Ampersunder

Be Awkward, Quick, Insolent: If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland

March 30, 2018

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Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write, written in 1938, is a precursor generally to the various books on the writing craft which I love so much and more specifically to The Artist’s Way (which I wrote about here). The three central messages of the two books are the same. Anyone can be an artist. Everyone has heaps of creativity inside them and probably need help to get access to it. And the only way to make real art is to find your true self, be kind to it, and tell the truth.

Unless you’re prepared for a fully loaded dose of affirmation, inspiration, optimistic encouragement, earnestness, and repetition, proceed with caution! If that doesn’t scare you, watch out for the old-fashioned conversational tone and slightly odd punctuation and grammar. Writers of the present century, aspiring or otherwise, are more likely to enjoy contemporary books on the writing craft.

Even aside from all of that, it might have been a bit much for me to read If You Want to Write so soon after finishing The Artist’s Way. Like Julia Cameron’s book, If You Want to Write is more about discovering that you can write, even if you think you can’t or aren’t good. The focus is on working toward becoming what you might call good, whatever that may be for you. It’s not about crafting beautiful sentences or a compelling plot or engaging characters. It’s about finding the thing inside of you that you want to write and getting it out on the page in an honest and truthful way. Reading two similar books about this so close together has pushed me to a saturation point.

But that’s not to say there aren’t some nuggets of insight to be found. Here are some of my favourite parts.

Being careless

Before Julia Cameron came along, Brenda Ueland had her own version of the morning pages:

“Write every day, or as often as you possibly can, as fast and carelessly as you possibly can, without reading it again, anything you happened to have though, seen or felt the day before. In six months look at it. A drawer full of paper will have accumulated. You will see that what you have written with the most slovenly freedom — in those parts there will be vitality, brilliance, beauty. By being careless, by taking it off on paper as fast as you can, you will not write what is dutiful and boring to you. You will not lumberingly over-explain, as they all do in political speeches and articles on economics. You will go straight to the point— be awkward, quick, insolent. Oh, this over-explaining! It is the secret of all boredom.”

I also like this advice about writing as though you will throw away what you create: “I don’t think we trust our imaginations enough, use them rightly. Self-trust is so important. When you launch on a story, make your neck loose, feel free, good-natured. And be lazy. Feel that you are going to throw it away. Try writing utterly unplanned stories and see what comes out.”

All should work

“Everybody in the world has the same conviction of inner importance, fire, or the god within,” she writes.

“The tragedy is that either they stifle their fire by not believing in it and using it; or they try to prove to the world and themselves that they have it, not inwardly and greatly, but externally and egotistically, by some second-rate thing like money or power or more publicity. Therefore all should work. First because it is impossible that you have no creative gift. Second: the only way to make it live and increase is to use it. Third: you cannot be sure that it is not a great gift.”

Personality and the true self

A lot of what Ueland has to say about writing is about finding your true self and writing from there, not putting on a character or trying to be someone you’re not. But how, she asks, “to single out your true self, when we are all so many selves?” Her answer:

“The only way to find yourself is by recklessness and freedom. If you feel like a murderer for the time being, write like one. In fact, when you are in a fury it is a wonderful time to write. It will be brilliant — provided you write about what you are furious at, and not some dutiful literary bilge.
…
Gradually by writing you will learn more and more to be free, to say all you think; and at the same time you will learn never to lie to yourself, never to pretend and attitudinize. But only by writing and by long, patient, serious work will you find your true self.”

Learning about yourself is what gives your writing that coveted personality:

“The personality behind the writing is so important. This is what I call the Third Dimension. On the paper there are all the neatly written words and sentences. It may be completely objects, with ‘I’ not written there once. But behind the words and sentences, there is this deep, important, moving thing — the personality of the writer. And whatever that personality is, it will shine through the writing and make it noble or great, or touching or cold … or supercilious or whatever the writer is.”

Planning before writing

A friend asks Ueland if she has planned the book and made an outline. She vehemently answers in the negative. “For when you begin to plan such a huge edifice of words,” she writes, “your heart fails you. It is too hard, it will never get done, it is too complex and frightful. No, write what comes to you now. More will come later. The river will begin to flow through you.”

I’m not sure this is useful advice for all writers. Sometimes it helps to know the big picture before you begin to write each chapter. Many writers are very capable of dealing with an ambitious work. There’s no need to tell them that it should seem difficult if they don’t actually feel that way.

It’s obvious from this book that Ueland followed this advice while writing it. Each chapter is a thing by itself, without much sense of a cohesive whole, and there is a lot of repetition and even some contradiction. It’s still readable, but a little haphazard. If You Want to Write itself isn’t a strong argument for not planning before you start writing.

“No, I wouldn’t think of planning the book before I write it. You write, and plan it afterwards. You write it first because every word must come out with freedom, and with meaning because you think it is so and want to tell it. If this is done the book will be alive.”

This advice is useful for starting with an exploratory first draft. But it’s not going to help people who already have an idea of what their book is about but need to do the work to figure out how to put it together. Planning is helpful for avoiding that scramble in the dark every time you sit down to write.

But it’s equally true that if you don’t know what you’re writing and how you’re going to start, outlining and planning isn’t really going to get you anywhere. Sometimes you just have to stop making excuses, stop living inside the hazy world of your grand ideas, stop pretending that one day the story is going to write itself. Sometimes you just need to get down to the work.

The way to make it better

Although so much of the book is about finding your inner artist and facing the fear that you can’t write, If You Want to Write also has some excellent concrete advice about writing.

How to get better: “Don’t be afraid of writing bad, mawkish stories for that will show you many things about yourself, and your eye and taste and what you really feel and care about will become clearer to you. If you write a bad story, the way to make it better is to write three more. Then look at the first one. You will have grown in understanding, in honesty. You will know what to do to it. And to yourself.”

How to revise a story: “When you have written a story and it has come back a few times and you sit there trying to write it over again and make it more impressive, do not try to think of better words, more gripping words. Try to see the people better. It is not yet deeply enough imagined. See them — just what they did and how they looked and felt. Then write it. If you can at last see it clearly the writing is easy.”

How to be interesting: “The secret of being interesting is to move along as fast as the mind of the reader (or listener) can take it in. Both must march along in the same tempo. That is why it is good to read your writing aloud to yourself. As soon as your voice drags, cross that part out.”

There is another book about writing with a lot of similarities to If You Want to Write that came out just a few years before, in 1934: Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande (available as a PDF), which I first heard about via Writing about Writing. Here’s a preview:

“There is a sort of writer’s magic. There is a procedure which many an author has come upon by happy accident or has worked out for himself which can, in part, be taught. To be ready to learn it you will have to go by a rather roundabout way, first considering the main difficulties which you will meet, then embarking on simple, but stringently self-enforced exercises to overcome those difficulties. Last of all you must have faith, or the curiosity, to take one odd piece of advice which will be unlike any of the exhortations that have come your way in classrooms or in textbooks.”

If You Want to Write, Here’s the Book for You at Literary Hub.
Brenda Ueland at Wikipedia.
Buy the book directly from Graywolf Press.

March 30, 2018

How Writing Has Been Going Lately

March 23, 2018

I wrote the first drafts of two novels last year. I wrote them quickly — the first in three and a half months at around 800 words a day, and the second in less than two months at about 950 words a day. I started the draft of a third novel in early December. I expected it to come out as quickly as the other two, but so far it hasn’t.

Writing lately

Writing lately has been slow. I try to work on it every day, and sometimes I fail. My average pace is somewhere around 200 words a day, and I’m nowhere close to the end of the story. There are many days where I’ve written nothing at all and other days where 300 words feels like a feat of incredible strength. It’s been months since I’ve written several hundred or a thousand words in one session.

That sounds like a lot, but on a day like that, the majority of the words are terrible. The volume is important, though. The point is getting inside the writing, moving forward, thinking of new ideas while in the thick of it, not from the outside. In the middle of a thought about something else finding insight into what is really going on in a scene. There need to be a lot of words because it’s often only at the end of a long stretch of sentences that something good or useful emerges.

Most mornings I type up a few sentences and call it progress. I feel lucky if I manage more than one paragraph. Sometimes that tiny beginning turns into something bigger and I get a few hundred words down in a morning, but most of the time it’s just words that reiterate something I’ve already written, that add a silly thought on top of another silly thought, that carry on a conversation with nothing in it. I don’t feel like it counts as progress.

Shifting form

Part of my problem with writing lately is that the story doesn’t even feel like a novel anymore. Somewhere along the way, the part I’m working on turned into a short story. Part of me wants to continue the novel, while another part wants to cut out this piece and work it into a thing that stands on its own.

I’m meandering on the outskirts of the story, looking backward at what I’ve already written, wishing I could make something of that, rather than continuing to move ahead. But having begun a novel that shows signs of going somewhere, I am compelled to continue it. Yet having a vision in my head of a short story, I am compelled to consider what it would mean to have a short story finished, done, without having to commit to an entire novel yet again.

A novel is fundamentally different from a short story. I can’t hold them both in my head at once. I’m finding it impossible to have it both ways. So I creep cautiously along, barely making any headway. And I keep thinking: what if it were a short story, something I could submit somewhere for publication on its own?

Writing lately

One step at a time

It feels so important, the piece of fiction you choose to be the first thing you send out into the world with your name attached to it. So I’m trying not to think about it. There are no limits to the kind of writer I can imagine myself being. I have not chosen a voice, a genre, a geography, a set of themes, a primary concern. Those choices shouldn’t be important. I feel nearly as likely to publish a contemporary romance novel as a book of prose poetry or an obscure literary novel or a self-help book. And with thinking about what I want to try to get published first, I feel like I have to choose. It’s a decision I don’t want to make. Is that why I’ve been slowing down?

After all the first drafts I’ve been writing lately, I really just want to finish something that I can put in front of other people. I don’t know what will happen after that, but that’s the first step. I have a sentence-generating itch in my fingers that won’t go away, not even on those zero-sentence mornings. The inevitable feelings of inadequacy and frustration and fear should make me want to quit. Instead they’re the motivators for continuing to work at it until I make something that I can maybe, if I squint and tilt my head and not think too hard, be proud of.

March 23, 2018

Organizing Our Books

February 15, 2018

I’ve been thinking lately about organizing our books. Alberto Manguel, in an excerpt from his forthcoming book Packing My Library on the Paris Review blog, writes about the experience of reshelving the books of one’s personal library:

“In the act of setting up a library, the books lifted out of their boxes and about to be placed on a shelf shed their original identities and acquire new ones through random associations, preconceived allotments, or authoritarian labels. Many times, I’ve found that a book I once held in my hands becomes another when assigned its position in my library. This is anarchy under the appearance of order.”

The last time we moved, eight years ago, we had 900 books. The packing and unpacking was undoubtedly a gruelling exercise, but it was so long ago that now I can only think fondly of the experience and wish to do it again. Not the move, of course, but the opportunity to make our books seem new again.

A few of our shelves.

Our books have occupied the same space almost since we moved in: a series of self-assembled bookshelves that line all three walls of the open room we call the office. Not counting the sundry volumes scattered about on desks, coffee tables, nightstands. We’ve had significant turnover in the ranks over the years – we gave away or exchanged some 300 books and bought another 600, leaving us now with 1200 books. (I keep a nearly-meticulous catalogue of our book collection.)

That might seem like a lot of books, but Alberto Manguel dealt with 35,000 volumes when moving from a house in France to an apartment in Manhattan. I can’t imagine ever owning that many books. That is, I can, but I shouldn’t.

I do have some book collector in my genes (my mother is on a quest to own the complete Airmont Mass Paperback Classics and Reader’s Digest World’s Best Reading, for reasons I still don’t understand; but I can’t really make fun of her because she took me to the used book stores where my personal library was first begun), but I also have allergies and not a large home and aspirations to minimalism and a devotion to the public library system. The number of books in our house will surely continue to grow, but I hope to keep it with reasonable bounds. (What counts as reasonable is subject, of course, to whim.)

Our bookshelves are in a kind of order, part careful and part random. Nothing is in alphabetical order or sorted by colour. We have books by (and about) our favourite authors shelved together (Austen, Baker, Davis, Dillard, Eliot, Powell, Pym, Pynchon, Markson, Moore, Murakami, Sayers, Strand, Wallace, and the list goes on), but there many exceptions. We have some rough genre categories: poetry, books about writing, English classics, graphic novels, my growing collection of self-help/spiritual/business books. The New York Review of Books books have their own shelf. The various Penguin classics paperback editions stay together. Large hardcovers live in the oversize bottom shelves. Art books and box sets like Proust and Harry Potter and Tolkien and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy live on top of the bookshelves.

Establishing a new order

We’ve reorganized the books in bits and pieces over the years, collapsing and expanding groups, keeping the favourites at eye level and the lesser volumes close to the ground. The books we like the most live on the shelves behind our desk chairs. The ones we like the least live in the far corner, almost inaccessible behind unhung art in dusty frames and an old lamp.

But bits and pieces aren’t enough. What I’m looking for is stacks on the floor, on the dining room table, on the kitchen counters. What I’m looking for is that clarifying excitement of handling each book, one by one, off the shelves into stacks, then off the stacks and onto the shelves.

Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting” (pdf), Manguel writes:

“Unpacking … is essentially an expansive and untidy activity. Freed from their bounds, the books spill onto the floor or pile up in unsteady columns, waiting for the places that will later be assigned to them. In this waiting period, before the new order has been established, they exist in a tangle of synchronicities and remembrances, forming sudden and unexpected alliances or parting from each other incongruously.”

I’m looking for a new world order in our land of books. It would be such a new world, such a sea change, that it would be impossible to choose an organizational principle or style in advance. The occasion would require a complete rethinking of what order even means.

Writing a library into existence

I like the connection Walter Benjamin draws between writers and book collectors:

“Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. At this point many of you will remember with pleasure the large library which Jean Paul’s poor little schoolmaster Wutz gradually acquired by writing, himself, all the works whose titles interested him in book-fair catalogues; after all, he could not afford to buy them. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.”

(If you, like me, have no idea who Schoolmaster Wutz is, he’s a character in a short work of 18th century German literature.)

I’m lucky enough to own the works whose titles interest me and whose contents satisfy me, while also daring to try to write the books that I wish were listed in book-fair catalogues.

Reading Widely, Deeply, and Not At All

January 28, 2018

Reflecting on the books I’ve read gets me thinking about why I read so much. There are plenty of people who read much more than I do and plenty of people who couldn’t care less about books. But I’m perhaps a bit greedy. I spend so much time reading books, reading about books, and wishing I were reading a book instead of whatever else it is I’m doing. I can’t seem to get enough.

Recently I’ve been a bit more selective of what books I start and finish because I realized that, in addition to having a large backlog, every year I find more books to read than I can possibly get through in a year. I will definitely die before I can get to all the books I’d like to read (and reread), so I need to make the most of the time I have left. And I wonder about other ways of being a reader, about the virtues of perhaps not reading widely.

An example of my excesses, after a trip to the library.

Reading widely

Why do I read so much? So many reasons. I love being surprised or thrilled by a turn of events or a turn of phrase. Being taken into another time and place, a different person’s head. Learning about things I never would have known or understood otherwise. I love the deep exploration of character and motivation and conflict and resolution. I love that books make me think about things I never think about on my own.

But there are other reasons. Reading is a way to do something “productive” and “good” while avoiding other things that are perhaps hard and perhaps more worthwhile. It’s an escape, in more ways than one. I read because I want to write, although that makes no sense because after a certain point, only more writing can help you get better at writing, not more reading.

Maybe one day, if I read enough books, I’ll finally decide that I don’t need to write anything after all. That anything I have to say has already been said by others who said it better than I could. The time I free up by not writing might be enough to one day get to all the books.

Another example of my excesses, before going on vacation.

Reading deeply

In “The Case Against Reading Everything” at The Walrus, Jason Guriel shares a refreshingly contrary perspective on the notion of reading widely, specifically for aspiring writers:

“The real problem with telling young writers to fan out across genres and forms is that it doesn’t help them find a voice. If anything, it’s antivoice. Learning the craft of writing isn’t about hopping texts like hyperlinks. It’s about devotion and obsession. It’s about lingering too long in some beloved book’s language, about steeping yourself in someone else’s style until your consciousness changes colour. … It’s going embarrassingly, unfashionably all in.”

But there’s more to do it than the development of a voice, Guriel argues. There’s also an apparent problem with the quality of the work that’s out there:

“The call to ‘read widely’ is a failure to make judgments. It disperses our attention across an ever-increasing black hole of mostly undeserving books. Whatever else you do, you should not be reading the many, many new releases of middling poetry and fiction that will be vying for your attention over the next year or so out of some obligation to submit your ear to a variety of voices.”

I feel bad for young readers and writers who are expected to decide what is worthy of their attention. How do you know? I don’t know. Is he just talking about not reading Fifty Shades of Grey or self-help books? Relying on the opinions of critics and friends and reviewers isn’t enough. How does a reader separate the “undeserving” from the “worthwhile”?

A post at Anecdotal Evidence gives some practical advice for reading deeply. The notion is that choosing the ten best books you’ve read and rereading them carefully and thoroughly, to the exclusion of all other books, will teach you what is good, develop your taste, and make you a better reader. That list of ten books will vary hugely for everyone — at least I hope it does.

Picking ten best books for myself seems like an impossible task, but perhaps the point is really that any ten books would do the trick.

Reading variety

There is a sour point in avoiding the “variety of voices.” There are political implications of reading only what you like or only the work of people like you. Guriel addresses the issue in this way:

“Most people urging you to read widely probably have a hard time ranging outside their comfort zones. There’s no doubt that, in the political realm, we need more connection with those we disagree with. But for the most part, ‘read widely’ belongs to a class of expression that’s good to be heard saying. … In my experience, only a minority of writers like to chase their Leslie Jamison with some Conrad Black, or their Yvor Winters with some Roxane Gay.”

If many writers don’t follow a piece of advice, it doesn’t follow that the advice is bad. Doesn’t everyone have a hard time going outside their comfort zone? And “connection with those we disagree with” is not necessarily more influential than what we read (and consume, TV and film especially) in relation to how we see the world and what we think of people who aren’t like us. It’s a bit facile to dismiss the political importance of what we (and aspiring writers) read.

I appreciate how Jana Marie expressed the point in a recent Sunday letter:

“I’m not here to tell you to read more … No, my suggestion would be to read the same amount as you do now, but just to read more widely. To wander into an unfamiliar section of the bookstore. To get your news from other sites. To follow those whose voices are unrepresented (or under-represented) in your feed.”

Reading a variety of voices and opinions is important. Moving beyond what school or popular culture tells us is good and being open to writers and settings and ideas that might seem foreign. And learning how to make up our own minds about it all.

Reading anything

I belong to a couple of large Facebook writing groups. It’s kind of alarming how many times aspiring writers ask questions that make me wonder if they even read books. Do publishers accept books written in the first person? Will my manuscript get rejected if my character has [some random trait]? Can I alternate points of view between two characters?

I hold back from joining these conversations (and am increasingly wondering why I submit myself to them at all) because there are many other people who jump in and quote Stephen King at them.

(Most people like the “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot“ quote, but I prefer “If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.” See also.)

What I want to say, though, is: read 5 books in your genre of choice and then answer your own damn question.

I’m clearly a horrible and unhelpful person. But why do people who don’t read books want to write one? Why would you write a book that you expect people to buy if you won’t even borrow a few from your local library?

It’s quite possible that the people asking these questions are Russian bots or trolls who hate writers. I really can’t rule out those possibilities, so I should just ignore them and move on, right? The internet is made of things that should be ignored.

Not reading at all

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m reading The Artist’s Way. One of the practices Julia Cameron recommends is a week of reading deprivation. No reading? No reading.

“For most blocked creatives,” Cameron says, “reading is an addiction. We gobble the words of others rather than digest our own thoughts and feelings, rather than cook up something of our own.” Ouch. That hits close to home, and I don’t really consider myself blocked.

So what does reading deprivation achieve?

“It is a paradox that by emptying lives our lives of distractions we are actually filling the well. Without distractions, we are once again thrust into the sensory world. … We are cast into our inner silence. Our reward will be a new outflow. Our own art, our own thoughts and feelings, will begin to nudge aside the sludge of blockage, to loosen it and move it upward and outward until once again our well is running freely.”

I don’t know what I’d do with myself if I didn’t read anything for a week. There’s so much I could do, so much I would want to do, but in reality I would binge watch Netflix and listen to podcasts and paint my nails and spend hours and hours and hours on Instagram. I’m not sure I know how not to consume something. But Cameron warns against this precise problem:

“Reading deprivation casts us into our inner silence, a space some of us begin to immediately fill with new words — long, gossipy conversations, television bingeing, the radio as a constant, chatty companion. We often cannot hear our own inner voice, the voice of our artist’s inspiration, above the static. In practicing reading deprivation, we need to cast a watchful eye on these other pollutants. They poison the well.”

I almost achieved reading deprivation on vacation last year, unintentionally, but I don’t think that’s what Cameron means. For me, the highlight of taking vacation is having more time to read. The highlight of my weekends is having more time to read. So not reading at all? For a single week? It seems impossible, which makes the challenge even more intriguing.

January 28, 2018

The Artist’s Way in Daily Doses

January 17, 2018

I’m reading The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. I started and abandoned it years ago after reading just the first section on Morning Pages, which is a daily practice of writing three longhand pages first thing in the morning. The point is basically to dump the contents of your brain on paper. They are a fundamental part of the creative journey that is The Artist’s Way. At the time, however, that first chapter was enough for me.

It took me a while to start, but now I’ve been doing Morning Pages for nearly two years, although I only do one page, not three. It’s a shame I didn’t stick with the book long enough back then to read about the other key practice: the weekly Artist Date (time alone to do something you enjoy, just for you, like visiting an art gallery, exploring an antique shop, or going to a concert). So many hours of quality time with my inner creative, forever lost!

The book is written as a 12-week course, with exercises and tasks every week, but I’m not using the book that way. (Not unlike how I love reading The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up but I’ve never actually tidied up in the way Marie Kondo prescribes.) The Artist’s Way is full of valuable ideas, insights, resources, quotations, and a not unhefty dose of spirituality. It’s a solid read in the genre of creativity and writing manuals even if you’re not interested in a course of “creative recovery” modelled on recovery from addiction.

What convinced me to pick up the book again was The Artist’s Way Every Day, which I borrowed at random from the library. I was looking for something else, noticed it, and thought I would give it a try. After enjoying A Year with Thomas Merton earlier in the year, I was up for another day-at-a-time kind of book.

But I’m not good at reading books a day at a time. You start this kind of book thinking you’ll read the day’s entry in bed at the end of the day as a tonic before falling immediately and blissfully to sleep, but it rarely turns out like that. Instead I binge several days’ worth at once and feel a little ill afterward.

When I manage to avoid such self-destructive behaviour, I use my lunch break to consume a handful of page-a-day snippets at a time. I can only read so many pages while waiting for food and/or eating it within my half hour break, so I often reach my capacity for page-a-day wisdom at just the moment I finish eating, which works out well for all involved.

Here are some of the passages that convinced me to give The Artist’s Way another chance. Just a taste, mind you, not enough to make you feel ill (I hope).

Obsessions with time and perfection

On accepting that you will spend a lot of time writing badly:

“We all have time to write. We have time to write the minute we are willing to write badly, to chase a dead end, to scribble a few words, to write for the hell of it instead of for the perfect and polished result. The obsession with time is really an obsession with perfection. We want enough time to write perfectly. We want to write with a net under ourselves, a net that says we are not foolish spending our time doing something that might not pay off.”

On making use of whatever time you have to write:

“One of the biggest myths around writing is that in order to do it we must have great swathes of uninterrupted time. Speaking for myself, I have never had such silken bolts of time. The myth that we must have ‘time’ — more time — in order to create is a myth that keeps us from using the time we do have. If we are forever yearning for ‘more,’ we are forever discounting what is offered.”

On avoiding perfectionism:

“Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead. It is a loop — an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are writing or painting or making and to lose sight of the whole. Instead of creating freely and allowing errors to reveal themselves later as insights, we often get mired in getting the details right. We correct our originality into a uniformity that lacks passion and spontaneity. ‘Do not fear mistakes,’ Miles Davis told us. ‘There are none.’”

Working always

On not waiting for inspiration (this is something that comes up again and again and again):

“We often make the mistake of thinking that we ‘have’ to be the ‘right’ mood to write. The truth is, any mood can be used for writing. Any mood is a good writing mood. The trick is to simply enter whatever mood like a room and sit down and write from there.”

On the importance of consistency as the one thing we can control:

“As artists, we wish we could always work well, but we must settle for working always. The ‘always’ we can control. The ‘well’ we cannot control. For this reason, we do well to simply serve, to focus more on the process of doing our work than on the ‘product’ of work produced.”

On having compassion for our imperfections:

“Who says (besides our Inner Perfectionist, who is always doing sit-ups) that we have to feel calm and centered to write out a piece of music? Maybe we can feel and be a wreck and do it anyway. Maybe we can do it and do it wrong and fix it later. Maybe we do not have to be or perform perfectly. Maybe we are allowed to have a learning curve. Maybe part of what we need to learn is a little compassion.”

The bit about sit-ups was a rare moment when Julia Cameron made me laugh. Personally, my Inner Perfectionist does squats and lunges!

Honesty and attention

On the importance of telling the truth:

“Writing is about honesty. It is almost impossible to be honest and boring at the same time. Being honest may be many other things — risky, scary, difficult, frightening, embarrassing, and hard to do — but it is not boring. Whenever I am stuck in a piece of writing, I ask myself, ‘Am I failing to tell the truth? Is there something I am afraid to say?’ Telling the truth on the page, like telling the truth in a relationship, always takes you deeper.”

But telling the truth is hard:

“As artists, we are perpetually seeking to penetrate the veil of cultural prescriptions and arrive at personal truth. In order to do this, we need to be brave enough with — and open enough to — our own internal territory that our art can express it. In other words, we must be able to face down shame and choose self-disclosure. This takes courage.”

It takes hard work and attention:

“It takes an effort to be clear about things. It is easier and much sadder to be muddy, to never take the time to clarify our thoughts and connect our own perceptions. The act of paying attention is what brings us peace.”

The artist and her trainer

I love this idea of a writer having to be both artist and trainer:

“In order to succeed as an artist we must have two well-developed functions: our artist and its trainer. The trainer is steady and adult. It keeps its eye on the course and the long run. It coaxes, wheedles, begs, cajoles, and occasionally disciplines our artist which, childlike, proceeds in spurts and sometimes not at all. The trick is setting the jumps low enough that our artist can be lured into action. If I am writing nonfiction, I set my goal at a modest three pages. Almost anyone can write three pages of something and my artists knows that. If we set our jumps low enough, our artist can be lured into cooperation.”

This applies to many things in life, not just creating (like, oh, eating well, exercising, saving money, getting out of bed). You need to allow for two very different sides of yourself to exist simultaneously. You need more than one way to talk to yourself and think about the work you have done or need to do.

Forward motion

The important thing is to keep moving forward, keep working at it:

“Writing is the act of motion. Writing is the commitment to move forward, not to stew in our own juices, to become whatever it is that we are becoming. Writing is both the boat and the wind in the sails. Even on the days when the winds of inspiration seem slight, there is some forward motion, some progress made.”