Writing Down The Bones: Freeing The Writer Within (18 page)

Suddenly, I looked around the room and everyone was watching me curiously, waiting to go on to another exercise. I was astounded. I realized none of them had any awareness of what they had just written. “None of you know that right now you wrote something very alive, do you?” They just kept looking at me.

This is not true only of beginning students. I am thinking now of two examples. One woman is a poet; she is very good and also very well loved. I call her the Darling of Minnesota. She writes about her life, her minister father, her seven sons, the breakfast table. At her last reading not only were all the seats filled, but they had sold out standing room. She told me that when the reading was over she went home very depressed because they had all liked her poetry so well. She said, “I fooled another crowd with my work.”

The other example was a writer in one of my Sunday-night groups. She was a novelist and the assistant editor of a city magazine and had written two very successful plays; one was named Critics’ Choice by the
Minneapolis Tribune
. She wrote several extraordinary pieces during timed writing in the group. I thought for sure she would know their quality—after all, she was an experienced writer. When I met her a month later for breakfast and commented about one of her pieces, she was amazed that I thought it was good. (
Good
wasn’t the word for how good it was.) I was surprised that she herself didn’t know. All her professional writing had been about subjects other than herself and her life’s experiences. She said, “This kind of writing is all of you,” so she couldn’t see it.

Katagiri Roshi once said to me, “We are all Buddha. I can see you are Buddha. You don’t believe me. When you see you are Buddha, you will be awake. That’s what enlightenment is.” It is very difficult for us to comprehend and value our own lives. It is much easier for us to see things outside ourselves. In the process of claiming our own good writing, we are chipping away at the blind gap between our own true nature and our conscious ability to see it. We learn to embrace ourselves as the fine creative human beings we are in the present. Occasionally, over time, we can see it: “Oh, I was good
then
,” but it is in the past. We lag behind.

I do not mean for us all to become braggarts. I mean we should recognize that we are good inside and emanate our goodness and create something good outside us. That connection between our inner richness, our self-concept, and our work will give us a quiet peace and confidence that are hard for most artists to find. It is not “The work is bad and we are bad” or “The work is good and we are bad” or “The work is bad and we are good.” It is “We are good and therefore we are capable of shining forth through our resistance to write well and claim it as our own.” It is not as important for the world to claim it as it is to claim it for ourselves. That is the essential step. That will make us content. We are good, and when our work is good, it is good. We should acknowledge it and stand behind it.

Trust Yourself

I
N CLASS
T
UESDAY
we went over two pages of someone’s journal. The truth is it was my journal. Two pages of my journal. I selected them because I had pulled out a poem from those pages a few months ago. Not a great poem. A quiet poem. Those are tricky poems to find; they are the subtle hum in your notebook that can bring you into another world. I handed out copies of those two pages a week before. The students were to find the poem in them. They were also free to tell me if there was nothing there. “Nat, this is all junk.”

Five or six students volunteered. There were at least four different versions of the poem. Some included the first half of the journal entry, some the middle, and one even picked up some overlapping work that was accidentally duplicated on the copy machine. There was one line they all included: “The hills of New Mexico are everywhere you go.” All the versions sounded fine. None of them great poems, including the one I had chosen.

Give a piece to one hundred people, you could possibly get one hundred different opinions—not absolutely different, but lots of variations. This is where the depth of the relationship with yourself is so important. You should listen to what people say. Take in what they say. (Don’t build a steel box around yourself.) Then make your own decision. It’s your poem and your voice. There are no clear-cut rules; it is a relationship with yourself. What is it
you
wanted to say? What do you want to expose about yourself? Being naked in a piece is a loss of control. This is good. We’re not in control anyway. People see you as you are. Sometimes we expose ourselves before we understand what we have done. That’s hard, but even more painful is to freeze up and expose nothing. Plus freezing up makes for terrible writing.

The best test of a piece is over time. If you’re not sure of something, put it away for a while. Look at it six months later. Things will be more clear. You might find that there are poems you love and that no one else cares about. I have one poem about a window that anyone who hears it uncategorically says is terrible. I think it’s brilliant. When they ask me for my Nobel Prize speech, I’ll whip out that little gem and have my satisfaction.

Don’t worry if you come back six months later and the piece you weren’t sure of turns out to be terrible. The good parts are already decomposing in your compost pile. Something good will come out. Have patience.

The Samurai

L
AST NIGHT IN
the Sunday-night group, I began teaching about the Samurai part of writing and ourselves. I realized that in class I have always been very encouraging and positive. That was because we were all in the creative space together. The encouragement was not dishonest; it naturally came out of that noncritical, open field of creativity. Everything you write is fine. And sometimes more than fine. It absolutely burns through to shining first thoughts. Sometimes students say, “Well, you’re not being critical enough; I don’t believe you.” They don’t realize that we’re sitting in different pools. I’m in the pool of creativity; they are busy mixing up the creator and editor and want to pull me into that fight. I don’t want to go there. It feels terrible.

But last night we started to work with the Samurai. Tom brought in a loosely finished piece, xeroxed copies, and we went over it. First of all, we looked for where there was energy. It was mainly in the third paragraph. William Carlos Williams said to Allen Ginsberg: “If only one line in the poem has energy, then cut the rest out and leave only that one line.” That one line is the poem. Poetry is the carrier of life, the vessel of vitality. Each line should be alive. Keep those parts of a piece; get rid of the rest.

The class played around with the third paragraph for a while. Not too long. Perhaps three minutes. That was enough. The third paragraph had energy but it wasn’t hot. It wasn’t half as hot as I knew Tom could be. I told Tom, “Yes, the third paragraph has energy. It’s good to fiddle with it awhile. It might help to plant a seed for the future in your compost pile, but you’ll come back to this one in a few weeks and it just doesn’t quite burn through. We’ve spent enough time on it. Let’s go on.” Shirley (a newcomer to the group) interrupted, “Wait a minute. What’s a Samurai?” Tom turned to her and spat out the answer: “Cut it out!”

So when you’re in the Samurai space, you have to be tough. Not mean, but with the toughness of truth. And the truth is that the truth can never ultimately hurt. It makes the world clearer and the poems much more brilliant. I’ve been in writing workshops where we have worked on a bad poem, criticizing it for twenty minutes. That’s ridiculous. It’s a waste of time. It’s like trying to beat a dead horse into running again. You can have the confidence that the writer of that poem will write other poems. You don’t need to think that if you don’t whip something out of the bad poem in front of you, the writer will never write again.

You can have the courage to be honest. “There’s some good stuff in here, but it doesn’t make it.” And go on. It’s a good process to be willing to just let go. Allen Ginsberg at Columbia University went up to his professor, the literary critic Mark Van Doren, and said, “How come you don’t criticize work more?” His response was, “Why bother talking about something you don’t like?”

During our writing there are times when we surface through the fog in our minds to some clarity—but not all the times that we become energetic in our writing mean that we have a valuable piece. No. They just mean we woke up, like on a Sunday morning after a late party Saturday night where we drank too much. Our eyes are open but we’re not very alert. It’s good to know where our writing is alive, awake, but it’s where our writing is burning through to brilliance that it finally becomes a poem or prose piece. And anyone can hear the difference. Something that comes from the source, from first thoughts, wakes and energizes everyone. I’ve seen it many times in a writing group. When someone reads a really hot piece, it excites everyone.

Be willing to look at your work honestly. If something works, it works. If it doesn’t, quit beating an old horse. Go on writing. Something else will come up. There’s enough bad writing in the world. Write one good line, you’ll be famous. Write a lot of lukewarm pieces, you’ll put people to sleep.

Rereading and Rewriting

I
T IS A
good idea to wait awhile before you reread your writing. Time allows for distance and objectivity about your work. After you have filled a whole notebook in writing practice (perhaps it took you a month), sit down and reread the entire notebook as though it weren’t yours. Become curious: “What did this person have to say?” Make yourself comfortable and settle down as though it were a good novel you were about to read. Read it page by page. Even if it seemed dull when you wrote it, now you will recognize its texture and rhythm.

When I reread my notebooks it never fails to remind me that I have a life, that I felt and thought and saw. It is very reaffirming, because sometimes writing seems useless and a waste of time. Suddenly you are sitting in your chair fascinated by your own mundane life. That’s the great value of art—making the ordinary extraordinary. We awaken ourselves to the life we are living.

Another good value to rereading whole notebooks is that you can see how your mind works. Note where you could have pushed further and out of laziness or avoidance didn’t. See where you are truly boring, how when you just complain in your writing it only leads you deeper into a pit. “I hate my life. I feel ugly. I wish I had more money. . . .” After you read your complaints long enough, you will learn to quickly turn to another subject when you are writing rather than linger too long in that complaint abyss.

Often while you are doing writing practice you have no idea whether you have written anything good or not. Sometimes I discover poems in my notebook that I did not know I had written. Our conscious minds are not always in control. On a day when I might have been subjectively bored while I was writing, it may turn out that I wrote a fine poem and didn’t know it till a month later when I reread my work.

I remember once writing in my studio and feeling good with a sense of well-being. I kept saying to myself, “What are you so happy about? You haven’t written anything good all day.” Four days later I was teaching a journal class, and one of my students belligerently challenged me to prove that I, too, “write lots of junk” in my notebook. I thought, “What I wrote in the studio that day will be easy proof.” I opened to that day’s writing and began to read. To my amazement it was a moving piece about time passing and a roll call of all the people in my life who had passed on, either by moving away or by dying. My voice actually opened up as I read it. I was astounded.

That day in the studio my conscious mind was frustrated and had no idea that I had written anything good, but below my discursive, critical thoughts that buzz around like a swarm of mosquitoes, my hand was busy recording first thoughts and writing a very present piece. This can happen. Some part of us can walk through the cloud of humming mosquitoes and touch a very clear place inside us. We can ignore the negativity and constant chatter of the internal critic and continue to move our hand across the page. Our conscious minds are busy with the mosquitoes, so they aren’t always aware that we are actually writing something good, but that day in the studio something was aware of it because I was humming the whole time. It is not unlike a mother who is constantly critical of her mothering, and yet you look at her children and see that they are happy, beautiful. She is doing a good job. Only in this case the mother (your discursive thoughts) and the good children (your writing) are both inside you and working simultaneously. The continuation of writing through all your discursive thoughts is the practice. A month later you recognize consciously the good writing when you reread your notebooks. At this point your unconscious and conscious selves meet, recognize each other, and become whole. This is art.

As you reread, circle whole sections that are good in your notebooks. They often glow off the page and are obvious. They can be used as beginning points for future writing, or they might be complete poems right there. Try typing them up. Seeing them in black and white makes it clear whether they work or not. Only take out the places where there is a blur, where your mind wasn’t present. Don’t change words, because in this practice you are deepening your ability to trust your own voice. If you were truly present when you wrote, it will be there whole. We don’t need to now have our egos manipulate our words to sound better or the way we want to sound: perfect, happy, on top of everything. This is naked writing. It is an opportunity to view ourselves and reveal ourselves as we truly are and to simply accept ourselves without manipulation and aggression. “I am unhappy”—don’t try to cover that statement up. Accept it without judgment if that’s how you felt.