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May 2008 
WISDOM FOR WRITERS -2-: WHAT TO DO WHEN YOUR MUSE LEAVES TOWN
AlexNoble
Wisdom for Writers – 2 -: What To Do When Your Muse Leaves Town
You want to write. You intend to write. You almost wrote something yesterday, but… You know you have worlds to say. But all you can do is stare at the blank page. Stare, stare, stare. You feel stuck, empty, useless, unworthy, ridiculous, a pretender in the world of ideas. You feel shame, guilt, despair. Nothing comes. If feels as though your Muse has left town for Mozambique, with no forwarding address and her cell phone number is no longer in service. What to do? There is a name for it, and your condition is called “Writer’s Block.”
The good news is that there is a cure. The cure takes willingness, awareness, serious martial-arts level self-discipline, and a heartfelt desire to give the gift of your words to humanity, to God, and even, if you can think this big, to the whole Universe. In other words, you have to leave your cute little ego behind and think outward to your higher purpose, your reason for being here in the first place. Start here. Be sure you are clear on why you want to do this thing called “writing” anyway. That is 90% of the battle. Spencer Johnson (The One Minute Manager) recommends writing out your purpose and goals out and putting them where you can see them. (How to Write a Best Selling Book). Trust me on this. 10% of the battle is, as one writer put it so well, “Putting the seat of your pants on the seat of the chair.” Or, we could say that 90% of the battle is having a Muse you trust, someone like Kurt Vonnegut’s sister, who was his inspiration.
Be of good cheer. There are many ways to trick yourself into writing. If you are passionate about becoming a writer, you will try all of them, find the ones that work best for you, and then start inventing your own. Writing is hard, and not for sissies. Julia Cameron (The Artist’s Way) recommends writing every morning no matter what. She calls this exercise “The Morning Pages.” Natalie Goldberg (Writing Down the Bones) teaches writing as a Zen practice, and tells her students to “Keep the hand moving across the page.” Jack Kerouac carried little notebooks with him in his pocket and took notes for later reference. These are all powerful strategies for breaking through the “I can’t” syndrome. Try them. See what works best for you.
Rilke created what he called “thing poems.” He created his own school of writing by wandering around Paris gazing intently at things, the way a writer of haiku poetry focuses on an exquisite moment in nature. “Yesterday I spent the whole morning in the Jardin des Plantes, looking at the gazelles,” Rilke wrote to his wife, Clara, on June 13, 1907. (Quoted in the essay on Rilke in Edward Hirsch’s inspiring book. Poet’s Choice).
Carry a small notebook, like Kerouac. Write every morning anything that comes to mind, as Julia Cameron recommends. Make “writing dates” with other writers and sit in a coffee house and “keep the hand moving across the page,” as Natalie Goldberg teaches. And look at the things around you deeply, with awareness, full consciousness, and love. Then, and only then, will your language become a practical magic. There are many paths into the blossoming garden of your soul. Go, now, and find the ones that work best for you. If you have not found enough dreams, as Georgia O’Keefe once said, it’s that you “haven’t dreamed enough.”
Between now and now
between what I am and you are,
the word bridge,
Entering it
you enter yourself:
the world connects
and closes like a ring
Octavio Paz
***
Alex Noble
"The Book of Wisdom for Writers"
Copyright C 2007 by Alex Noble. All rights reserved in all media.
Access: Public
Some writerly thoughts on writing:
There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein. ~Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith
So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say, and so often one regrets having marred it. ~Harold Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete, 1948
I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all. ~Richard Wright, American Hunger, 1977
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. ~Mark Twain
If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster. ~Isaac Asimov
I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork. ~Peter De Vries
If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it. ~Toni Morrison
I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top. ~English Professor (Name Unknown), Ohio University
Burt: Never was the phrase “rolling on the floor laughing” more true! These are wonderful! Absolutely classic. I know these words will be a comfort to many, including me. One of my favorites is something that was shared with me by one of my writing teachers:”A writer should never keep a loaded gun in the house.” Onward…
Fabulous stuff dear ones, nourishment for me and for the writers I work with, thank you!
I do believe one of the most terrifying things known to man/woman is the blank page.
In return I will copy a few things I've found helpful and which I use in my Diving Deeper groups - not as wonderfully hilarious as Burt's.. but.. perhaps something here to inspire.
And, who am I to speak? I have quite a big writer's block - not for blogs or bits and pieces, but I realise I'm in a kind of transition phase, a good one, but not a comfortable one. I blocked half way through a novel ( my first ) - and as I go on, with support from others and my own personal process, I realise that I need to discover the world more, the world I'm writing about… and to fill myself with it as much as my own life stories have filled me.
One simple practical thing which supports me, is to 'prepare' my writing desk the night before. Make it look inviting… and sometimes, if I'm actually not completely blocked, stop writing at a point where I'm 'in the middle' of something, so the next day I'm already juiced.
Well, here are the quotes I've found helpful:
“Do not try to see the words when you stop, just see the pictures better.”
Jack Kerouac.
”When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you anyway.”
- James Baldwin
“Uncertainty is the essential, inevitable and all-pervasive companion to your desire to make art. And tolerance for uncertainty is the prerequisite to succeeding. That’s just part of the deal.”
- David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art and Fear
”The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas – for my body does not have the same ideas I do. ”
- Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text
the next bit is very long, but one of my absolute favourites:
”A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has
found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not
started to say them.
One implication is the importance of just plain receptivity. When I write, I like to have an
interval before me when I am not likely to be interrupted. For me, this means usually the early morning, before others are awake. I get pen and paper, take a glance out of the window (often it is dark out there), and wait. It is like fishing. But I do not wait very long, for there is always a nibble–and this is where receptivity comes in. To get started I will accept anything that occurs to me. Something always occurs, of course, to any of us. We can't keep from thinking. Maybe I have to settle for an immediate impression: it's cold, or hot, or dark, or bright, or in between! Or well, the possibilities are endless. If I put down something, that
thing will help the next thing come, and I'm off. If I let the process go on, things will occur to
me that were not at all in my mind when I started. These things, odd or trivial as they may be, are somehow connected. And if I let them string out, surprising things will happen.
If I let them string out…. Along with initial receptivity, then, there is another readiness:
I must be willing to fail. If I am to keep on writing, I cannot bother to insist on high standards.
I must get into action and not let anything stop me, or even slow me much. By “standards”
I do not mean “correctness” spelling, punctuation, and so on. These details become mechanical for anyone who writes for a while. I am thinking about such matters as social significance, positive values, consistency, importance etc…. I resolutely disregard these. Something better, greater, is happening! I am following a process that leads so wildly and originally into new territory that no judgment can at the moment be made about values, significance, and so on. I am making something new, something that has not been judged before. Later others–and maybe I myself–will make judgments. Now, I am headlong to discover. Any distraction may harm the creating.
So, receptive, careless of failure, I spin out things on the page. And a wonderful freedom
comes. If something occurs to me, it is all right to accept it. It has one justification: it occurs
to me. No one else can guide me. I must follow my own weak, wandering, diffident impulses.
A strange bonus happens. At times, without my insisting on it, my writings become
coherent; the successive elements that occur to me are clearly related. They lead by themselves to new connections. Sometimes the language, even the syllables that happen along, may start a trend. Sometimes the materials alert me to something waiting in my mind, ready for sustained attention. At such times, I allow myself to be eloquent, or intentional, or for great swoops (Treacherous! Not to be trusted!) reasonable. But I do not insist on any of that; for I know that back of my activity there will be the coherence of my self, and that indulgence of my impulses will bring recurrent patterns and meanings again.
This attitude toward the process of writing creatively suggests a problem for me, in terms
of what others say. They talk about “skills” in writing. Without denying that I do have
experience, wide reading, automatic orthodoxies and maneuvers of various kinds, I still must insist that I am often baffled about what “skill” has to do with the precious little area of
confusion when I do not know what I am going to say and then I find out what I am going to
say. That precious interval I am unable to bridge by skill. What can I witness about it? It
remains mysterious, just as all of us must feel puzzled about how we are so inventive as to be able to talk along through complexities with our friends, not needing to plan what we are going to say, but never stalled for long in our confident forward progress. Skill? If so, it is the skill we all have, something we must have learned before the age of three or four.
A writer is one who has become accustomed to trusting that grace, or luck, or–skill.
Yet another attitude I find necessary: most of what I write, like most of what I say in casual
conversation, will not amount to much. Even I will realize, and even at the time, that it is not
negotiable. It will be like practice. In conversation I allow myself random remarks–in fact,
as I recall, that is the way I learned to talk–so in writing I launch many expendable efforts.
A result of this free way of writing is that I am not writing for others, mostly; they will not see
the product at all unless the activity eventuates in something that later appears to be worthy. My guide is the self, and its adventuring in the language brings about communication.”
William Stafford “A way of writing, Writing the Australian Crawl”
Sandra!
Thank you so much… These are wonderful. Yes, we ALL have those moments when we feel we cannot write another word! They say you teach that which you most want to learn, and I developed my Creative Writing Workshop as my personal curriculum for breaking through my own 'blocks' and stuck moments. This is, as you say, a universal issue, and I will be posting much more on this (in byte-size pieces) because it is one of my favorite subjects. I am a “recovering writer” in that I was completely stuck for several years. Simply could not get near my creative work. Endless business and corporate writing, but nothing remotely creative. My dear friend Larry Brody (www.tvwriter.com) helped me break out of my drought with this wonderful question: “Why do you need to write, and what is keeping you from it.?” That facilitated my breakthrough. (Larry teaches aspiring TV writers how to be real writers and write material which is about something worthwhile.)
I welcome your ongoing notes on this, and I will be sharing all the tricks and tips that have worked for me in the past, and which are working for me now. Blessings and love to you, AJN.
Smiling. I'm feeling very 'met' dear Alex. Yes I too started my Diving Deeper writing workshops as a way to support me writing.. and they worked well, for a while, the first three got me started on The Novel ( rather curiously, also a fantasy/sci-fi type thing, completely NOT what I expected to be writing). And then, well then of course the workshops started to need my full attention, and in any case, I couldn't write more than a couple of clunky lines when I tried.
I do know some of the answers to the wonderful questions Larry Brody asked you - What is keeping me from writing is partly to do with practicals: I'm on the move constantly, and rather haphazardly ( in other words, I'm not travelling for inspiration for my writing, more as a reactive process) - I do not have a home base ( looking for one) and presently more or less live in one room with my partner. I want space and silence, more than I need food and water really. And the other question, why do I need to write? Ah. That's a good one. I'm going to have to sit with this. Thank you so much for your supportive words. And most definitely I'll be delighted to share anything that might be helpful..
One is the very thing you have done right here with me, and you mention “Make “writing dates” with other writers” - I sense most writers need the company of other writers, even if it is long distance. One of my workshops spawned a writers group, they get together twice a month and share work together.. and do some writing in the group itself. And I know that going on a specific 'writing' retreat with other writers as I have just done in the UK, is really really helpful.
With much love,
Sandra
<<sigh>> Today I read a synopsis of Cormac McCarthy's The Road.
It has so many similar elements to my own (blocked) novel I almost wanted to cry. & I then think of ”The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun. “(Ecclesiastes 1:1–9)
Perhaps my response is a key my answer to the question, “Why do you need to write?”
Sandra: Yes! When I started to answer Brody's question as to “Why I want to write-NEED to write,” it was like Proust biting the madeleine…suddenly the universe cracked open. I actually started writing with the “voice” of Japanese lady named “Hiroka,” in very broken English, but I was WRITING! Ray Bradbury used to encourage writers to improvise on his plots and characters, as no two stories will ever be the same. I am about to post a story based on Julio Cortazar's Famas and Cronopios. Be of good cheer. Let the good times roll!!! Love xxx
When you are looking for words to write, meditate on it first.