Watching the words go by

Some days when I come to the page to write my hour, I have a definite idea or theme in mind: something I’ve been thinking over and want to write about. Other days, like today, I come to the page with nothing particular in mind, just the intention to put one word in front of the next. Writing is one way I make sense of the world, so whereas some people like to sit and think, I prefer to sit and write. Somehow, crafting one sentence then the next and the next helps me figure out what I’m thinking, even before I fully realize what it is that’s on my mind.

The interesting thing about thinking is that it never stops: even when you sit down with “nothing to write about,” your head is never close to empty. Anyone who has tried to meditate knows how never-ending the river of thoughts is: whenever anyone asks me how to “quiet their thoughts” when they are meditating, for instance, I have to stifle a hearty laugh. Quiet your thoughts? You’d have better luck containing a cloud or stopping a river. Even if you could calm or quiet your thoughts, why would you want to? There’s nothing more precious than a new idea—something arising out of nothing—so why would you want to halt the perpetual motion machine that is your own consciousness?

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the sheer parade of thoughts in my head. In elementary school, I liked to climb atop the jungle gym during recess, while my classmates were running, shouting, and playing games, so I could sit quietly and think, alone and aloof like Saint Simeon. Later, after I was too old for playgrounds, I learned that sitting alone with a book or notebook served the same purpose: when you’re reading, writing, or sitting atop a jungle gym, people don’t bother you. Even though you aren’t doing much of anything, you presumably “look busy,” or at least you look like you don’t want to be bothered.

I don’t remember, exactly, what I thought about when I was a kid perched atop a jungle gym: I think I just liked to watch my thoughts, fascinated by the way they arose, transformed, and gurgled away like globules in a lava lamp. Some kids can sit for hours with a magnifying glass studying ants or rocks or blades of grass: I liked to sit and watch my thoughts. When I was a kid, I liked to take some simple idea or question and explore it from all angles until I’d stumped myself with the sheer inadequacy of my own understanding. If God created the heavens and the earth, for instance, where did God dwell before that? How is it that my brain knows how to move even the smallest muscle in my hand, orchestrating complex gestures automatically, without the need for conscious thought? Or, what exactly makes “pain” painful? If a little bit of warmth feels good, why and at what point does “warmth” become “hot” then “too hot,” crossing the threshold from “comfortable sensation I seek out” to “painful sensation I flee from”?

You might say I was born to be a writer or philosopher, or you might say I was just a really weird kid, preferring to sit alone with my thoughts rather than playing with my peers. In retrospect, growing up in a neighborhood where there weren’t many children my age might have had something to do with it: given the ten-year gap between me and my older sisters, I learned at an early age how to entertain myself. Or perhaps my fascination with the process of thinking—the way one thought leads to another, and the way close observation easily transforms into wonder—means I was a natural meditator, cultivating an open attitude of awareness and curiosity even before I’d ever heard the word “meditation.”

All I know is that given an hour and a blank page to fill, I always seem to find something to say…at least if I can keep from distracting myself with email, Facebook, or the hydra-headed distraction of the Internet. Now that I think about it, spending an hour a day waiting for words—any words—to arise beneath my scribbling pen or typing fingers is the grown-up equivalent of sitting atop a jungle gym, watching my classmates race to and fro. Watching the world go by isn’t that much different from watching a river flow, or ants walking along a sidewalk, or the incessant parade of thoughts streaming through your own head. Given an expanse of time and the willingness to wait and watch, you never know what will show up on the page before you.

The sculpture pictured in this post is Jaume Plensa’s Alchemist, a figure made up of numbers and mathematical functions that stands in front of the student center at MIT. Perhaps mathematicians like to watch the numbers in their head as much as writers like to watch the words.

 

And it stoned me

It’s a strange, unseasonably warm day: rainy and dismal this morning, and intermittently cloudy now. The sun is chasing the clouds across the sky: one minute bright, the next minute gray. The quality of light keeps changing, too, from iron-clad to gold-toned. I just posted my final small stone for this month’s Mindful Writing Challenge, and it was difficult to describe a day so mercurial: as soon as I’d mentally crafted an adequate description of Now, the light and tenor of the day had already changed.

I sit writing these words on the last day of the January in my office at Framingham State. I have work to do, as always, but more than anything I want to walk. What better way to experience a kaleidoscopic day shot through with a rotating assortment of glinting, metallic light than by walking through that light, illuminated?

In today’s small stone, I compared the clouds to hammered pewter, and indeed some of them are gray and mottled, capping the heavens like a lid. But at the fringes, these thicker, darker, more solidly heavy clouds fray into something more miscible: spun-sugar and cotton-tuft. On the dull, muddy ground, the rain-sodden grass is etched with spider-tracery, the weirdly wending shadows of overhead tree limbs. Students pass in sweatshirts and long-sleeves—no jackets, but no bare arms, either.

What have I learned from a month of mindful writing? Every day gives you something you can boil down to its essence, the meaty broth of experience. Every moment offers something to see.

I crafted one version of today’s Tweet in my head while I was driving to campus through windblown drizzle this morning, but by my office hour, when I had a chance to post it, that moment had already long passed. Looking back on a month of Tweets, I see not a month of days but a month of moments. Why this arbitrary decision to post a small stone a day when one could easily Tweet a small stone an hour, small-stoning rather than rocking around the clock? If my heart had thumbs with which to Tweet or text, could I emit a small stone with every heartbeat, my Twitter feed pulsing with the emphatic urge of Now, Now, Now?

A car passes, its engine whining, in one direction; two women pass, chatting, in the other. Right now the clouds have parted and the light is golden; in a minute, the cloudy curtain will close, and the light will turn leaden. Nature’s alchemy works in both directions on partly cloudy, late-January days: gold turns to lead, and lead turns back to gold. Given the anvil of time, what will you hammer from your days?

Will I continue Tweeting tomorrow? When the urge strikes, yes, but automatically every day, no. Having started the year with open eyes, now I’ll walk through the rest of these days, alert.

January’s small stones:

1. I needn’t see the shadow of passing wings to know a hawk has been near: the hanging feeder bereft of birds tells the tale.

2. Two downy woodpeckers flit and chitter on a frozen branch, their chatter as brittle as clacking ice.

3. A blue jay calls, and the cardinals, nuthatch, juncos, and all but two house sparrows vanish. False alarm.

4. A downy woodpecker scoots around a slim limb while a male and female cardinal fluff their feathers against the cold.

5. A fat gray squirrel leaps from feeder to tree, spraying an arc of seed for the juncos and sparrows scratching the snow below.

6. A sugar-sifting of snow on my birthday. Two nuthatches scoot and honk overhead, neither looking a day older than yesterday.

7. A squirrel leaps from fence to tree, his tail curled into a question mark. A woodpecker startles, silhouetted in morning light.

8. Curbside trash bins sparkle with predawn frost. High above the streetlights, a thin sliver of moon glows like God’s thumbnail.

9. Two male cardinals are meticulously placed, each a spot of color in his own tree, each coolly eyeing the other: winter detente.

10. Two nuthatches work a half-dead walnut tree, probing for insects. Their claws scratch bark as they hop from branch to trunk.

11. With no gaudy mate to overshadow her, a female cardinal is perfectly complemented by her red bill, black mask, and olive coat.

12. A damp morning–the backyard fence green with algae. A white-throated sparrow sings, his whistle as cool and clear as water.

13. No birds at the feeder, just three fat squirrels who know they outweigh the invisibly lurking Cooper’s hawk.

14. A balmy day, humid with the souls of melted snowmen. The backyard, stripped of snow, is as bare & miserable as a fleeced sheep.

15. Outside before dawn, I see the ears and eye-shine of one of our cats in an upstairs window. In a nearby house, one lit candle.

16. Juncos fly into a black & white tree. A cardinal beneath the snow-topped feeder gives a spot of color to a monochrome morning.

17. Four squirrels scramble down a mazy maple, each taking his own circuitous path to the fence, where they scurry in a neat row.

18. A turquoise sky caps a fiercely cold morning. Sunlight glints on the birdbath ice, and chickadees chatter from brittle pines.

19. What unseen bit is wedged at the apex of this particular fence slat, luring a red-breasted nuthatch to hammer fearlessly there?

20. One fat squirrel on the bird feeder, a second tail-twitching on the branch above, quietly plotting strategies and trajectories.

21. A woodpecker calls, his “peeeek” as hard as the bird bath ice. Incongruously, a chickadee sings a spring song: two clear notes.

22. A thin film of snow squeaks underfoot. Three lines of rabbit tracks crisscross the driveway: this way, that way, and back.

23. The rising sun glows & sparkles through an opaque veil of ice crystals, the window feathered with bluish brushstrokes of frost.

24. Too cold to look for the woodpecker calling from the tall, twiggy trees behind my office, his cry as sharp as the winter air.

25. Beneath the feeder, two white-throated sparrows scratch for seed, so natty with their neat eye-stripes and clean white bellies.

26. A faint line of bird tracks wends delicately across the sidewalk, an intricate embroidery in a script I can’t understand.

27. Alerted by a downy woodpecker’s call, I look up just in time to see the sun glint golden on a passing red-tailed hawk’s belly.

28. A nuthatch zooms like a torpedo to the feeder, parries with a sparrow there, & deems the place big enough for the two of them.

29. Up before dawn or any birdsong. Underfoot, an inch of sugar-white snow crusted with ice, like walking through crème brûlée.

30. A soupy-humid day, with yesterday’s slush reduced to slop. Beneath the dripping trash bins, two flat rectangles of hidden snow.

31. An otherworldly light as hammered-pewter clouds roll in and out. High overhead, a lone gull circles on long, spindly wings.

If you’re a Van Morrison fan, you’ll recognize the allusion in today’s title. Enjoy!

 

Tweet a squirrel

This month I’m participating in the Mindful Writing Challenge, which basically means I’m trying to note and record one interesting thing every day, using my Twitter account to post these “small stones.” Noticing and recording one small thing every day sounds easy enough—just open your eyes—but of course, simplicity is never as simple as it seems.

I’ve settled into a routine for generating each day’s small stone. In the morning when I take the dogs to our backyard dog-pen and back, I try to notice one interesting thing I can describe in a single arresting image. My walk to the dog-pen is short: from the back door to just beyond the garage. During that short stroll down the sidewalk, across the driveway, and back—something not long enough to count as a proper dog-walk—I watch for birds at the feeder, hawks in the trees, stars in the sky, or anything else that seems noteworthy: something seen in the brief backyard space between here and there.

Because I’m using Twitter to post my daily stones, I can’t be wordy: instead, I have to boil things down to their essence. On Twitter, I don’t have room to mention how this morning’s squirrels reminded me of other times I’ve seen squirrels romping and chasing; instead, I have to determine what makes this morning’s squirrel-spotting interesting or unusual. What is the kernel of experience that makes this squirrel stand out as remarkable or noteworthy? Specific details, I tell my writing students, are what make your writing believable: you want to capture the essence of “squirreliness” in your description, proving how attentive an observer of squirrel-nature you actually are. You don’t want to describe a squirrel as if you’ve never met one outside a book; you want to describe a squirrel as if you know it.

This morning’s squirrels were romping and scurrying, scrambling from all directions down one of our backyard maple trees onto a weathered picket fence, running along the top of it one after another. That was the central image in my head when I crafted this morning’s Tweet: squirrels rapidly converging as if from all directions, scrambling down a bare, branching tree and then chasing one another, one by one, along the top of the fence—one, two, three, four.

I just spent an entire paragraph describing this morning’s squirrels running from tree to fence, and I still don’t think I’ve provided an accurate picture. I haven’t mentioned the tail-twitching, the scrabbling claws, or the sharp chits of four squirrels chattering amongst themselves. I also didn’t mention how later, I saw even more squirrels—these same four, I’m guessing, and one or more additional ones—chasing and tumbling in the tall pines that fringe our backyard. Describing one squirrel encounter is difficult enough; describing two is infinitely more complex.

Having failed in two paragraphs to describe for you these squirrels, I give up, opting instead to create only the sketchiest of outlines: a Tweet that implies more than two paragraphs of prose could ever tell. When I craft each day’s Tweet, I first notice something as I’m taking the dogs out and in, out and in. Then I think about that noticed thing while I’m washing the previous night’s dishes, rinsing the recycling, and taking out the trash. Given what I saw, what can I say about it? Only then do I actually try to commit words to paper, except there’s no paper involved. Instead, I log into Twitter on my iPod Touch, then I skim a few Tweets before typing a short, condensed description of what I saw, ignoring how many characters I’m using and only trying to describe one central image that might express or explain the whole experience.

I do this with my thumbs because that’s how you type on an iPod Touch, as if you were texting on a phone. I never thought I’d use my thumbs to compose miniature bits of nature writing based on things I see in my suburban backyard, but I’m finding my Touch to be a perfect compositional tool for the simple reason that I don’t have to turn on my laptop to use it. Before I’ve written my morning journal pages much less turned on my laptop for the day’s work, I’ve composed the first draft of my daily Tweet, which I then whittle and hone so it fits Twitter’s 140-character limit. This act of winnowing words is what makes such Twittering useful to me as a writer: a daily exercise in concision. When you don’t have room for all your words, you pare down to your best words. This and this and this, and not a jot or tittle more.

This morning’s result? A single sentence that took me five minutes to get just so:

Four squirrels scramble down a mazy maple, each taking his own circuitous path to the fence, where they scurry in a neat row.

 

Retreating

Last Saturday, a friend and I held our own two-person writing retreat: a full day devoted to our writing. Calling the day a retreat makes it sound like we went somewhere exotic and inspiring: a cottage on the beach, perhaps, or a cabin in the woods. But I’ve learned that what you need to work on your writing isn’t a picturesque place but an absence of distractions. The secret isn’t what you add to your writing practice but what you take away.

The inspiration for this writing retreat was twofold. First, we’d gotten the idea for a day-long writing retreat from the Cambridge Center for Adult Education’s annual Fall Writer’s conference, which we’d attended when we first met more than a decade ago. After we’d attended this one-day conference several years in a row, my friend and I decided we hadn’t learned anything from the workshops and workshop leaders that we didn’t already know; instead, the conference was valuable primarily because it forced us to spend an entire day focused on nothing other than writing.

“There’s no reason we couldn’t schedule our own writing conference,” we decided years ago, declaring over hot beverages that all we’d need was to set aside a fall day, go somewhere we could write, and actually spend the day writing rather than talking about writing: no need for workshops, workshop leaders, registration fees, or anything else. Deciding we’d pursue our own version of “writing without teachers,” my friend and I promptly forgot about the idea, letting it fall into the neglected corner where well-intentioned but abandoned resolutions hide. Sometimes all a well-intentioned resolution needs, however, is enough time to quietly germinate and take root.

The second inspiration for this weekend’s bare-bones writing retreat was a similar one sponsored by the Boston Writing and Rhetoric Network this past August. BRAWN is a network of Boston-area college writing professionals—writing and rhetoric professors, writing center administrators, and the like—and the premise of the August retreat was plain and simple: given all the time and energy we spend focusing on our students’ writing, why not take a day to focus on our own?

At that August retreat, a handful of my Boston-area colleagues and I gathered in a windowless classroom in MIT’s Stata Center, the leader writing “BRAWN Writing Retreat” on the chalkboard at the front of the room. That was all it took to transform Just Another Day into a Day Devoted to Writing. Just as writing a contract and checking in with a partner are all you need to keep you writing every day, sometimes showing up in a classroom with few distractions and promising to stay there all day, writing, is all it takes to get words on paper. You don’t need a cottage on the beach or a cabin in the woods to make a “writing retreat”: all you need is a commitment to keep your backside planted in your chair while you type, scribble, squint at the screen, or edit.

So on Saturday morning, my writing partner and I carpooled to Framingham State, where we commandeered an empty classroom in a building where I’ve never taught. All you need for a writing retreat, I learned from that BRAWN retreat in August, is an empty room with desks and chairs, a plug for your laptop, and a commitment to spend the day writing rather than aimlessly checking email, Facebook, and Google Reader. In the morning, we claimed a room flooded with natural light that shone over long, narrow tables; my writing partner set up camp in the middle of the back row, and I spread out my things (carried in my faithful laptop bag) at the far end of the room, where I had a window view of a bronzed oak tree lit by morning sunlight.

After spending a few hours writing, we stopped for lunch, driving through a landscape of late autumn fields and sun-dappled woods to a haunted tavern in a nearby town, where we talked over omelets, iced tea, and club soda: food of the gods if you’ve spent the morning with only your own written words to entertain you. After lunch, we drove back to campus, where we claimed a second, less-drafty classroom, opening our laptops and arranging our things on a large conference table while golden light from several towering oak trees cast lingering shadows.

One of the things I’ve learned from sitting Zen retreats is that there is a certain kind of intimacy that comes from sharing silence. I’ve sat retreats alongside people whose name I didn’t know and whose voice I’d never heard, but by retreat’s end, I intimately knew the sound of their breathing, the slouch of their shoulders, or the way they slurped their soup. Something similar happens on a writing retreat, whether it’s a formal, organized thing or something casual you arrange with a friend. You grow accustomed to the rhythmic sound of fingers tapping laptop keys, the quiet pauses to re-read or re-consider a line, and the staccato burst of the backspace button deleting a word. On one Zen retreat, I could tell a longtime friend was having a difficult time because I could hear her clicking her meditation beads faster than usual, and on Saturday’s writing retreat, both my partner and I were attuned, I’m sure, to those moments when the other sat back and sighed or leaned forward in her seat to break off another square of dark chocolate: edible inspiration.

It doesn’t take a fancy setting to make a writing retreat: had my friend and I rented a cottage on the beach or a cabin in the woods, perhaps we would have been so distracted by the scenery, we wouldn’t have been attuned to the quiet rhythm of our own inner prose. Who wants to sit inside writing all day if either the beach or the woods beckon? All it takes to make a writing retreat is someone who will hold you to your commitment. For about a decade, my partner and I planned to spend a day writing, and having finally decided to do it this year, we each almost backed out at the last minute, blaming our to-do lists and an onslaught of other social commitments. The minute we’d settled into a plain but perfectly functional classroom at Framingham State on Saturday morning, however, I knew we’d made the right decision: after a workweek complicated by a hurricane, power outage, and interrupted Internet connection, it felt like a welcome relief to return to the sadly neglected page.

So on Saturday I spent a bright and brisk November day inside looking out. I could have spent the day working: I certainly had plenty of things to do. I could have spent the day walking: it was a pretty enough day for it. Instead, I sat in an almost-empty classroom at Framingham State writing because a friend and I had made a promise, and after all these years of intending to retreat but never actually doing it, here we were, at last, taking a day to pause, step back, and devote time to something there typically aren’t enough hours in the day to do fully and without distraction.

 

Showing up at the page

A few nights ago, my writing partner emailed to let me know she hadn’t completed her daily writing commitment, but she’d done part of it: she’d showed up at the page. The phrase “showing up at the page” is a shorthand we both understand: showing up at the page is what you do on days when you don’t feel like you have anything to say, or you’re stumped at how to phrase what you do have to say, but you show up anyway, just in case words magically appear despite all your doubts and second-guesses.

Showing up at the page takes a great deal of faith and dedication. Regardless of all the evidence to the contrary, you believe in your heart of hearts that the process of showing up is worthwhile and valuable even on (and even especially on) days when the product you produce is puny, disappointing, or just plain insipid. You believe despite all your doubts and second-guesses that the discipline of showing up is its own reward, and you believe despite all your doubts and second-guesses that showing up is important because there are, occasionally, those magically unpredictable days when Something spontaneously appears out of Nothing. If you hadn’t made a practice of showing up at the page, how could you have experienced that windfall?

Henry David Thoreau captured the spirit of showing up for the page when he wrote in Walden, “I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.” The sun will both rise and set without you, and there will be days when it’s too cloudy for you to see anything the sun might happen to be doing at the moment. But on those days, too, there is something to be gained from the discipline of showing up for the sunrise and observing whatever you can see. Think of all the things—an entire bustling Universe of activity—that happen every day whether we’re watching or not…and then think of the things we might actually see if we were present with our eyes open and alert.

Years ago in Rhode Island, in the woods behind the Providence Zen Center, I saw a weasel by sheer accident. Hiking the winter woods behind the monastery where I’d been meditating and suffering, homesick and sore, for five days, I stopped to listen to the sizzle of rain falling on melting snow. I remember the woods were silent, hushed and expectant; honed by hours of meditation, I must have instinctively sensed the precise silent moment—raindrops paused in midair as if in a giant snow globe—when that tiny fanged predator, a curling wisp of sinew and muscle, would silently patter into view, running downhill into his own footprints, a limp and bloodied chipmunk dangling from his mouth. Had I not been walking in the silent Rhode Island woods at precisely the right moment, I would have never seen that weasel, that chipmunk, those sizzling raindrops.

Showing up at the page is like keeping watch at the bedside of a comatose relative: you watch, wait, and hold out hope because your patient might be present and alive in there, despite an unresponsive body. Just because your patient doesn’t seem to respond doesn’t mean they aren’t there: as Jesus said of a child he raised from the dead, “She’s not dead; she’s only sleeping.” On days when your own creativity seems dead, you show up and sit by the tomb, expectant. If today should be the miraculous day when your lifeless creativity should stir and then sit up in its shroud, you will be there to see it. There might not be anything you can do to help either the sun or the dead rise, but it is of the last importance that you be present just in case.

Keeping a blog is a great exercise in showing up at the page. When you start a blog, you make an unspoken contract with your readers that you will show up and say something regularly enough to make their checking in worthwhile: a blog grown cold is like a closed and darkened house where a weary traveler had hoped for hospitality. Many days when you show up to “feed the blog,” you feel like Old Mother Hubbard reaching into a cupboard that’s sadly bare. When you’re forced to concoct a blog-worthy meal out of meager scraps, you often end up with a stone soup simmered with bits of this and that: nothing fancy, just something simple and savory. Out of the leftovers of your days, what kind of sustenance can you cobble together if you simply continue to show up for your own life?

 

The hours

For the past month or so, I’ve been working on a writing project inspired by an article I saw in Oprah magazine. For most of the summer, I struggled with my writing, trying (unsuccessfully) to write my way back into a book-length narrative I’d started back in November and feeling generally uninspired about posting to my blog. For most of the summer, I faithfully wrote my morning journal pages but couldn’t motivate myself to write much more, feeling uninspired, uncreative, and entirely at a lack of anything to say: stuck. I couldn’t get into the book-length narrative, I didn’t particularly want to blog, and I basically wondered how I’d ever find my way back to writing (and wanting to write) again.

I could offer any of a number of deep, psychological reasons why I spent most of the summer stuck. Since Reggie died in April, I haven’t been walking as much as I used to: without the impetus of an elderly dog with a tiny bladder, I can stay home rather than going for frequent dog-walks. Now that I no longer live in Keene, the walks I do take are on quiet suburban streets, not the occasionally gritty small-town setting I was accustomed to writing about. Given that my dog-walks with Reggie were a constant source of creative inspiration, this summer’s writing felt tepid and uninspired: if you’re no longer doing the thing that used to inspire you, how do you find inspiration in a different place, with a different routine, and with a different dog?

The premise of that Oprah article was mind-numbingly simple: instead of focusing on the psychological issues keeping you “stuck,” simply write a contract outlining a specific writing commitment—any writing commitment—and then swap that contract with a friend who agrees to keep track of your progress. In the article, Aimee Bender describes the commitment a friend made to work on her stories for one hour a day five days a week: a commitment she made in writing and shared with Bender, who served as her accountability partner.

She would write five days a week for an hour. As a firm reminder, every day, when she finished her hour, she would e-mail me one word: Done, and at some point during the day, I would e-mail back Check. No other words were necessary. All that was being acknowledged was that she’d sat at her computer for an hour with the intention to write, whether or not she did.

When I first read Bender’s article, I’m sure I chuckled: how could simply making a promise to sit at your desk for an hour with only “the intention to write” result in anything? Why would simply making a promise in writing and then sharing that written promise with a friend be any more powerful than making a promise to yourself? And how could calling your written promise a “contract” make it more binding than a mere (but sincere) resolution? I was sure none of it would work: like many of the things I read in Oprah magazine, this was probably another bit of advice that sounds too simple to be true because it is too simple to be true. The idea of making a contractual promise to write and then simply keeping your promise sounded like another bit of self-help wisdom that is inspiring in theory but in practice is nothing more than snake-oil: pure placebo.

The funny thing is, though, the article was right.

As silly as it sounds, there is something profoundly powerful about expressing your promises in writing. First, you have to define your goals. When I say I’m going to “write” for an hour a day, five days a week, what exactly does that mean? Am I working on a particular project, am I writing whatever appears, or am I focused on writing a particular genre or narrative style? In my case, I decided that “writing” refers to nonfiction prose, it can include journal-writing and blog-post crafting, and it can include the revision of previously written work. In my contract, in other words, I defined “writing” to cover all the stages of crafting and polishing prose, not just the initial composition. If I don’t have anything new to say in today’s writing hour, I can go back and revise something I wrote previously.

Second, when you craft a writing contract, you have to set your list of “Don’ts.” While you’re sitting at your computer trying to write, what can’t you do? I decided that sitting and thinking (also known as “doing nothing”) was okay, but sitting and surfing the web wasn’t. During my contractual hour, I am not allowed to check email, Facebook, Twitter, or Google Reader. I’m not allowed to dry dishes, fold laundry, or do any other sort of housework; I’m not allowed to answer the phone; and I’m not allowed to write handouts, class plans, or other kinds of teaching documents. When I sit down to write, I need to stay sitting even if I’m stuck and don’t feel like writing. If I force myself to sit there “doing nothing,” I eventually find something I want to work on.

When I sit down to “write my hour,” as I’ve taken to calling it, I turn off my email notification and set a digital kitchen timer for 60 minutes: a full hour of no email, no Facebook, no blog-reading, no web-surfing, no work or housework. When you create a temporal space for your writing, you create a kind of intellectual vacuum: an empty hole the Universe seeks to fill. Most of us are amazingly gifted when it comes to filling this kind of vacuum with any manner of busywork. Given the choice between spending an hour with a blank page and spending an hour doing “something productive,” we typically choose the productive option, avoiding our writing by dusting the bookshelves, rearranging the closet, paying bills, or doing pretty much anything that isn’t writing.

One thing I’ve discovered this past month or so, however, is that the earth continues to spin even when I’m not continually checking email. All the essential things on my to-do list—the papers I need to read, the emails I need to answer, the classes I need to plan—are all there and waiting for me after I finish writing my hour. Devoting five hours a week to my own writing hasn’t turned me into a wretchedly ineffective, self-absorbed teacher even though for one hour a day, five days a week, I’m ignoring both my email inbox and lingering paper piles. If anything, I find that writing my hour makes me a more engaged and inspired teacher because teaching is no longer ALL I’m going. Given the creative stimulus of my own intellectual pursuits, I can devote my full attention to teaching when I’m teaching, then I can walk away and do something else when my teaching time is done.

Another thing I’ve learned from a month of keeping my “hours” is how to blog slowly. Not every idea has to be published immediately, in the instance of its emergence; instead, some ideas can be allowed to germinate, ripen, and mature. Several of the pieces I’ve blogged this past month are the result of writing and revising over a week or more. I assembled “Sudden hummingbirds,” for instance, from paragraphs scribbled over several days’ worth of journal pages, then I spent about a week revising it. “How to read a true war story” also first appeared in my handwritten journal, and it took me nearly a week and a half to continue thinking about, adding to, and revising it. When I say I spend a week or more working on these pieces, that doesn’t mean I spend all my writing time in a given week working on one essay. Instead, at any given time, I have several essays-in-progress saved in a folder I’ve named “The Hours”: something close-at-hand to work on whenever I sit down and start my timer.

Even a piece like “Anticlimax,” the first draft of which I wrote in a single sitting, benefited from me taking a few days before publishing it. When I wrote that piece on the Friday morning an exterminator came to destroy our backyard bald-faced hornets’ nest, I wasn’t completely satisfied with the essay’s tone. The original draft seemed too superficial and even flippant, focusing too much on how professional a job the exterminator had done. Not satisfied with the piece, I let it linger on my laptop over the weekend, and then I published it the following Monday morning, after removing two paragraphs that took the piece in the wrong direction and cobbling together a conclusion that better matched what I wanted to say.

It might seem silly to dedicate this much time revising blog posts: after all, blog posts are often considered a throw-away genre, something you slap up in the heat of the moment. But just because I can share something the minute I finish writing it doesn’t mean I should share it so quickly. When I first started keeping a blog, the goal was to give me a forum in which to practice writing. Working on my “hours” has reminded me that as much as I enjoy writing, I enjoy revision even more. In any given week, there are ideas that make their way into my morning journal pages that could be shared on-blog or elsewhere if only I took the time to develop them, and my weekly “hours” are allowing me to do exactly that.

When I initially signed my writing contract, I wanted to devote my “hours” to working on the book-length narrative I started last November, and indeed part of what I’ve been doing is revisiting revisable bits in that larger work. “A stone that will endure,” for instance, is a piece that refused to be written in June, when I told myself it should serve as the opening of that envisioned narrative: somehow, telling myself I was trying to write the beginning of a BOOK made the words freeze in my fingers. Now that I’m sitting down to write five days a week whether or not I call that writing a “book,” I’m realizing I truly do write like Thoreau, finding inspiration in my daily journal-keeping and seeing not much of a difference between short essays and more sustained narratives. The way to write a book, I’m deciding, isn’t to sit down and say “I’m writing a book”; instead, the way to write a book is the way you write anything. You sit down and write whatever wants to appear right now, you go back and revise whatever wanted to appear previously, and you cobble together whatever you end up with, letting revision smooth over the seams.

I don’t know where my “hours” will ultimately lead me. I might end up with a book, I might end up with a bunch of blog posts, or I might end up with some strange combination of both. Right now, I’m trying not to spend too much time defining what it is I’m writing; instead, I’m enjoying the simple fact that I am writing, the change in season bringing a welcome end to my summer stagnation.

 

Retrospection

I’m slowly re-reading my hand-written journals, starting with one I began in August, 2002: nearly ten years ago, when I began journaling in large, lined Moleskine notebooks that now fill a shelf of their own.

It’s strange and surreal to have a day-to-day chronicle of one’s own life, an account that’s infinitely more raw and personal than anything I’d share on my blog. I’ve always enjoyed reading writers’ journals: my fondness for May Sarton, for instance, comes from her prose journals, not her poetry, and I love reading the mundane thoughts of essayists such as Virginia Woolf and Henry David Thoreau. I’ve intermittently kept a journal since high school, but I destroyed most of my scattered and self-absorbed notebooks from high school, college, and even the early days of graduate school. Only in 2002 did I start keeping the journals I kept.

It’s interesting to eavesdrop on another’s mind; it’s interesting to see how the rhythms of thought get patterned into prose. When you read the journal of a writer you’re familiar with, you can recognize in embryonic form the ideas and images that appear in later published pieces. One fascinating aspect of reading excerpts from Thoreau’s 1851 journal with my former writing students, for instance, is the way bits of Thoreau’s later essays appear there: for instance, scattered passages that ultimately appeared in the essay “Walking,” which was published in its present form only after Thoreau’s death.

When you read your own journal, you can trace the foreshadowing of a story whose outcome you know, having lived it. In 2002, my father was diagnosed with a cancer I now know he survived; in 2002, I applied and began training for an online teaching job I still have. In 2002, I knew my first marriage was doomed but didn’t have the courage to end it: that wouldn’t happen until two years later. In 2002, I lived with, tended, and had as my constant companion a dog in the prime of life who I couldn’t envision ever growing old, much less dying.

When literary scholars read the journals, letters, and other ephemera of published authors, they are looking for the seeds of greatness: how did this artist take the thoughts in her or his head and commit them to paper? When I read my own journals, I’m similarly looking for suggestive patterns, but only as they provide insight into personality: who was I then, and what happened in the interim to make me who I am now?

I think it’s significant, somehow, that it took me ten years to complete my PhD; I taught for just over ten years at Keene State; and now I’m revisiting nearly ten years of journal entries that offer their own partial slice of both experiences. Now that Reggie’s dead and I’ve left Keene State, it feels like it’s time to move onto something new–something Next. When I finished my dissertation, colleagues warned me of the let-down graduates often feel in the absence of a Big Project…but when I finished my dissertation, I quickly moved onto the big transitions of divorce, life as a single woman, marriage to J, and ultimately moving from Keene. Only now do I feel like the emotional aftermath–Buddhists would say the karma–of so many changes is starting to clear, providing an opportunity for me to discern my next step. What better way to figure out what to do with the next ten years of my life than by re-visiting my journals with their day-to-day account of the past ten years?

 

Words

Although I haven’t been blogging much, I have been writing…just not here. I’m still in the habit of writing four handwritten pages in my paper journal almost every morning, and most days this month that’s been all the creativity I’ve had time for, the rest of my energy devoted to the classes and course design project I started last month.

I finished my course design project last week, one of my classes ended this week, and another class ends this weekend. Once I’ve submitted grades on Tuesday, my schedule will finally slip into something more comfortable: just one online graduate class that runs until September. As always, I’m looking forward to a (relative) break from teaching and grading: a chance to return to writing, letting my own words settle into the spaces recently filled to overflowing with the words of my students’ posts and papers.

This is my contribution to today’s Photo Friday theme, Words. I’ve blogged the photo at the top of this post twice–first in February, 2009, and again in December that same year–and I blogged the photo in the middle of this post in May, 2010.

These days I’m still writing loopy words with a Waterman fountain pen in a lined Moleskine notebook…but recently I’ve been using purple ink rather than green.

 

Make it a habit

I have the habit of writing in the morning because that is when I feel the most awake, alert, and alive. This morning I did yoga then lifted weights, so my muscles sang with strength as I opened my notebook to write. Later in the day, I feel sluggish and thick, incapable of bright, interesting discourse, but in the morning my body feels both lithe and light, its strength and resilience reflected in the suppleness of my moving mind.

This morning I started reading Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit. The book is favorably reviewed on Amazon, and I trust the taste of the friends who recommended it. But still any time I start a book by an author I’ve not read before, I wonder what I am in for. Will this person’s definition and practice of creativity differ from my own? Will there be breathy, New-Age aspects that clash with my down-and-dirty Zen approach–an insistence on praying to fairies, perhaps, or a pervasive belief in unicorns and leprechauns as totems of creativity?

I shouldn’t have worried. Tharp’s approach is as down-and-dirty as my own–no surprise, I suppose, since she is a dancer and choreographer, someone intimately acquainted with the poetry of bone and sinew and the languid beauty of shimmering skin. Tharp believes, as I do, that creativity is a practice–a habit–that thrives (as embodied things do) on ritual and regularity. Your Muse isn’t some ethereal spirit who imbibes rainbows and twirls with angels on the heads of every pin; it is a creature who must be both fed and exercised, as fierce and fragile as any animal.

I am already enamored with Tharp’s approach because what she says in her first chapter resonates so deeply with my own experience: not just what I believe, but what I do. Creativity doesn’t happen by magic nor by accident; it is a strength that must be exercised. Just as we all possess muscles that grow stronger and more flexible–more invigorated and alive–through use, so too does creativity thrive on habitual activity. No one lacks creativity any more than any of us lacks a muscular system. We all come with creativity as a standard feature–something factory-installed–but many of us never use the thing, so it becomes dull and dusty with disuse.

Tharp, who choreographed scenes in the movie Amadeus, makes an intentional effort to debunk the romanticized view of Mozart popularized by that film. Mozart’s creativity did not happen by accident, nor was it effortless. Any natural talent young Mozart possessed was honed by an attentive and at times overbearing father who exposed the boy to the best musical models and mentors while urging him to practice, practice, practice. Mozart himself denied the claim that writing music came easily to him; instead, his was a craft he honed through extensive practice and study.

This is a lesson Malcolm Gladwell emphasized in Outliers, where he argues both the Beatles and Bill Gates became great by practicing for 10,000 hours, and it’s a lesson underscored by Celtics star Kevin Garnett, who memorably remarked in an interview once that “The elite is the elite for a reason.” Mozart might have been born with more musical talent than the rest of us, but he would have made nothing of that talent had he not practiced. Practicing scales for 10,000 hours might not make me a Mozart, but it would make me far more proficient on piano than I currently am, without any practice.

Tharp begins her second chapter by describing her daily ritual of waking at 5:30, dressing in work-out clothes, then hailing a cab to go to the gym. “The ritual is not the stretching and weight training I put my body through each morning at the gym,” she explains; “the ritual is the cab.” Regardless of what happens at the gym, in other words, the part of Tharp’s practice that matters is simply showing up. This rings so true to my experience, I wanted to shout “Amen” and “Hallelujah” when I read Tharp’s words.

“In order to be creative,” Tharp insists in a sentence that literally jumps off the page in large red print, “you have to know how to prepare to be creative.” Creativity, it turns out, is as much about preparation as it is about perspiration: creativity, in other words, is a phenomenon that starts the night before. This isn’t about sitting and waiting for your Muse to arrive on the back of a unicorn prancing down a rainbow; it’s about dragging your ass to the gym, the keyboard, or the blank page. Show up, practice your craft, then keep showing up and practicing. Judging from the opening chapter of The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp and I are kindred spirits.

 

Twitterpated

I’ve decided to start Tweeting again: just one line distilled from each morning’s walk, then recorded on Twitter and in my morning journal pages. This was a practice–just one daily Tweet–I enjoyed when I did it somewhat regularly during January’s “River of Stones,” a discipline requiring close observation and distillation. How can you present something meaningful–something crystalline–in 140 characters?

It’s a subversion of typical Twitter usage, this crafting of literary lines. Twitter is a fast, ephemeral medium: old Tweets are so five minutes ago. Twitter is typically the realm of folks with smartphones who text with lightning-fast thumbs: all the news that’s newer than new. The ultimate in-the-moment medium, Twitter focuses on what is happening Right Now, not on what might make any difference tomorrow or next week or beyond that.

The act of actually crafting a Tweet–of seeing something on one’s walk, savoring it like a sweet, then mulling over and revising it, honing it down to its essence–seems absurd in such a throwaway medium. Why write slowly in a medium that thrives on speed? Why willfully subvert the process by Tweeting in a way that is frankly old school?

For me, the appeal of Twitter doesn’t lie in its rapidity or its reach, with celebrities gathering thousands of followers who hang on every Tweeted word. For me, the appeal of Twitter lies in its enforced brevity: the fact that like a poet you are required to count and consider every character. There is a lot of disposable chitchat on Twitter–that is, after all, what the site is designed to cultivate. But in the hands of a writer, Twitter’s space constraints are invaluable, forcing the long-winded and prosaic among us to jettison every scrap of dead wood.

I am not a poet; I deal exclusively with prose. The danger that nonfiction writers flirt with perpetually is the temptation to over-elaborate, providing an entire blueprint of a house when actually an impressionistic sketch will do. Prose states and poetry implies, and sometimes the declarative nature of prose makes it possible to over-emphasize a point, preaching on about something that could have been stated far more succinctly, and toward more effective ends.

I like the idea of transforming a transitory, superficial medium into something both crafted and contemplative. Well-wrought Tweets won’t slow Twitter a whit, but they speak toward the boldness of brevity and the purity of prose. In this, I have plenty of good models to emulate, such Dave with his Morning Porch observations, Leslee with her 3rdhouse micro-poems, and Teju with his Small Fates. With neighbors like these, I feel I’m in good company: a small band of wordsmiths conspiring to bring depth and awareness to a superficial genre, one word at a time.

Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter what other folks are doing on Twitter since writing has always been more a practice than a product for me. I’m just as interested in what I learned from producing a piece of writing–what was the experience of writing it like, and what did I glean from the process–than I am in what the end result turns out to be.

Whether I’m scribbling a journal entry, publishing a blog post, or tweaking a Tweet, how has my relationship with language changed or evolved in the process? Did I find a chance to use a favorite word or create a startling image? Did I succeed in capturing the kernel of a particular image that can sprout and flower into awareness in my reader’s mind? Did I achieve connection with my audience, a moment of lightning recognition: “Oh, yes, exactly!” If I’ve achieved any of these, I don’t care how or where or in what medium it occurred: the simple experience of awareness, communication, and connection is enough.

Anyone who has seen the movie Bambi might recognize the title of today’s blog-post as being the term the Wise Old Owl uses for springtime infatuation.