And what great writers actually pass on is not so much their words, but they hand on their breath at their moments of inspiration.
We learn writing by doing it. That simple. We don’t learn by going outside ourselves to authorities we think know about it.
Give me your morning. Breakfast, waking up, walking to the bus stop. Be as specific as possible. Slow down in your mind and go over the details of the morning.
Failure is a hard word for people to take. Use the word kindness then instead. Let yourself be kind. And this kindness comes from an understanding of what it is to be a human being. Have compassion for yourself when you write. There is no failure – just a big field to wander in.
This all happened fifteen years ago. A friend once told me: “Trust in love and it will take you where you need to go.” I want to add, “Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you where you need to go.” And don’t worry too much about security. You will eventually have a deep security when you begin to do what you want. How many of us with our big salaries are actually secure anyway?
I cannot say why, but the simple act of reading it aloud allows you to let go of it. Do not forget this. Believe me, it helps. At first it is a very scary thing to do.
Inspiration means breathing in. Breathing in God.
Happy?” He stared her down. “You can’t expect happiness. If it comes along – consider yourself lucky, but that’s not what life’s about.
It’s good to go off and write a novel, but don’t stop doing writing practice.
Add to the list anytime you think of something. Then when you sit down to write, you can just grab a topic from that list and begin.
Dreams are another slice of reality, not different from where we are now – they just tell about it in a different way. They also can open up your reality. They don’t have the constraints of conscious logic.
It is also hard to write about a city we just moved to; it’s not yet in our body.
Explore the rugged edge of thought. Like grating a carrot, give the paper the colorful coleslaw of your consciousness.
That dead feeling hits hard and permeates the first year. It comes back to test you often in the following years, but if you get through the first year, then you know about it. It will never have the power to defeat you again.
Miyamoto Musashi’s actual burial ground was in close range. According to legend he had been buried in full samurai regalia clutching his faithful sword. The last line of the translation: He died lonely. The Japanese liked loneliness. It had a different quality than our dreaded isolation. More like one with the void, alone with the Alone, no longer separate from anything. It was the final compliment to describe him this way.
It was my own human mind. I needed to understand it. Why? It’s the writer’s landscape. Imagine that a painter has that wild animal to capture on canvas: arresting its fangs, the raging color of its eyes, the blue of it’s hump, the flash of its hoofs, the rugged shadow that it casts. We writers have that beast inside us: how we feel, think, hope, dream, perceive.
Once you connect with your mind, you are who you are and you’re free.
Of course, we are drawn to teachers who unconsciously mirror our own psychology. None of us are clean. We all make mistakes. It’s the repetition of those mistakes and the refusal to look at them that compound the suffering and assure their continuation.
TAKE A SUBJECT, a situation, a story that is hard for you to talk about, and write about it. Write slowly, evenly, in a measured way. Don’t skip over any part of it. Stay in there. It might take you several days, a week, a month to write out the whole thing. Continue to work on it every day until it is finished.
If every time you sat down, you expected something great, writing would always be a great disappointment. Plus that expectation would also keep you from writing.