Zen In the Art of Writing (with a nod to, and great love for, Ray Bradbury)

Some years ago, I joined a Zen Buddhist sangha.  It happened pretty much serendipitously, as so many things in my life seem to.  A friend dropped by one afternoon with a book on Zen that she handed to me.  “I just had a feeling,” she said, “that you should read this.”  A few days later, stepping off the elevator at work, I found myself face to face with a small woman with a shaved head wearing black Zen robes.  A Buddhist monk, she had just returned from training in Japan and was applying to teach writing at the school where I taught at the time.  I asked her to be my teacher.  Over the next months, as the local sangha formed, we met and sat zazen in the warehouse behind a local art gallery, on concrete floors, with the wide warehouse doors to the loading dock pushed open to let air into the sweltering space.  We sat in circles on the floor while Eido Frances taught us meditation techniques, and, after each sitting, talked with us about Zen.  

All these years later, that sangha is thriving, and I live in a different town.  When I met Eido, I was not (am not) a religious person, or at least never would have described myself as such.   That is probably true of many ex-Catholics.  Not into religion, but still seeking.  Zen was the perfect place for me - a philosophy of living, plain and straightforward.  Eido once referred to Zen as “the Quakers of Buddhism.”  I met with that sangha at least once a month for a couple of years, and sat alone at home many times.   My (late) husband told me at the time that he had never seen me so focused, so serene.  

The community where I live now has a couple of sanghas, but I have never joined, though I have visited.  None of them give me the feeling of that first, plain, straightforward group, sitting on concrete floors, listening quietly to Eido in the stuffy warehouse air.  Since then, especially during the times when Zen has become (however temporarily) “trendy,” I’ve seen others I know become “into” Zen.  I’ve watched them buy hand-crafted zafus (the cushions you sit on when you sit meditation), and fill their homes with bronze statues of Buddha, rugs and hangings of natural fibers, low tables of polished woods.  Something about this always bothered me, seemed anti-Zen to me:  spending money on expensive trappings to “capture” Zen.   To me, the central part of Zen was ‘acceptance.’   Accept what is in your life, work with it.  

I’ve had Zen on my mind more and more, lately, with the current writing class I am teaching at my school.   I had wanted to use Ray Bradbury’s “Zen in the Art of Writing” as the text for that class, but the staff couldn’t find it to order.  That is a shame.  There are a quite literally millions of books on writing on the market, but precious few that have the spirit of Bradbury’s work.  Jump in, Bradbury tells us, explode with passion.  

“...if you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are

only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market …  that you are not being yourself. You don't even know yourself. For the first thing a writer should be is-- excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms.”   - Ray Bradbury, from Zen in the Art of Writing -

“A thing of fevers and enthusiasms…”  - would that teaching our students this was a goal of education in this century.  Would, in fact, that this was a goal of writers in this century, or, for that matter, of any of us as human beings. I have, quite recently, stopped going to writing workshops, lectures by published writers, and writing conferences.   I’d never gone to them often, but now I’ve stopped entirely.  I’ve found that, more and more, even the workshops on something seemingly so incorruptible as a poetry workshop have come to be more and more about the market - writing not what is your best work, not what is the quality of poetry that elevates us, but what will sell.  Forget zest, forget gusto, forget love - remember:  sell.  It is to focus on the image of what the market wants, not the truth of human expression.  

Please, let us do the opposite as writers:  let us forget the market, forget the editors and critics, forget what will sell, and follow Bradbury.  “You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations,” Bradbury tells us.  “You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.”    It may or may not sell, but, it is so much closer to a real life, to that life out of time and within love.  And, honestly, it is grand.

If You love "Having Written," Turn on Your Crap Detector

“I hate writing, but I love having written.”

                                             -Frank Norris (1915)

This quote is a hard one to be honest about.  Because if we (those of us who call ourselves writers) are honest about it, it doesn’t make us look very good.  Damned bad, in fact.   We are like those parents who take credit for all our kids accomplishments, while forgetting to pack their lunch.  Image without substance.    There are lots of writer's blogs out there that have explored the meaning of this quote - I read a lot of them when I was working up to this, jotting down ideas, researching the quote’s origins.  And, by the way, No, it was not Dorothy Parker who said it.  In fact, there’s no link at all to Parker and this quote.  Nor was it, (as some have claimed) Gloria Steinem.  Or Cornelia Otis Skinner.  Or the many others it’s been attributed to.  Most of them have quoted the line, but the first documented use was by novelist Frank Norris in a newspaper interview in 1915.

Frank Norris

People generally write about this quote as though it were all about process.  The writing is hard work, (I hate that), but the end product is satisfying (I love that).  But I think there is much more here.   I think this quote, which many have blurted, tongue-in-cheek, goes beyond the notion that the struggle is worth the product, that the hard work is worth the satisfaction.  There’s more here than the idea that commitment to gut-wrenching honesty in your work leads to relief when that is done. My thoughts on it’s relevance apply  to all forms of writing, all types of writers - from the commercial writer who writes for the market, working hard daily to churn out volumes of quick-and-easy formulaic reads, to the would-be ‘artist’ who labors for truth in every word.  

Four or five years ago, I went to a local theater to see a production of Steven Dietz’s play Fiction.  The play’s two main character’s are both writers, though one has produced only one book, and the other writes material even he considers unsatisfying.  The play has many layers about writers, relationships, and the lies we tell, but the moment that I am thinking of now comes as the husband in the pair sits at his desk talking about his work, and uses this quote in his speech.  There was light laughter in the audience when he said it, and two or three of us who laughed much louder.  I fairly barked out my  laughter at the line.  At intermission, the friend I was with asked me what I found so funny about it, and I felt pinned to the spot, mentally flailing for an answer.  

Why was it so much funnier to me than to others in the audience?  And why couldn’t I explain that?  

Because it’s hard to own up to unpleasant things about yourself.  A local reviewer called the characters in the play “un-charming” and “self-satisfied.”  And I identified with them.  It’s similar to having a belly-laugh at a sitcom about a dysfunctional family, because you see the ghosts of your own family there.  

What Michael (the husband in the play) seemed to me to be saying when he uttered this line was that he really hated writing, but he loved being a writer.   There are perks, after all - even if (like most of us) you are not famous and only have middling (or no) publications.  People envy your ability with words.  People admire your commitment.  They ask for advice, they respect you and what you do.  They romanticize (and so do you) the image of what it means to be a writer.  That can be a pleasant place to be, living in that imagery.

Perhaps, when faced with this, we all need Hemingway’s “shock proof crap detector” - (the only quality he said every good writer needed to have).   A writer needs to be perpetually on the alert for crap - especially her/his own.  Much has been made of getting rid of your ‘internal critic'- that voice inside telling you that your work sucks, and so do you.  Whole lessons have been structured about getting rid of that voice.  But we need to rid ourselves of the voice on the other end of the spectrum as well, the voice of self-satisfaction, the voice that romanticizes the work we do.  Because it’s work, not a self-promotion plan.  Laugh at ourselves when we go that route, then roll up our sleeves and, simply, work.  

The Writer's Journal: A HOT MESS

Decades of my journals

      My journals are a mess - and they should be.  Decades of journals in notebooks bound and ring-bound, loose-leaf and cloth-covered.  The pages are a mess, writing going sideways and in a circle, in different colors, interrupted with pictures and arrows and notes and even the occasional grocery list.

     And not just the pages are a mess.  In any given volume, entries may begin in 1997 and then break off, taking up again on the very next page in 2004.  It isn't that I didn't write in my journals for those seven years - it's that suddenly, that particular volume didn't feel right to me, and I'd either switch to one of the others that still had empty pages, or start up a new one.  Some volumes have entries from more than nine different years.  I switched because the heft of the book didn't feel right - it didn't feel right when I ran my hand over the cover, or the paper wasn't smooth enough or rough enough for how I was feeling at that time.  Or just because I wanted a change.

Handwriting changes!

      As a consequence, they are, as the kids used to say, a hot mess.  As humans, we do seem to have a need to organize things, and over the years, I've tried.  A few times, I sat down thinking I'd catalog what years were in which volumes.  Gave that up after two or three tries.  Once I thought the way was to type up each year in a separate computer file - that lasted even less time.  To try to find anything specific, or even the entries from a certain year, is, well, one very big task.  And still I continue to change from journal to journal as the mood strikes me.  Even my handwriting has changed over the years, sometimes from journal to journal.  I can't predict what I may find (or be able to read) when I pick up any individual volume. And that is just as it should be.

 These journals should not be a model of organization or chronology or anything measurable or quantifiable.  Peter Elbow once said that writing was a process of making a mess and then
cleaning it up.  The "mess" is the wonderful pile of ideas, brainstorms, anecdotes, sketches, and dreams that suddenly fall together to make a story.   The "cleaning it up" is the construction of that story from the mess of thoughts that led you there.

     

But we humans do have a tendency to want order.  This past week, I've been working on a piece about grief.  In doing that, I couldn't help but think of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's 5 stages of grief, and looked those up.  Reading about them, it struck me that there were similarities to the stages of the writing process put forward by many theorists, and also to the stages of cognitive development I studied so hard as I was preparing to become a teacher.  And all of those have one more thing in common with the "stages" of the writing process:  they aren't true.  They don't really work that way.  In her later years, Ross regretted ever having formulated the stages, because counselors were trying to force people into the model.  "I'm so much more than those five stages," she said in her last years.  "And so are you."   Piaget admitted not all learners go through the stages of his model, and not all go through them in order.   The stages of the writing process work best when, as suggested by philosopher/educator Paulo Freire, they are taken to be "recursive," to loop through and repeat different "stages" as needed by the individual.

     Life is messy, learning is messy, writing is messy.  In the beauty of that mess, as we trust it and immerse in it, as we feel it and touch it and let us carry it where it will, there's growth, and learning, and healing.  One of the graduate school workshops I remember well from the cohort who all worked with my adviser, was the challenge, as we wrote under her guidance in workshop, to incorporate random elements she tossed at us - to learn to trust the random.   So I pick up a journal from time to time, turn to a page, and think what those words are saying to the me of now.  And I start a new journal (or switch) whenever I damn well please.