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d-a-anderson · 4 years ago

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A Meditation on Writing Honestly

There’s an anecdote about James Joyce I remind myself of often when I think about writing—particularly when it comes to the pressure we put ourselves under to “produce” something.

Joyce walked into the pub one evening. Sitting next to one of his writing buddies, his buddy asked him:

“What did you write today, James?”

Joyce replied:

“I put in a comma… and then I took it out.”

I love that. In truth, the story may be apocryphal, or attributable instead to Oscar Wilde. But for me, it could be Joyce just as well—and the point sticks.

Joyce was able to twist language the way Dali could twist an otherwise realistic painting to its surrealistic breaking point. Joyce made language multi-dimensional. He wasn’t a pulp fiction writer. Sure, he produced work—some of the greatest work in the English language, arguably—but he did it on his own terms.

Look. I’m not here to say that you shouldn’t meet your goals. What I am saying is that quality isn’t necessarily quantity, and vice versa.

When I wrote my book, I had a rough draft that’d been stewing in me for years. I came back to it every so often and would rewrite a part. Life would happen, and I’d come back to it and rewrite another section. More life would happen. Critical events occurred in my world that fundamentally changed the novel and the characters, and I think for the better. If I hadn’t waited for those changes to happen, the “discoveries” I’d made during the writing process wouldn’t have happened—because there was nothing yet there to uncover.

Writing is a lot like any other kind of creative work; there’s a flow state that you can hit, where things just “feel right”. The pieces fall into place and things just make sense. That’s the number one thing I love about writing: I strike a nerve and I ride it; I get to entertain myself in a wholly different world, and I discover things about the world and myself along the way. It’s possible to catch lightning in a bottle that way sometimes. But it requires patience, too. Writing, like Zen, is a finger pointing at the moon. If you’re so intent, and thus, full of tension, at the idea of catching lightning in a bottle, you’ll be like the student looking at the tip of the finger instead of gazing at the moon. And then, as Bruce Lee admonishes: “you’ll miss all the heavenly glory.”

Writing is a natural thing. And like all natural things, it happens without force. I’m not saying it’s without effort—writing anything, from novels to poetry, is extraordinarily hard. But is it ”hard” to do anything in a flow state? Whether it’s dancing, playing music, or painting—the flow state lets us forget about the world and something that would be otherwise forced and contrived just occurs. The best writing happens like when the best sleep happens: when you’re relaxed and not thinking about it.

When I wrote the novel, I had a goal of two pages a day. That was a good goal. Even though the rough draft was stewing for years, the majority of the final draft was rendered in about six months. It felt right to me at the time. It might be different for someone else. Two pages wasn’t a quota I demanded of myself, though; it was a soft quota. That is, I wouldn’t beat myself up over whether I’d written a whole chapter or just a paragraph. Sometimes I wrote more, sometimes I wrote less—it depended on what the work was asking from me that day. I wasn’t writing to a quota—I was writing to write. And that made the writing better.

For Joyce—or Wilde, apocryphal anecdote or not—the craft came first. Add a comma, then take it out. The act of adding it and taking it out again improved what he was working on in whole, even though it sounds like just taking one step forward to take one step back. Because he learned that adding a comma there wasn’t right for that work. And that simple lesson probably informed him for every word he wrote afterward.

It’d be a damn shame if I started to twist my work into a box for the sake of a personal challenge, or god forbid, to start to hate the craft because I’m not “measuring up” to some arbitrary standard. I’ve never had a written project on contract, so maybe I’ve lived in luxury so far. I make promises to myself and go public sometimes to share with others the challenges I set for myself—but that’s a tactic for reinforcement. I know I’d be more disappointed if I read something that felt like the author was writing just to be completionist. Writing for the sake of completion alone is like a bad bonsai tree. It gets twisted and warped and never truly grows.

Good writing is always honest. It doesn’t try to “measure up”. It just is. By being honest, it gets better, and its potential is maximized—whatever that potential is. Sometimes it’s a spark, sometimes it’s an explosion—and either way is okay. Because it should be what it is—no more, no less.

It’s good to set goals as creative people and see how high we can jump. Navy SEALs have that forty percent rule: when you think you’re done, you’ve only reached forty percent of your potential. But burnout is a real thing, and sometimes we can, in fact, push ourselves too far—especially when we’re trying to measure up to a set of rules rather than the inner potential of the creative work itself.

There’s a story about King David from the Old Testament, and I keep it in the back of my mind when doing anything that requires inspiration or creativity. For me, the moral of the story can be stated simply: “rules made for the sake of the mission must not impede the mission.”

The story goes that David was on a mission before he was king, and he and his soldiers were hungry. He asked the priests of the tabernacle—the ancient Jewish temple of that time—for bread. They had no fresh bread on hand, but they did have special consecrated bread that was meant to be kept in the temple for God as a kind of ritual offering. Understanding that he and his men were starving, the priest gave him the ritual bread, which only priests were allowed to eat, technically breaking the Jewish law. Centuries later, Jesus used this example to explain that the Sabbath, the day of rest, was made for the sake of humanity—humanity was not made for the sake of the Sabbath.

It’d be like if you set up a special display with fresh food, a cornucopia, and more, all for decoration, and a starving person came by and asked if they could have some food because they’re hungry. How asinine would it be to deny that person food because the decoration was more important than their satiation?

Spoiler: in this parable, the starving person is you, the creative person, and your muse.

We get caught up in our rules and goals that we often miss the point. If the point of the Sabbath is to rest, but work must be done in order to live—by all means, work. It’s an ancient prescription for avoiding burnout. But we humans have a way of taking rule abiding to the ‘nth degree—and in so doing, we ruin the spirit of the rule. The rule, ironically, becomes an impediment to us enjoying that which the rule should enable us to do. We’re getting in our own way. Lots of fundamentalists, religious and non-religious, have this problem.

Writing is like this too. There’s hard work to be done—and sometimes you just have to push on through. Books like Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art is great for this—it’s one of my favorite books on writing. It’s near and dear to my heart, along with Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones.

But forced work is work without soul, and creative work without soul is always contrived. I’d rather write one single great book and never publish another word again if that was what the craft lead me to do. Some writers only publish once, and that’s okay.

(I do think I’ve got more work than that to publish, but sometimes you have to be open to the extremes to find where you truly are. It gives a sense of perspective.)

So if an idea isn’t quite coming through, let it percolate. Sleep on it. Write it out from different angles, or don’t write on it at all, and do something different. Explore it in a different medium. Sleep on it; watch a movie. Make a sandwich and watch the birds. The brain is a magical organ that does amazing things when we’re not looking. There’s a time to take a sledgehammer to the block. There’s also a time to sit in silence with an idea, and let it slowly whisper to you what its story really is.

And when it does whisper, all you’ll need to do is listen carefully. And write.

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Photo: James Joyce

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