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.

ON MAKING CONNECTIONS, LOSING SLEEP, AND THE OCCASIONAL INCONVENIENCE OF THE MUSE

It was a wake-up-at-3-a.m.-and-get-that-thought-on-paper-before-you-lose-it kind of morning.   I’ve had many of  these as a writer.  Just a few short years ago, when I was working on an early draft of The Hapless Life of Samuel Joseph, my life changed.   My then-sixteen year old granddaughter, troubled and not doing well at home, moved in with me, as did a dear friend of mine in need of a temporary place to stay.   I was living in a small apartment, and we were, all three of us and our respective beds, crammed into one tiny bedroom.  My granddaughter -being a teenager - slept through my late-night bouts of creativity, but I would often hear my friend chuckle from her bed as I’d mutter “damn!” and shoot out of bed to run to my desk, pounding out the pages that were shouting in my brain, then stumble back to bed, pull up the covers, and close my eyes, only to have the insistent story dragging me from bed short minutes later to write some more as I muttered soft curses under my breath.  The house-mate chuckled, and I beat out page after page on my old typewriter, and slept a whole lot less than I might have liked.   A month or so later, we found a much larger house to rent where each of us could have our own room, and lived there for a year or so, but I would still wander out to the deck in early mornings to find my house-mate grinning and commenting on the sound of the typewriter having lulled her to sleep the night before.  

Those months were, for me, the height of the creative process in the writing of Samuel Joseph.   His life and the story he had to tell unfolded in my brain insistently, as though I were but recording the story as he narrated it, trying desperately to get it all out before he lost the connection with me.   Pages piled up in my writing room (another reason we chose the house we found - rooms for each of us, and a writing room for me), stacks growing exponentially.  Three thousand, four thousand, sometimes as many as six thousand words in a day.  It was a wave of energy, a wave of clarity, and I rode it all the way from the first scene to the last, feeling the story unfold, knowing when I needed to stop what I was doing, rush to the typewriter (or the page, as I wrote a great deal of that first draft in long-hand).  And I often did not get much sleep.  

I had not gotten to that point easily - for months I’d been trying to find Sam’s character, feeling the basics of the story, having strong images of scenes and characters, with no idea how they connected, but understanding they had a story to tell that meant something to me.  I knew it had to do with the tragedy of a very talented young person with the wrong mentor, I knew that some of the things I tried to write were not  right, as I stumbled around, trying to find the presence that was haunting the corners of my brain.

This is the same process I have gone through lately with the story I am currently telling - the story of a family once torn apart by secrets, now finding their way back to each other.  For this story, the characters have been clear to me from the very beginning, but how their individual stories connect had not been, until, after much stumbling, I began to see those connections in the pieces of their lives.   Which led to today’s late-night scribbling, and lack of sleep.  

I was in a show last night, performing on a local stage with more than a dozen other actors, and coming home with that post-performance high that caused me to putter about for a couple of hours before I lay down.   Once asleep, though, that rest did not last - at three in the morning comes the muse - with yet another connection in the woven fabric of these characters lives - an essential one between parent and child, a clear and simple explanation of who they were and who they have become, and I had to  get out of bed and get it down.  Once done, the energy of that release, that creation, once again left me too wired to sleep.

Some time back, a friend and I (the same woman who was, just last night, my scene partner in performance), joked that someone needed to start a training school for the muse, as she tended to misbehave and come at the most inconvenient times.  We even joked that we would write a play about a training school for the errant muse, modeled after those schools that train misbehaving dogs.  Interestingly, it is often the owners of the dogs who are really trained in such a school, to understand how to work with their dog’s essential nature in a way where they can live together.   I think such a thing is also true of the training of the muse - we must actually train ourselves - to be open, to listen, to understand when the voice of the muse is the true, essential voice of the story and must be written, and when it is okay to mutter “oh, go away” and go back to sleep.

Learning such a thing is not easy, and none of us are ever perfect at it.  Like writing itself, it is a process.  I have had moments when I’ve muttered ‘go away’ at my muse, and returned to sleep (or to work, or to feeding the cats, or whatever I happened to be doing at the time), only to jolt upright later and realize that there had been a light in my brain, a window opening onto the brightness of the story, and I’d slammed down the shutters.  The key, I believe, as it is for so many things in life, is to listen.  

And perhaps learn to be good at naps.  

"Street Cred" And The Writer

I like to think that I have (or could, if I wanted to claim it), some “street cred” as a writer.  Before I turned down the self-publishing path a couple of years ago, I had published four books ‘traditionally’ – three nonfiction and one novel – about two dozen articles and essays (four of them in juried publications), and a handful (dozen or so) poems and stories. All in ‘traditional’  mediums.  I’d edited six published collections, and  contributed to more newsletters and editorial columns than I can hope to remember.  It’s not being J.K. Rowling, but  it all counts as “cred”, right? The truth is, in today's publishing culture, it doesn’t count for beans. In the publishing industry, only one thing counts - the ability for the publisher to make money.

I’ve written and posted quite a lot recently as I’ve mused over what it means to be a writer, to seek after the truth of our lives, and to speak it through fiction.  All very wonderful and noble, you may think, but what good is it if you can’t get those words to readers?  In the dominant cultural mind, the mainstream publishing industry is the way to do that, and American publishing is a hard industry to break into.  The odds, as they say, are against you.

Publishers turn down brilliant works because the author is too old for them to “sell,” - yes, this happened: I read it in a recent op-ed piece written by an editor at a large publishing house, explaining why she sometimes turns down very good books - she turned down a book she adored because the author was 54. Or they turn them down because the author doesn’t already have an active online platform, or because it's been too long since her/his last publication, or because the editor thinks the writing is too complex for American readers. That last one startled me, but I’ve actually seen the rejection slip, and that’s what it says - the plot is too complex for American readers. The market is publishing for the masses, and the market has a pretty low opinion of the masses.  

Self-publishing has had an unfortunate reputation for decades, and, often, deservedly so - a lot of what is called “vanity publishing” (the author pays a publisher to print their works) is frankly abysmal, as is a good deal of what is now published in the form of e-books, which authors can publish for free on a variety of platforms.  But there are also some profoundly beautiful works out there as well in that medium.  It is a free market, which is what attracts me to it.  A thirty-something, recent-lit-grad, New-York-publishing-house editor will not decide the merit of your works, but readers will.  

Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Ben Franklin, John Stuart Mill, Jane Austen, Walt Whitman, and William Blake - these are just a few of the luminaries in history who have self-published their work.  Some (Whitman as a perfect example) were vilified by some for the work they published, others gaining acclaim and respect in their own time.  Unconcerned about the opinions of "the publishing industry," they turned their concern more to sharing their work with the world.  And how much poorer would the literary world be if they had not done so.  They didn’t care about “street cred,” or the opinion of the powers that were in the then-publishing industry - they simply cared - about what they were writing, about sharing it with those who might read.  

That, honestly, is the true tradition of self-publishing.  Be a storyteller, put your stories in front of readers. For decades, publishing has been (much like academia) a “gate-keeper” industry.  Those with some sort of credentials (degrees or pedigrees) decide who gets in and who doesn’t, and this shapes the reading of the consuming public, because it shapes what is available to read.  And that is what is changing with the availability of free self-publishing platforms.  Writers have an opportunity, here, to raise the bar.

Let’s set aside (for the moment) debates over large companies like Amazon and Barnes & Noble and what they have done to small publishing houses, bookstores, and independent publishers.  That’s an important debate, but not what I’m talking about here.  What we have in the shifts currently going on in the publishing industry is a chance to change things.  If, as many claim, the American public has been “dumbed down,” it is at least in part (and I believe a large part) due to what they’ve been offered:   education shaped by politicians and not educators, media shaped by profit interest and not public service, books marketed more on the celebrity status of the author and not on challenging or enlightening content.  In a truly free market, (which I believe free publishing offers us the opportunity to create), all of that can change.  

Not that I (or most writers) sit down to my  writing table every morning with revolutionary intent in mind. Many of the things that I write, I write just for fun.  This blog, for instance – a wonderful musing release in the middle of days of struggle, and many of the stories I’ve produced recently are fancies, flights taken in moments of “what if?”  But, even there, I find the themes that haunt most of my writing (and that haunt my thoughts):    the abuse of power  never being  justified, the tragedy of youthful talent in the hands of the wrong mentor,  the twisted co-opting of what used to be a dynamic working-class culture in this country, the terrible loneliness of being the sole voice to stand for something.  I return to these themes over and over, and if I write words that help one person with a difficult decision, or bring memories back, or help them see the lives of others more clearly, that is enough.  More than enough.  So, the audiences that flock to big box book stores or to Amazon may find my books, or they may not.  But if just one of the right people does, I am ok with that.  And I know that this conclusion is the polar opposite of the (dare I use the word) philosophy of the publishing industry.  And I know I don’t need them.  I don’t need their “cred,” their respect.  I just need my own.

ACTING Like A Writer

Sometimes I wish writers had the equivalent of rehearsals, like we do in theater.  Cast in a play, you meet your fellow cast members, you do a "table-read" (everyone just sits around a table and reads through the script), you have scene rehearsals, then run a whole act, then run all the acts together, then have dress rehearsals.  In the process, you have time to get "off-book," to memorize your lines and be ready to rehearse without your script in hand.  You ease into the final product a step at a time - lights and sound effects added near the very end, first rehearsing without any set, then set and props and costumes added a bit at a time until the picture is complete.  You have a director who tells you how to imagine the character, the scene, who guides you.  You have crew members who take care of props and lights and sound.  You have fellow cast members, who, in playing out their characters, give you meat for your own.

It is terrifying, and exhilarating.  You can feel the story, the performance, coming together around you and the rest of the cast.  It's very social.    From the first day, you have to work to connect not only to your own character, but to the other characters and the actors who play them.  Sometimes it's easy.  Sometimes not. Actors get together after rehearsals and in cast parties, and meet ahead of rehearsals to run lines together or just to vent.

As a writer, there's a lot of that I could go for.  As many have said, writing is a solitary task - one person, one keyboard, one pen and paper.  From first draft to typing the last page, it's just you.  You can take your writing to a writing group, or get first readers (for my last book, I had nine) - but when the feedback comes, it's just you deciding what stays and what doesn't.  No director is going to call "cut!" and tell you how it should be.  No others are going to act out the characters for you to give you a new perspective.

I've often said that being involved in theater has been good for my writing - as an actor, learning to embody a character has given me a fresh perspective on how to create a character on the page, and I think my characters have improved as a result.  Being a producer (and occasionally an Assistant Director) has given me a sense of the scope of story construction that, though I'd studied it before, I don't think I fully appreciated until I'd ushered in a few productions.  It's also been incredibly humbling - watching the skill and intelligence with which so many actors approach their roles, how artfully they work with and bring out the best in less skilled members of the cast - how dedicated they are, going onstage with high fevers, broken toes, family crises, and heartbreak.

I know that the writing process has many parallels to "rehearsal" - the drafts, the editing, the revisions - but it is, in contrast to theater, anti-social - the writer, as one member of a critique group once said, "is God on that page."   And being God can be lonely.

I wish sometimes, at the keyboard, for a director to guide the mood of the scene, a scene partner to bring her/his energy to the scene so that my characters can feed off it, be guided by it.  I wish for an after-rehearsal gathering to vent, a cast party to celebrate the creativity.   But I know that, as a writer, that's not how it can be.   The truth of any particular story I write is in my head, and only I am responsible for bringing it out.  The difference between the creative act in theater and in writing is this:   in the theater, you are responsible to be with  the rest of the cast, to be present to them, aware, work with them.  As a writer, you are responsible to the story.   The actors works to be able to 'read' his fellow cast members, the writer must work to be loyal to that seed that sparked the story within her.   The actors act, the writers write.  They rehearse, we re-draft. They perform, we publish.   And then we all wait for reviews.

A Note of Thanks on Saying Good-Bye

4 of the original 5 - (l to r):  Rosalind, Connie, me,
and Jeanne.  Missing (and forever missed), Erica 

     This week, I left my writing group.  I had been out of the group since a month ago when I began my sabbatical.  This week, though, I told them I wouldn’t be coming back for the foreseeable future. It was one of the most difficult decisions I’ve made in a very long time.

This group of women have been a foundation in my life for the better part of a decade – the longest I’ve ever stayed with any writing group.  In that time, we have become a community – we have been friends and colleagues and confidantes.  Together we have faced the loss of one of our dearest members to cancer.  We've seen each other through health crises, family crises, and loss of confidence.  We have shared and worked and laughed together.

We have core members who have been with the group from the beginning, and we have welcomed  new members and lost them to other demands in life.  Together we have read our writings, critiqued, rejoiced in successes and shared failures and disappointments.  These women are good people and good friends.  The thought of not sitting with them twice a month to sip tea, laugh, share, and then get down to the business of work-shopping our writings – that thought fills me with sadness.

But, in the end, that friendship was not enough reason to stay with a writing group.  I was finding a need for more and more solitude in my work, and needed to transition to a different phase in my writing.  Over the years, I have received more from these women than I can possibly ever thank them for.   The closest I can ever come to adequate thanks  is to be as true to the development of my work as I can, and, for now, for the time being, that means working alone. 

So, day after day, I’ll sit at my table and work to be the best writer I can, and though the work may be solitary, I will never feel alone.  
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For Rosalind Trotter, Jeanne Bishop, Connie Newman, Carol Massahos, and Morgan Songi.  And, as always, for Erica.