Pep Talks for Writers Page 15
I finally moved on to other writing projects, but that novel still cries out to me from time to time. Not because I have a burning need to work on it, but because of all the time I invested in it—the heaviness I put into it.
What does it mean to hold things lightly? It’s an attitude that takes work (hard work, ironically). It’s easy to get so serious about our creative work that it can feel like a life or death matter. We pin our self-worth on our ability to carry it out. But, in the end, it’s not a life or death matter. Creativity is necessary, yes. It’s a life enhancing force, yes. We want to maximize it, not minimize it, yes. But I believe each individual project has a lightness that needs to be observed. Otherwise, the light can’t get in to help the seeds sprout. Without lightness, the soil of your story is too hard-packed, and the ground isn’t loose enough for the seed to sprout.
If one of your projects weighs so heavily in your mind that you feel it smothering your creativity, then don’t feel bad if you let it go for a while. Your creativity shouldn’t burden you. It shouldn’t be a yoke. It should be more like a feather that you hold in your hand.
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RELEASE YOUR WRITING
If you’ve been doggedly working on something for weeks or months or years, take a break from it. Pretend it doesn’t exist. Pretend that your computer crashed and you lost everything you wrote. Now start something new. Anything. Your creativity is still intact, right? Let other stories call to you.
49
INTUITION VERSUS LOGIC
The mind versus the heart. The head versus the gut. Intuition and logic have been waging a war since the beginning of time. It’s as if they reside on different sides of the brain, both of them lined up, holding spears in their hands, distrust glaring in their eyes. There’s intuition—a mysterious and bewitching force that springs up impulsively, magically, and spins a seductive spell that earnest and hardworking logic quickly tries to trouble. Logic prefers things to be visible, tangible, and provable. Logic loves its algorithms and outlines, its diagrams of how point A leads to point B, so it’s only natural that it distrusts the seeming ease with which intuition slides into the world and proclaims answers—without even deigning to show its equations.
It’s an interesting battle, because as our world becomes more data-driven and scientifically determined, as “best practices” govern our classrooms and our workplaces, the mystical forces of intuition have become relegated more and more to a secondary status. Intuition is for new-age types. We’re told not to pay attention to our tingling Spidey sense that’s so alert and ready to lead us through this confusing world, but to instead hew to a logical plan. A writer should study the rules of craft. A story should form itself around the logic and pacing of a three-act structure. A novel should follow an outline that includes character reversals and plot pivots, all carefully calculated and calibrated.
There’s a lot to be said for logic and craft and outlines, of course, but if you talk to most writers and artists, they’ll tell you that intuition guides their art as much or more than logic. Some might not give logic any place at all. That gut feeling of intuition is a powerful, undeniable force, rising up from the deep pools of imagination and emotion. It places you in a narrative you aren’t really in charge of, stretching back through the patterns of your thoughts, experiences, and emotions to the very beginning. You know something—yet you don’t know how you know it. Intuition is a tingling, a tickle, a whisper, a pulse. It’s a gesture, a reaching out to connect your primal spiritual soul with the objective world. It’s an epiphany that represents the essence of things.
The aesthetic of every story always includes elements of the mystical, the unknown. “Part of writing a novel is being willing to leap into the blackness,” says the novelist Chang-Rae Lee. “It’s like spelunking. You kind of create the right path for yourself. But, boy, are there so many points at which you think, absolutely, I’m going down the wrong hole here.”
I view intuition as essentially the ink in your pen, the bloodline of your story. Its wondrous frissons can feel like magic, spawned from an inner incense wafting through your mind. As you write, your characters increasingly take on a life of their own, and if you give yourself the space to respond authentically to your story, you can begin to feel as if the story is moving with a will of its own. We tell stories to move beyond the real world—to a higher and different truth—and it’s that truth that intuition knows and needs to express. So it’s important that you not only recognize your intuition, but that you attune your senses to it.
We’re so trained in logic, however, that our brains can easily favor it. Logic is used to sitting in the front seats of our minds and raising its hand energetically to get called on first. It’s been told it’s best throughout years of schooling. (Have you ever taken a class in intuition, or heard a math or science teacher espouse the merits of intuition?) We think logic will nullify mistakes, give us greater efficiency, simply because it gives us the feeling of control. Life is increasingly structured around elbowing out intuition, if not smothering it. “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift,” said Einstein.
It can be difficult to hear what your intuition is saying in a crowded, noisy life, so it’s more important than ever to nurture solitude and silence. Listen to your mind, your body. Pay attention to others. You as a writer need to flip things and invite your intuition into the mix, as if it’s the quiet student whose eyes are always alert and attentive but who isn’t brave enough to speak up in class.
To nurture my intuition, I sometimes play a game and see if I can be an empath. I first encountered the notion of an empath on Star Trek, when a character on another planet, Gem, absorbs Captain Kirk’s wounds to heal him. She’s specially attuned to another’s feelings, and literally takes the negative ones away. In order to be an empath, I simply try to attune myself to the nuances of those around me, to their desires, wishes, thoughts, and moods. Instead of treating the checkout clerk at the grocery store as an anonymous automaton, I notice her eyes, the way she moves, the way she breathes, and sense whether she’s happy, fatigued, or depressed, whether she’s daydreaming or open to conversation. Or, I might simply sit in a cafe and try to read the thoughts and emotions of others around me.
Our stories guide us toward the things we don’t know yet. It’s as if we’re walking through a dark room, arms outstretched to try not to bump into anything, but drawing on all our senses to feel the world in a previously unknown way. Our emotions weave through our intuition, guiding and prodding it so stealthily in the background. Sometimes the critical thinking powers of the intellect seem more solid, more trustworthy, but every emotion is a judgment, an evaluation of some kind, and deserves equal standing.
Our stories guide us toward the things we don’t know yet.
As tempted as you are to think your stories all the way through ahead of time, remember that overthinking can smother the imagination. Instead, practice engaging in those moments of mystery—when you’re vulnerable, when the unknown beckons. Don’t worry if you feel irrational. Don’t worry if your impulse is to transgress the rules of craft. The words spooling on the page are forming a story as you write them. Trust in what they will reveal. You learn how to write your story by writing your story.
In the end, your intuition and logic shouldn’t be at odds, but rather creating together in their own special harmony. The timbre of their voices is quite different, but when they’re in tune, a story truly sings.
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FIND THE LOGIC IN THE ILLOGICAL
Ponder Blaise Pascal’s quote, “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows not.” What reasons in your story can’t be understood logically? Why? How does this influence your characters’ actions? How does it influence your narrative decisions as an author?
50
VANQUISHING FEAR WITH CURIOSITY
Some stories beckon us, sing to us, an
d we excitedly follow them as if opening the door to a festive party. Other stories are fraught with a foreboding sense of danger. As you approach them, you encounter an uncomfortable uncertainty, the forbidding chill of a discomfiting dare. You fear entering the story. You fear that you lack the ability to pull it off.
It’s easy to shirk away from writing things that are frightful. It’s easy to get scared by possible ridicule, social rejection, or by emotions you’ve repressed for years. Fear overtakes your mind like a tsunami’s wave. It crashes into your thoughts and can literally sweep away your creative impulses. You fear what you might be. You fear what you are. Fear twists the needle of your compass in a different direction—away from your creativity. It’s so sneaky that it can sidewind its way into your thoughts when least expected. It fabricates, bullies, and cajoles, dampening your willpower, your resolve, and your very belief in yourself.
But only those who challenge their fears continue. The dustbins of history are full of people who conjured disaster fantasies and stopped creating. You have to find a way to dissolve your fear, to flip a switch and turn it off.
You have to find a way to dissolve your fear, to flip a switch and turn it off.
I once talked with a soldier who had to clear large areas of Bagdad for land mines during the Iraq war. A single wrong step could end his life. He told me that he had to condition his mind to be like a predator hunting for food—because the predator is in charge, curious, attuned to scents and signs. If he allowed fear to take him over, he’d become the prey, and when you’re the prey, your fear constricts all your senses and thoughts and incites the irrational. You can only think of your fear, and you become literally consumed by it. And then there’s the cruel irony: when you act out of fear, your fears tend to come true.
The same principle applies to your story. If you embrace the wide open lens of your curiosity, your curiosity becomes like a super power, a laser that can pierce and melt any fear. Your curiosity allows you to inhabit your “inner wolf” and pursue your story with the keen senses of one in pursuit. Some stories will wend through the darkest of paths, and genuine moments of terror can arise—because fear is, in fact, a product of the intensity of the creative process. A writer so often writes in states of dissonance, feeling his or her way through levels of discord and uncertainty, aware of the threat of perils ahead, and perhaps even more conscious of threats arising from within. Every story enters into shades of uncertainty, but it’s in those piquant, disquieting moments of precariousness where the challenge and heart of the story reside.
It’s paradoxical, but you can find expansiveness in such uncertainty. As Rainer Maria Rilke put it in Letters to a Young Poet, “I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.”
If you love the questions, fearful as they might be, then you proceed with curiosity; you decipher foreign tongues and follow the portents of your imagination. We write to discover and give voice to an abiding mystery, and to explore such things, we often have to risk discomfort and proceed through tremors and agitations of fear. It’s only when we’re uncomfortable—when we’re challenged by new surroundings, new experiences, new thoughts—that we grow. People who need certainty in their lives are less likely to take risks in their art.
What’s comfortable swaddles you like a baby. You’re warm, you’re safe, and warmth and safety are good, but after a while you realize that comfort induces complacency. Comfort can dull the mind’s sharpness, dim the lights of your imagination. If you shy away from the disquietude that questions present, you’ll miss so many unexpected paths. As Alice said in Alice in Wonderland, “Curiouser and curiouser! Now I’m opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye, feet!”
Don’t let your fear shut your telescope. There’s so much to see in your story if you remain curious, if you trust that moments of uneasiness don’t arise to restrict but to open new pathways. Tolerance for uncertainty is the foundation of your art. Uncertainty serves to sharpen a writer’s skills and determination, not to blunt them. Uncertainty gives us the questions to write our stories with. Trust in uncertainty as a pathway to expand your story.
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RISE TO THE ULTIMATE CHALLENGES
List the books, songs, or artwork that have challenged you and made you grow? Did they confront you in some way, make you uncomfortable? What makes you uncomfortable or afraid in your own writing? How can you approach your discomfort with curiosity?
51
LOGGING THE HOURS: MASTERY EQUALS PERSEVERANCE
When I first became a writer, I marveled at the magical worlds my favorite authors created—their lyrical prose, their riveting plots, their piercing characterizations. They wrote with such grace, such ease, that it seemed as if they’d been born writers, blessed with a talent and anointed by a higher power. They were masters, and I was a simple novice, a bystander wanting in, but improperly dressed for the fancy dinner party they attended.
Their prose shimmered like diamonds, but what I didn’t realize was that they weren’t just plucking diamonds from an endless store of gems and dropping them in their novels. No, each gem was hard-earned, burnished by the unsexy and often uncelebrated traits of diligence and discipline. We sometimes praise an author’s talent too easily, forgetting the thousands of hours of practice that form the steel girders and rivets that make a novel’s beautiful contours possible. If talent was a prerequisite to writing a novel, then writers would talk about how easy it was to do so. The opposite is true, of course. Writing a novel is full of anguish and mis-steps. Talent is nothing without flinty determination. Talent quickly becomes indistinguishable from perseverance and hard work.
There’s a concept that it takes roughly 10,000 hours of practice to reach mastery, whether it’s in chess, writing, or brain surgery. (James Joyce estimated he spent 20,000 hours on Ulysses alone.) Malcolm Gladwell, who popularized the concept in his book Outliers, calls it “the magic number of greatness.” The number 10,000 comes from the research of K. Anders Ericsson, who studied what goes into elite performance and found that the average time elites practiced was 10,000 hours (about 90 minutes a day for 20 years).
Now, if you’re just starting to write, don’t despair that you’ll have to wait 20 years to achieve mastery, or even 10 if you speed things up and write for three hours a day. You’ve already done a lot of writing and reading, not to mention imaginative daydreaming and storytelling with friends and family, so those hours count.
Also, 10,000 hours isn’t truly a magic number of success—your brain doesn’t tally the minutes of your practice and then magically deem you a master at the 10,000-hour mark. It’s the concept that’s important. Most writers need to write several hundred thousand throwaway words before they begin to produce their best work. Ray Bradbury wrote a thousand words a day when he first decided to be a writer. “For ten years I wrote at least one short story a week, somehow guessing that a day would finally come when I truly got out of the way and let it happen.”
NaNoWriMo teaches a similar process. To write a 50,000-word novel in a month, you have to write 1,667 words a day for 30 days. You have to banish your Inner Editor and show up and write, on good days and bad days, on days when you have a crappy day at work, on days you’re just feeling lazy and uninspired, and maybe even on sick days. Your goal of a 50,000-word novel beckons you. Your daily word-count needles you. In this determined practice, you learn how a novel is built not by the grand gusting winds of inspiration, but by the inglorious increments of constancy.
But the mantra of practice, practice, practice, will only take you so far. The mythical 10,000 hours of practice isn’t just a matter of banging away on your keyboard for 10,000 hours. To get better at anything, the number of hours you put in is just one component. The other component is how you practice—the quality of your practice. For example, if you practice shooti
ng free throws, and shoot 10,000 shots with bad form that you don’t try to analyze or correct, then your shooting percentage isn’t likely to go up much. But if you figure out that you need to bend your knees more, steady your elbow, and release the ball off your fingertips—and then practice the precision of your new method through repetitions—you’ll start to see improvement. The hard stuff, the stuff you’d rather skip or do later, is often the stuff that’s most necessary. This method of practice is called deliberate practice, an approach that is focused on improvement through continual reflection and instruction on what needs to be improved.
The hard stuff, the stuff you’d rather skip or do later, is often the stuff that’s most necessary.
As a writer, it’s important to pay attention to the moments you’re writing on autopilot. Every time we choose to play it safe or bypass challenging intellectual moments, we hinder our ability to innovate and grow. It’s only through the more deeply challenging work that takes more time and energy where we’ll find the soul work that is so gratifying. So practice being comfortable in discomfort. Practice writing for an extra 10 minutes when you think you’re spent, just to build stamina. Read interviews with authors or craft books to evaluate your own stories and investigate new ways of writing. Take a writing workshop, just to see if there’s a consistent pattern of weaknesses that others see in your stories. Study novels and other works of art and apply new techniques to your own works.