you – if you feel moved to write about kittens in a blender, then by all means, write about kittens in a blender.
Usually – and I wish I could underline and underscore this – if you’re writing well, where you begin your writing should not be where you end up. The best writing is a process of discovery and surprise, and it comes from a willingness to take great personal risks, such as truly listening to yourself even when you think that what you’re trying to say has no future in it. Do you think Nabakov woke up one morning and thought, “Hey, I know what let's right about, Vera – let's write about pedophilia!” No, he wrote about pedophilia and it became a novel that takes reveals a breathlessly keen insight into aspects of the human condition no one wants to talk about. Do you think George Orwell decided over tea one day that the most sensible and compelling thing to write about was an allegory based around animals in a barn? Or that Melville decided preemptively that a whale-sized novel about a whale was the way to secure instant literary popularity? Or that Poe realized that the surest way to make his refined, collegiate New England peers celebrate him was to write a short story about one man locking another into a hidden room in his basement?
The bottom line is that WHY you’re writing is so much more important to your sustainability as a writer than what you’re writing. There’s no lack of vibrant subject matter in the world around us. But to write about something just because you think others will find it important/saleable/noble is to rely on others to provide the foundation for your writing. Let me tell you from experience: that never works. The harder and simpler truth is that your own best writing will come from a deep, personal urgency that only you can access. And you won’t access it every time. Sometimes, you’ll need to rekindle your connection to that urgency by going out and getting your hands dirty. (I consider this devotion to oiling and fueling your own engines writing, btw.) Sometimes, you’ll need to find it by following the curious urge to write about kittens in a blender, which might lead you to ponder the place of casual violence in our society, which in turn might open the gates to a realization that you’ve been wanting to write about the monster-under-the-bed culture we’re all trying to live through right now.
The point is, if you really and truly extend some trust yourself, and don’t judge what arises based on whether or not it makes you look like an industrious writer with great potential, you’ll find yourself in a much more enviable position than being an industrious writer with great potential. You’ll be a writer who is actually writing.
More importantly, I don't like the idea of writer's block because it grossly misstates the conditions that get in our way, therefore making them much harder to overcome. I don't mean for a minute to suggest that that writers don’t get stuck. We do. Every single one of us has known the agony of feeling we should be writing when we’re not, or approaching the page with every intention of getting something down, only to have it stare back at us with its infuriating white blankness. But there are very good, very simple reasons for these stalemates, and they don’t include the sudden inability to write, or a cessation of all creative energies without reason, or a muse who is MIA. In actuality, these stalemates usually result from a misalignment between what we think we should be writing and what we actually have to say.
First, the bad news. Sometimes, we don’t have anything interesting to say. It happens. Nothing in nature blooms all the time. In fact, trying to force oneself to bloom when your creativity needs to regenerate is the quickest way to leap into an endless cycle of mediocre output. Unfortunately, modern society has taught us to believe that when it comes to good work, quantity equals quality, and that if we’re not writing it must be because we’re lazy/stupid/untalented artists (which is also exactly -- and conveniently! -- how our society continues to destroy artistic impulses). It takes a huge leap of counter-cultural faith to stand up to this pervasive line of nonsense, but it can change your life to do just that.
To begin with, you can challenge how you react to that blank page. When you don’t have anything interesting to say, it doesn’t mean you need to just stand around agonizing and waiting for the moment when you do. In fact, this is another surefire way to shoot yourself in your own foot, creatively speaking. Instead, you need to put down your pencils and get yourself out into the world. Serve, volunteer, listen, read, move. Pick a verb and go with it, but makes sure it involves getting your head out of the sand and filling your hands with an activity that is directly connected to your heart. Subject matter, in other words, is generated from a life well-lived, and if you find yourself with nothing to say, the first thing you need to look at is how deep the impression of your butt is on your chair.
But Dr. Percer, my Greek Chorus of students is whining, what if I go to Africa and build houses and come home with all sorts of material and still find myself staring down the blank page? Can’t I plead writer’s block at that point? Sorry, but no. If you think you have nothing to write about, it’s probably because you’ve made the common mistake of assuming that when you come home from building houses in Africa you should write about building houses in Africa. But subject matter rarely works like that. If the first most common form of subject-matter-related writer’s block is a failure to allow for the regenerative phases of your creative life, the second is an unrelenting policing of what you think you should or should not be writing about.
Here’s the only thing to worry about when it comes to subject matter: you need to find a subject, and it should matter to you. It doesn’t need to matter to anyone else. It doesn’t need to be encapsulated into an elevator pitch before you even begin – in fact, elevator pitches can become the basis for some of the worst creative shackles. You don’t even need to know why it matters to you – if you feel moved to write about kittens in a blender, then by all means, write about kittens in a blender.
Usually – and I wish I could underline and underscore this – if you’re writing well, where you begin your writing should not be where you end up. The best writing is a process of discovery and surprise, and it comes from a willingness to take great personal risks, such as truly listening to yourself even when you think that what you’re trying to say has no future in it. Do you think Nabakov woke up one morning and thought, “Hey, I know what let's right about, Vera – let's write about pedophilia!” No, he wrote about pedophilia and it became a novel that takes reveals a breathlessly keen insight into aspects of the human condition no one wants to talk about. Do you think George Orwell decided over tea one day that the most sensible and compelling thing to write about was an allegory based around animals in a barn? Or that Melville decided preemptively that a whale-sized novel about a whale was the way to secure instant literary popularity? Or that Poe realized that the surest way to make his refined, collegiate New England peers celebrate him was to write a short story about one man locking another into a hidden room in his basement?
The bottom line is that WHY you’re writing is so much more important to your sustainability as a writer than what you’re writing. There’s no lack of vibrant subject matter in the world around us. But to write about something just because you think others will find it important/saleable/noble is to rely on others to provide the foundation for your writing. Let me tell you from experience: that never works. The harder and simpler truth is that your own best writing will come from a deep, personal urgency that only you can access. And you won’t access it every time. Sometimes, you’ll need to rekindle your connection to that urgency by going out and getting your hands dirty. (I consider this devotion to oiling and fueling your own engines writing, btw.) Sometimes, you’ll need to find it by following the curious urge to write about kittens in a blender, which might lead you to ponder the place of casual violence in our society, which in turn might open the gates to a realization that you’ve been wanting to write about the monster-under-the-bed culture we’re all trying to live through right now.
The point is, if you really and truly extend some trust yourself, and don’t judge what arises based on whether or not it makes you look like an industrious writer with great potential, you’ll find yourself in a much more enviable position than being an industrious writer with great potential. You’ll be a writer who is actually writing.
Writer’s Log, February 14th: Foolish Love
Two years ago yesterday, one of my dearest friends died abruptly of an aneurism. A year or so prior to that, when my husband and I were creating a will, we’d asked her and her husband to serve as guardians to our children in the case of our own untimely deaths. Rajna was beloved by many, but that particular truth – and the fact that we’d been neighbors for seven years -- made it easier to excuse the ferocity with which our family swept in to comfort and stick beside hers. Now, two years later, the arrangement we first made to help alleviate some of her husband’s burden and give him some space for his own grief – to have her children with us for one night each weekend – still stands.
As a result, I’ve had a front row seat to the constantly shifting ways her children’s hearts have broken and fought to heal. Though healing isn’t exactly what appears to be happening; like broken bones that aren’t reset properly, their hearts seem to have grown stronger around the indelible distortion of losing their mother at such a young age.
It’s hard to be around broken children and not want to fix everything and anything, instantly. But I’ve lived long enough – and have been raising my own children for long enough – to know that any instant fix for severe heartache is only temporary and might even prolong the pain by providing false comfort. So I’ve been treading carefully, but sometimes, I’ve found, foolish love gets in anyway.
Ever since Rajna died, I’ve had strange encounters with birds outside the two windows that are positioned behind and next to my writing chair. We live on the estuaries of San Francisco Bay, which is the soupiest of soupy lands, sure to instantly transform us all into a community of floating houseboats in the next big earthquake, but it’s also spectacularly beautiful here. It’s lush and vibrant and absolutely chock full of birds. Our children’s playfields are sometimes so overrun with goose poop that they are unusuable; in the spring, when the ducks and geese have their babies, they stop traffic by walking them across our many narrow streets the way birds of limited intelligence in protected communities will do. And on my biweekly runs, I’m treated to every manner of avian theater imaginable.
But what happens behind my chair is a little different. Hummingbirds, for instance, hover just at eye level, leaving the flowers they were focused on to embark on some strange errand of visitation. A sparrow tapped constantly on one of the windows for the better part of week. One time, a massive eagle perched on an overhang just three feet away and stayed there for a few days. “What’s should we name it?” I asked my younger son, thinking of my grandfather, Samuel. “Sam,” he replied.
Like any good recovering academic, at first I devoted myself to explaining it away. Of course, I’d see more birds behind my writing chair – that’s where I spend my longest moments of stillness. True. And I make more sense of them, because that’s where I do my deepest reflections. Also true. But after several months of these occurrences, reason no longer mattered as much. Hummingbirds, I learned, are symbolic of spirits that hover between two worlds, I’ve since read, as are sparrows. And eagles of the fierce beauty – and choice -- of having a lonely heart.
After a year or more had passed, and Rajna’s daughter still refused to talk about her mother, in a moment of desperation I began to dip my toe into talking about the birds with her. She was ten when her mother died, incredibly impressionable and vulnerable. But then I remembered that grief has no good answers, and that sharing my own paltry reaches toward comfort was a way of sharing my own messy grief and hope with integrity. So last Mother’s Day, when a hummingbird blocked my path on a run, hovering at chest level right in front of me for the better part of a minute, I told her about it. And her eyes lit up. Since then, carefully, ever so carefully, I’ll share another moment when the time is right. And she smiles.
Maybe I am misleading her. But love is foolish, after all – and sometimes its foolishness can be a marvelous gift. It defies reason and fills our heart even when they have no business being filled. It reminds me of Shakespeare’s fool, in King Lear, the only soul who sticks beside the flawed and miserable king as he descends into madness, improbably comforting him along the way. Why should we expect love to be reasonable, anyway? Power doesn’t always come from the mind. And healing rarely does.
Which brings me to the latest installment. On Sunday, the day before this two-year anniversary, my daughter and Rajna’s – I’ll call her Anne -- were investigating some beading I was working on while sitting in my chair. They were both leaning over me when Anne suddenly stood up straight, pointing out the window. “Is that a CHICKEN?” she exclaimed. My daughter and I whipped around. Sure enough, just outside, a bird I have never seen before, looking for all the world like a rangy chicken, was pecking its way around the lawn. We crept outside for further investigation and then, fearing we’d frighten it away, went back inside to frantically search the internet for an image that might match what we were seeing.
It was a grouse, also known as a prairie chicken. And the grouse, it turns out, is symbolic of the spiral of life and death, the false ways we see each of these events as hard stops or starts, instead of events interwoven into an ongoing process. And you know what? As we looked and talked, as I mentioned again how much I miss her mother and love imagining I’m seeing her in spirit, she smiled, and stood up straight, and together we basked in our foolish love.
As a result, I’ve had a front row seat to the constantly shifting ways her children’s hearts have broken and fought to heal. Though healing isn’t exactly what appears to be happening; like broken bones that aren’t reset properly, their hearts seem to have grown stronger around the indelible distortion of losing their mother at such a young age.
It’s hard to be around broken children and not want to fix everything and anything, instantly. But I’ve lived long enough – and have been raising my own children for long enough – to know that any instant fix for severe heartache is only temporary and might even prolong the pain by providing false comfort. So I’ve been treading carefully, but sometimes, I’ve found, foolish love gets in anyway.
Ever since Rajna died, I’ve had strange encounters with birds outside the two windows that are positioned behind and next to my writing chair. We live on the estuaries of San Francisco Bay, which is the soupiest of soupy lands, sure to instantly transform us all into a community of floating houseboats in the next big earthquake, but it’s also spectacularly beautiful here. It’s lush and vibrant and absolutely chock full of birds. Our children’s playfields are sometimes so overrun with goose poop that they are unusuable; in the spring, when the ducks and geese have their babies, they stop traffic by walking them across our many narrow streets the way birds of limited intelligence in protected communities will do. And on my biweekly runs, I’m treated to every manner of avian theater imaginable.
But what happens behind my chair is a little different. Hummingbirds, for instance, hover just at eye level, leaving the flowers they were focused on to embark on some strange errand of visitation. A sparrow tapped constantly on one of the windows for the better part of week. One time, a massive eagle perched on an overhang just three feet away and stayed there for a few days. “What’s should we name it?” I asked my younger son, thinking of my grandfather, Samuel. “Sam,” he replied.
Like any good recovering academic, at first I devoted myself to explaining it away. Of course, I’d see more birds behind my writing chair – that’s where I spend my longest moments of stillness. True. And I make more sense of them, because that’s where I do my deepest reflections. Also true. But after several months of these occurrences, reason no longer mattered as much. Hummingbirds, I learned, are symbolic of spirits that hover between two worlds, I’ve since read, as are sparrows. And eagles of the fierce beauty – and choice -- of having a lonely heart.
After a year or more had passed, and Rajna’s daughter still refused to talk about her mother, in a moment of desperation I began to dip my toe into talking about the birds with her. She was ten when her mother died, incredibly impressionable and vulnerable. But then I remembered that grief has no good answers, and that sharing my own paltry reaches toward comfort was a way of sharing my own messy grief and hope with integrity. So last Mother’s Day, when a hummingbird blocked my path on a run, hovering at chest level right in front of me for the better part of a minute, I told her about it. And her eyes lit up. Since then, carefully, ever so carefully, I’ll share another moment when the time is right. And she smiles.
Maybe I am misleading her. But love is foolish, after all – and sometimes its foolishness can be a marvelous gift. It defies reason and fills our heart even when they have no business being filled. It reminds me of Shakespeare’s fool, in King Lear, the only soul who sticks beside the flawed and miserable king as he descends into madness, improbably comforting him along the way. Why should we expect love to be reasonable, anyway? Power doesn’t always come from the mind. And healing rarely does.
Which brings me to the latest installment. On Sunday, the day before this two-year anniversary, my daughter and Rajna’s – I’ll call her Anne -- were investigating some beading I was working on while sitting in my chair. They were both leaning over me when Anne suddenly stood up straight, pointing out the window. “Is that a CHICKEN?” she exclaimed. My daughter and I whipped around. Sure enough, just outside, a bird I have never seen before, looking for all the world like a rangy chicken, was pecking its way around the lawn. We crept outside for further investigation and then, fearing we’d frighten it away, went back inside to frantically search the internet for an image that might match what we were seeing.
It was a grouse, also known as a prairie chicken. And the grouse, it turns out, is symbolic of the spiral of life and death, the false ways we see each of these events as hard stops or starts, instead of events interwoven into an ongoing process. And you know what? As we looked and talked, as I mentioned again how much I miss her mother and love imagining I’m seeing her in spirit, she smiled, and stood up straight, and together we basked in our foolish love.
Writer's Log, February 7th: Editing in the Twenty-First Century
One thing I wished we talked about as writers is the historically unprecedented opportunity we now have to endlessly edit our work. Given that writers tend to be a sensitive, reactive, thoughtful, and ever-so-slightly insecure group of worker bees, it's really a surprise that no one's thought to babysit our interactions with our word processors. We should have Word for Writers, a software program that sends up alerts when we've rewritten the same chapter twenty times, or futzed with the same sentence a hundred times, or our time spent staring at the screen is inversely proportional to the time it takes to delete a 20,000 word document in its entirety. "Are you sure you want to do that?" might be adjusted to add: "Maybe you want to sleep on it?" or "Did your mother just call with edits on your latest draft?"
As if we didn't struggle enough with shaping 80,000+ words into a story. Or 80 into a decent poem.
This might just be one of those things that is best combated with awareness. One of my favorite ways to bring the reality of editing throughout the ages home is to pick up one of the many volumes available today that reveal a canonical writer's drafts. While these resources probably make Nabokov and Faulkner spin in their graves, I have no trouble appropriating them if they help to keep my own liferaft afloat. Because what they show me is the magical intersection of human error and stumbling with the emergence of the kind of true and lasting music so many of us which to achieve in our own writing. And in the process, they remind me that it's not how many times you revise your work that determines whether or not it will sing; it's how you learn to talk back to it and adjust it -- not disassemble it -- to find its heart. Because more often than not, these works remind me of the work of archaeologists, not demolitioners. They represent the patient sifting through seemingly dull or worthless materials to reveal timeless significance.
But I have to admit that this is only one of a few tools I have to combat the siren call of word processing mania, and I sometimes forget it's there. So I ask you: How do you fight back against the temptation to slash and burn through your drafts -- in the word processing arena, or elsewhere?
As if we didn't struggle enough with shaping 80,000+ words into a story. Or 80 into a decent poem.
This might just be one of those things that is best combated with awareness. One of my favorite ways to bring the reality of editing throughout the ages home is to pick up one of the many volumes available today that reveal a canonical writer's drafts. While these resources probably make Nabokov and Faulkner spin in their graves, I have no trouble appropriating them if they help to keep my own liferaft afloat. Because what they show me is the magical intersection of human error and stumbling with the emergence of the kind of true and lasting music so many of us which to achieve in our own writing. And in the process, they remind me that it's not how many times you revise your work that determines whether or not it will sing; it's how you learn to talk back to it and adjust it -- not disassemble it -- to find its heart. Because more often than not, these works remind me of the work of archaeologists, not demolitioners. They represent the patient sifting through seemingly dull or worthless materials to reveal timeless significance.
But I have to admit that this is only one of a few tools I have to combat the siren call of word processing mania, and I sometimes forget it's there. So I ask you: How do you fight back against the temptation to slash and burn through your drafts -- in the word processing arena, or elsewhere?
December 13, 2016
Writer's Log, December 13: Are You Hungry?
When I was a kid, I was lucky enough not to be hungry. Not only did I live in a family that could afford food regularly, I rarely banked my own appetite. I ate a lot, and stopped when I was full. But then, around the age of eight, self-consciousness kicked in. My older sisters were ten and twelve at the time, and I’m sure what they were experiencing as blossoming adolescents in the image-zany 1980s filtered down, but even so: I consider myself somewhat lucky that I managed to eat unchecked for almost eight years.
Can we stop to fully appreciate how weird that is? How on earth did we get to a place where eight-year-old girls are lucky if they haven’t yet started head trips on themselves about their appetites?
And of course, as we all know, these warped perceptions and unnecessary anxieties extend to plenty of other appetites, in woman and men, though women tend to bear the brunt of shaming (by themselves and others) around the more intimate ones: the sexual appetite, the desire to feel powerful and heard, the hunger for personal expression. And when one appetite is compromised, they all weaken.
One of the wonderful and agonizing things about being a writer is that your self is your instrument, and the music you make depends largely upon your ability to let yourself sing. In my case, for example, I find that when I’ve lassoed my poor appetite to the calorie counting mechanical bull, I tend to also be worrying about word counts and page lengths and fitting into a genre. This is the creative equivalent of trying to swim in a lead vest. Or when I’m too anxious to remember how much I enjoy time in bed with my husband, I might find that I haven’t been open to reading new works and letting fresh voices in, or that my characters are doing nothing but talking and are starting to bore even me.
Sure, you’re saying, I’ll just give into my appetites and eat this entire batch of Christmas cookies and go sleep with the UPS guy/gal. But that’s like calling jumping into bed with your ex closure. It’s not about giving into the appetites, it’s about appreciating them instead of castigating them. Maybe you want to eat the Christmas cookies because your mother just called and the only way you know how to survive her citrusy barbs is to anesthetize yourself with the mellowness of vanilla and sugar. Maybe while you’re enjoying them you might think of other ways your voice isn’t heard, and the cookies won’t seem quite as necessary. Maybe you want to sleep with the UPS person because you told your partner you didn’t mind doing the laundry all the time, but now you feel like her toady washerwoman, especially when she drops her dirty socks in the middle of the bedroom floor for you to pick up.
The point is, desire and appetite can’t be squelched, at least not for long, and even if you manage to temporarily shove them down into your gut, they’ll find their way out in much darker and more damaging ways. Because they’re just a part of us. There’s no judgment to be made about that. The judgment comes, perhaps, in what we do with our desires, but we should be the ones who make that judgement call according to our sense of a good life well lived. We should figure out what the best expression of our hunger, our sexuality, our power can be. And then we make the right spaces for them, rather than constantly trying to put the genie back in the bottle. When I think of what I could have done with the time spent obsessing over ways to deny my hunger if I’d put it toward children, or books, or listening, it makes me want to just go back to bed. Thank goodness I’ve still got today. And cookies.
Can we stop to fully appreciate how weird that is? How on earth did we get to a place where eight-year-old girls are lucky if they haven’t yet started head trips on themselves about their appetites?
And of course, as we all know, these warped perceptions and unnecessary anxieties extend to plenty of other appetites, in woman and men, though women tend to bear the brunt of shaming (by themselves and others) around the more intimate ones: the sexual appetite, the desire to feel powerful and heard, the hunger for personal expression. And when one appetite is compromised, they all weaken.
One of the wonderful and agonizing things about being a writer is that your self is your instrument, and the music you make depends largely upon your ability to let yourself sing. In my case, for example, I find that when I’ve lassoed my poor appetite to the calorie counting mechanical bull, I tend to also be worrying about word counts and page lengths and fitting into a genre. This is the creative equivalent of trying to swim in a lead vest. Or when I’m too anxious to remember how much I enjoy time in bed with my husband, I might find that I haven’t been open to reading new works and letting fresh voices in, or that my characters are doing nothing but talking and are starting to bore even me.
Sure, you’re saying, I’ll just give into my appetites and eat this entire batch of Christmas cookies and go sleep with the UPS guy/gal. But that’s like calling jumping into bed with your ex closure. It’s not about giving into the appetites, it’s about appreciating them instead of castigating them. Maybe you want to eat the Christmas cookies because your mother just called and the only way you know how to survive her citrusy barbs is to anesthetize yourself with the mellowness of vanilla and sugar. Maybe while you’re enjoying them you might think of other ways your voice isn’t heard, and the cookies won’t seem quite as necessary. Maybe you want to sleep with the UPS person because you told your partner you didn’t mind doing the laundry all the time, but now you feel like her toady washerwoman, especially when she drops her dirty socks in the middle of the bedroom floor for you to pick up.
The point is, desire and appetite can’t be squelched, at least not for long, and even if you manage to temporarily shove them down into your gut, they’ll find their way out in much darker and more damaging ways. Because they’re just a part of us. There’s no judgment to be made about that. The judgment comes, perhaps, in what we do with our desires, but we should be the ones who make that judgement call according to our sense of a good life well lived. We should figure out what the best expression of our hunger, our sexuality, our power can be. And then we make the right spaces for them, rather than constantly trying to put the genie back in the bottle. When I think of what I could have done with the time spent obsessing over ways to deny my hunger if I’d put it toward children, or books, or listening, it makes me want to just go back to bed. Thank goodness I’ve still got today. And cookies.
November 29, 2016
Writer’s Log, November 29th: Anxiety vs. Insight
I tend to like things pretty neat and orderly. I geek out over recently organized libraries and preen when I’ve organized even the tiniest corner of my child-riddled household. I’m a far better baker than cook, and had I any appreciable mathematical talent, I would most likely have gone the way most of my extended family has – toward physics and math and science, laboring gladly under their cerebral frameworks.
But alas, my Jewish doctor of a father fell in love with an Irish poet, and there you have it: a girl who wants to multiply but can only sing. Still, when the world is thick with the unknown and the unanswerable, sometimes it’s the songs rather than the solutions that keep us afloat.
That said, living without solutions can be hair-raising, to say the least, and I know I’m not alone in feeling a little overwhelmed by the miasma of thoughts and feelings and emotions in our society right now (actually, they’re always there; they just happen to be coming to a fierce boil on the surface right now, for better or worse).
As a lifelong navigator of overwhelming emotions, I’ve noticed that at the peak of our experiences, we encounter both tremendous opportunities for insight and the temptation to dissolve into an anxiety-riddled mess. In all honesty, you can have both simultaneously, and despite how uncomfortable that is (kind of like having ants in your pants and several cups of mental caffeine kicking in simultaneously), you’ll survive it.
But personally, this is not my favorite way to go, and I’ve struggled mightily with alternatives. Surprisingly enough, sometimes it helps enormously to just recognize the difference between anxiety – the persistent voice that assures you, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you left the door unlocked and all thieves in the area are having a field day in your jewelry and lingerie drawers (no pun intended) – and insight – the persistent voice that tells you that Trump is probably just as scared as the rest of us.
So how do you tell the difference? I’m not entirely sure, but I think the trick lies in tuning out the voices and going deeper, tuning in to a place where voices cannot reach. For example, does the confidence with which you know the world is coming to a screeching have a vice grip on your chest? Is it tightening a rough, impenetrable sailor’s knot in your gut? (One that is probably teaming with fish slime, making it just a matter of time before either the infection or the ulcer takes you out?) Or does it start in your heart and spread like a wave through your consciousness, not demanding that your nervous system go from all’s well to Bush-era levels of code orange; just making its presence known like a wave with a momentum all its own?
You can’t always tell the difference right away. When there’s so much honking and squawking around us -- when some of those honks and squawks are our own – it can be hard to even decide what to have for dinner. It helps to have allies in the cause. Recently, I’ve returned to enjoying my love of Marc Chagall, an artist who managed to paint scenes that were at once entirely whimsical and entirely spiritual. They crack me open and up – all those goats and brides and breasts – and they somehow also make me feel like everything is going to be OK. Something about this French Jew using every primary color and its neighbor to paint floating nonsensical scenes of love flanked by sorrow and music in the wake of World War II reaches deep inside me and thrums with a resonance I can’t even be bothered to deny. Few facts could be traced within his work, but truths abound.
Here's a news flash: insights are unlikely to lead you to facts. They’re experiences of deeper connection to the world around us. Frequently, they’re riddled with truths that make facts look like penny-pinching grouches at a soup kitchen. But the point of letting insights be and appreciating them is not about being right or wrong. It’s about letting your little tentacles of truth and awareness reach out and touch other, similar feelers in the world and make connections that are based on open-heartedness and open-mindedness. Immediate truths might not fall out, like so many dominoes clicking down in order and leaving a glittering, lifeless train of order, but deeper ones will swell and rise under the good care and faith you have in them.
But alas, my Jewish doctor of a father fell in love with an Irish poet, and there you have it: a girl who wants to multiply but can only sing. Still, when the world is thick with the unknown and the unanswerable, sometimes it’s the songs rather than the solutions that keep us afloat.
That said, living without solutions can be hair-raising, to say the least, and I know I’m not alone in feeling a little overwhelmed by the miasma of thoughts and feelings and emotions in our society right now (actually, they’re always there; they just happen to be coming to a fierce boil on the surface right now, for better or worse).
As a lifelong navigator of overwhelming emotions, I’ve noticed that at the peak of our experiences, we encounter both tremendous opportunities for insight and the temptation to dissolve into an anxiety-riddled mess. In all honesty, you can have both simultaneously, and despite how uncomfortable that is (kind of like having ants in your pants and several cups of mental caffeine kicking in simultaneously), you’ll survive it.
But personally, this is not my favorite way to go, and I’ve struggled mightily with alternatives. Surprisingly enough, sometimes it helps enormously to just recognize the difference between anxiety – the persistent voice that assures you, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you left the door unlocked and all thieves in the area are having a field day in your jewelry and lingerie drawers (no pun intended) – and insight – the persistent voice that tells you that Trump is probably just as scared as the rest of us.
So how do you tell the difference? I’m not entirely sure, but I think the trick lies in tuning out the voices and going deeper, tuning in to a place where voices cannot reach. For example, does the confidence with which you know the world is coming to a screeching have a vice grip on your chest? Is it tightening a rough, impenetrable sailor’s knot in your gut? (One that is probably teaming with fish slime, making it just a matter of time before either the infection or the ulcer takes you out?) Or does it start in your heart and spread like a wave through your consciousness, not demanding that your nervous system go from all’s well to Bush-era levels of code orange; just making its presence known like a wave with a momentum all its own?
You can’t always tell the difference right away. When there’s so much honking and squawking around us -- when some of those honks and squawks are our own – it can be hard to even decide what to have for dinner. It helps to have allies in the cause. Recently, I’ve returned to enjoying my love of Marc Chagall, an artist who managed to paint scenes that were at once entirely whimsical and entirely spiritual. They crack me open and up – all those goats and brides and breasts – and they somehow also make me feel like everything is going to be OK. Something about this French Jew using every primary color and its neighbor to paint floating nonsensical scenes of love flanked by sorrow and music in the wake of World War II reaches deep inside me and thrums with a resonance I can’t even be bothered to deny. Few facts could be traced within his work, but truths abound.
Here's a news flash: insights are unlikely to lead you to facts. They’re experiences of deeper connection to the world around us. Frequently, they’re riddled with truths that make facts look like penny-pinching grouches at a soup kitchen. But the point of letting insights be and appreciating them is not about being right or wrong. It’s about letting your little tentacles of truth and awareness reach out and touch other, similar feelers in the world and make connections that are based on open-heartedness and open-mindedness. Immediate truths might not fall out, like so many dominoes clicking down in order and leaving a glittering, lifeless train of order, but deeper ones will swell and rise under the good care and faith you have in them.
Writer’s Log, November 22: Obedience Training
I don’t know about you, but there are days when I’m trying to write and my ego just shoves all good intention out of the way, plunks itself down beside me, and proceeds to make snarky comments while looking over my shoulder and cracking its knuckles. And once it muscles its way in, forget about it leaving anytime soon. The ego, after all, wants everything to be all about the ego, and if you aren’t careful, it’ll move in and start insulting your friends and chattering to you when you’re trying to type and leave crumbs all over your keyboard before it spills its drink on your motherboard and blames you for upsetting its balance.
It would be marvelous if we could just show it the door. Some writers claim to be able to do this, but I’m not one of them. Believe me, I’ve tried. But sometimes learning what doesn’t work is the best way to understand what does, and I’ve grown to understand that the reason why we can’t get rid of our egos is because they are to a writer’s health. The absence of ego is good for monks and saints, but artists are driven to occupy the spaces in between, to translate and make connections between the very light and the dep dark. And in order to do this frequently harrowing and often lonely work, we need as much encouragement as we can get.
That’s where the ego comes in. It keeps us afloat when no one else believes in us, it never doubts that we can achieve our biggest goals, and it thinks we’re much smarter/prettier/more talented than we give ourselves credit for. I think I might have just described my mother. Anyway, the unfortunate thing is that leaving the door open to ego can often mean that it will kick it open and pester you with its unquenchable thirst for attention, leaving you distracted, creatively paralyzed, and frustrated.
My ego has been particularly snappy lately. Like all praise-junkies, it always wants more from me, and sees everything I’ve already done as not nearly enough. And even though I know how to work with it, I usually stumble a bit toward the tried-and-true solution. This is to be expected. Even the most sanguine among us gets a little rattled by a bully, until we remember that bullies are created from fear and insecurity, and are managed best when we don’t lose our heads and keep patience and compassion in the forefront of our thoughts, even if we want to just punch someone in the nose.
When it comes to managing my writing, it helps to have a favorite saying. This is not because we are giving ourselves over to clichés, but because of the simply fact that mantras help reestablish equilibrium when all logical thought is scrambling for the exits. My favorite saying is pieced together from an ancient Chinese one: “In order for us to conquer our fear of the dragon, we must first invite him into our home.” Actually, that might be my second favorite saying. I think my favorite saying is a Yiddish one:“To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish.” They’re actually not all that different, come to think of it. Both of them encourage perspective. Both of them tell us that our biggest fears might exist mostly in our interpretation of them.
In all honesty, sometimes I need to write these down and stick them on my forehead (metaphorically speaking, of course (maybe)). But the more I repeat them, the quicker I find a way to tame my ego. Recently, I’ve found it useful to think of my ego like a giant St. Bernard puppy that needs to learn how to heel. I don’t know how much work you’ve done training a dog, but getting one to walk just beside and not in front of you at a measured pace can feel a little like something only David Blaine could pull off. But as with anything remarkable, it’s all about the daily work, the attention you pay to the matter in small and consistent ways. You can’t teach a dog or an ego to heel, in other words, by shouting at it. The only thing that works is a dedicated, patient practice of establishing boundaries. Your ego and your dog love you, and are wild to be around you, but you’re going to get into a car accident if you don’t devise some kind of daily strategy to work with its boundless and sometimes frightening energy.
I know you’re too smart to expect to see results overnight, but these things always take longer than they should and set in when you least expect them to. Just know that the ego can be managed, provided you approach it without failing to see how equally essential and dangerous it is. But the practice you undertake to manage it, as is the case with almost all practice, actually enforces its own purpose over time. In other words, the practice itself steadies the ego just as much as what is being practiced. Which is very useful, because even after your ego stops peeing all over everything you own and maybe learns some basic commands, it’ll still require your vigilant and compassionate discipline. But don’t cast it out. Just like all our other qualities, it certainly isn’t perfect, but it’s a wonderful and necessary addition to the party, one you should kiss tenderly on the cheek when it arrives, just before you assign it a designated driver for the way home.
It would be marvelous if we could just show it the door. Some writers claim to be able to do this, but I’m not one of them. Believe me, I’ve tried. But sometimes learning what doesn’t work is the best way to understand what does, and I’ve grown to understand that the reason why we can’t get rid of our egos is because they are to a writer’s health. The absence of ego is good for monks and saints, but artists are driven to occupy the spaces in between, to translate and make connections between the very light and the dep dark. And in order to do this frequently harrowing and often lonely work, we need as much encouragement as we can get.
That’s where the ego comes in. It keeps us afloat when no one else believes in us, it never doubts that we can achieve our biggest goals, and it thinks we’re much smarter/prettier/more talented than we give ourselves credit for. I think I might have just described my mother. Anyway, the unfortunate thing is that leaving the door open to ego can often mean that it will kick it open and pester you with its unquenchable thirst for attention, leaving you distracted, creatively paralyzed, and frustrated.
My ego has been particularly snappy lately. Like all praise-junkies, it always wants more from me, and sees everything I’ve already done as not nearly enough. And even though I know how to work with it, I usually stumble a bit toward the tried-and-true solution. This is to be expected. Even the most sanguine among us gets a little rattled by a bully, until we remember that bullies are created from fear and insecurity, and are managed best when we don’t lose our heads and keep patience and compassion in the forefront of our thoughts, even if we want to just punch someone in the nose.
When it comes to managing my writing, it helps to have a favorite saying. This is not because we are giving ourselves over to clichés, but because of the simply fact that mantras help reestablish equilibrium when all logical thought is scrambling for the exits. My favorite saying is pieced together from an ancient Chinese one: “In order for us to conquer our fear of the dragon, we must first invite him into our home.” Actually, that might be my second favorite saying. I think my favorite saying is a Yiddish one:“To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish.” They’re actually not all that different, come to think of it. Both of them encourage perspective. Both of them tell us that our biggest fears might exist mostly in our interpretation of them.
In all honesty, sometimes I need to write these down and stick them on my forehead (metaphorically speaking, of course (maybe)). But the more I repeat them, the quicker I find a way to tame my ego. Recently, I’ve found it useful to think of my ego like a giant St. Bernard puppy that needs to learn how to heel. I don’t know how much work you’ve done training a dog, but getting one to walk just beside and not in front of you at a measured pace can feel a little like something only David Blaine could pull off. But as with anything remarkable, it’s all about the daily work, the attention you pay to the matter in small and consistent ways. You can’t teach a dog or an ego to heel, in other words, by shouting at it. The only thing that works is a dedicated, patient practice of establishing boundaries. Your ego and your dog love you, and are wild to be around you, but you’re going to get into a car accident if you don’t devise some kind of daily strategy to work with its boundless and sometimes frightening energy.
I know you’re too smart to expect to see results overnight, but these things always take longer than they should and set in when you least expect them to. Just know that the ego can be managed, provided you approach it without failing to see how equally essential and dangerous it is. But the practice you undertake to manage it, as is the case with almost all practice, actually enforces its own purpose over time. In other words, the practice itself steadies the ego just as much as what is being practiced. Which is very useful, because even after your ego stops peeing all over everything you own and maybe learns some basic commands, it’ll still require your vigilant and compassionate discipline. But don’t cast it out. Just like all our other qualities, it certainly isn’t perfect, but it’s a wonderful and necessary addition to the party, one you should kiss tenderly on the cheek when it arrives, just before you assign it a designated driver for the way home.
November 8, 2016
Writer’s Log, November 8: It might be time for a vacation…
OK, setting aside the fact that our entire nation probably needs a vacation after this election, since we can’t all go sit on the beach together and pass the margaritas and remember why we got married in the first place, let’s at least give our writing a little TLC.
In the past, when I’ve been really stuck on a project and boring down on it like a teenager in the grips of unrequited love, I sometimes forget to breathe – figuratively speaking, of course. But it doesn’t always feel that way. I have to admit that sometimes I get so tangles up in my own leash that my chest gets all tight and my eyes burn from staring at the computer screen. And to make matters worse, it feels like the more I dig my heels in, the further the object of my attention drifts away from me. One great thing about writing, though – as opposed to love, say, or politics – is that it responds really, really well to taking a vacation. Two types of vacation, as a matter of fact.
The first is the sort of vacation you take when Ed McMahon shows up with a million dollars and you leave the milk out and hightail it out of there faster than you can say “fortheloveofgodgetoutofmyway.” This is not a bad sort of vacation to take, though it’s best not to stay away for too long in a place where you arrive in a sweaty and desperate panic. That’s what we might call a temporary solution. Because while it might make you feel like throwing your computer against the wall and making a dramatic exit, your writing is a part of you, and needs to be honored as such, even if you sometimes need to just shut it down and walk away to get a little perspective.
The second type of vacation is one that keeps you connected to yourself as a writer, but puts you in a new scene where no one knows you and you might need to pick up a new language. For those of you with darker, more subversive streaks, you might think of this type of vacation as the writerly equivalent of taking a mistress. Either way, this kind of vacation involves your setting that stubborn, no-good, totally unreasonable project you once thought you could hang the moon on aside and taking on another.
Yes, you read that right.
Start something new – and make sure it’s categorically different from whatever you’ve been obsessing over, er, working on. Maybe you’re a fiction writer who takes on a biography; or a journalist who starts a mystery series; or an academic who starts a novel. The most important thing to keep in mind is that this secondary project, or dalliance, should feel like everything the intractable project is not: fun, undemanding, different, and entirely free from expectation.
You might find that you don’t even need to refocus for long to find your way back – or you might find that what you once only thought of as a vacation spot might be where you need to live for a while. Either way, it’s incredibly refreshing to release your creative energies into unexpected and unexplored spaces. Because the most dedicated, most productive kind of creativity must allow for a healthy amount of play. Otherwise, you become like the kid who’s always making everyone play dolls and lines them up and doesn’t let her friends touch their clothes or dirty their shoes. So please, after you vote today, find a little breathing room. Remember that it’s rare that great things come out of unrelenting pressure, and that the most beautiful voices sometimes emerge from the most unexpected of places.
In the past, when I’ve been really stuck on a project and boring down on it like a teenager in the grips of unrequited love, I sometimes forget to breathe – figuratively speaking, of course. But it doesn’t always feel that way. I have to admit that sometimes I get so tangles up in my own leash that my chest gets all tight and my eyes burn from staring at the computer screen. And to make matters worse, it feels like the more I dig my heels in, the further the object of my attention drifts away from me. One great thing about writing, though – as opposed to love, say, or politics – is that it responds really, really well to taking a vacation. Two types of vacation, as a matter of fact.
The first is the sort of vacation you take when Ed McMahon shows up with a million dollars and you leave the milk out and hightail it out of there faster than you can say “fortheloveofgodgetoutofmyway.” This is not a bad sort of vacation to take, though it’s best not to stay away for too long in a place where you arrive in a sweaty and desperate panic. That’s what we might call a temporary solution. Because while it might make you feel like throwing your computer against the wall and making a dramatic exit, your writing is a part of you, and needs to be honored as such, even if you sometimes need to just shut it down and walk away to get a little perspective.
The second type of vacation is one that keeps you connected to yourself as a writer, but puts you in a new scene where no one knows you and you might need to pick up a new language. For those of you with darker, more subversive streaks, you might think of this type of vacation as the writerly equivalent of taking a mistress. Either way, this kind of vacation involves your setting that stubborn, no-good, totally unreasonable project you once thought you could hang the moon on aside and taking on another.
Yes, you read that right.
Start something new – and make sure it’s categorically different from whatever you’ve been obsessing over, er, working on. Maybe you’re a fiction writer who takes on a biography; or a journalist who starts a mystery series; or an academic who starts a novel. The most important thing to keep in mind is that this secondary project, or dalliance, should feel like everything the intractable project is not: fun, undemanding, different, and entirely free from expectation.
You might find that you don’t even need to refocus for long to find your way back – or you might find that what you once only thought of as a vacation spot might be where you need to live for a while. Either way, it’s incredibly refreshing to release your creative energies into unexpected and unexplored spaces. Because the most dedicated, most productive kind of creativity must allow for a healthy amount of play. Otherwise, you become like the kid who’s always making everyone play dolls and lines them up and doesn’t let her friends touch their clothes or dirty their shoes. So please, after you vote today, find a little breathing room. Remember that it’s rare that great things come out of unrelenting pressure, and that the most beautiful voices sometimes emerge from the most unexpected of places.
