Making A Few Preparations, Part 2

The Journey from the Center to the Page
by Jeff Davis

(Page 4 of 4)

Many writers appreciate admiration and approval, but that motivation can consume us. Nonfiction writer Michael Stephens has admitted how, as a young writer trying to prove himself, spite and competition in his writing group fueled his young blood at St. Marks Poetry Project. Whether green or seasoned, we seek it. Nothing wrong with a little praise or ego drive, except that it can become an addiction that can steer us away from a more sustaining path. "Stop trying to get your audience to like you," writer Gerald Burns once told me and a group of other writers. Writing mainly to please someone - even an imagined audience - may sustain a writer for a while, but those exposed roots only extend so far.

When you privately ask "What am I writing for?" the ego can rest (and it's rare for our writers' egos to rest). You don't have to impress anyone. In this space, you can be more honest with yourself about what leads you to write. Recently, my father-in-law (a retired stockbroker), my wife, and I were talking about books and writers. My father-in-law said, "Well, you know, most writers publish books for one reason: to make money." My wife immediately disagreed. He looked at me and said, "Well, all right, Jeff, why do you write? When you're writing, aren't you thinking about making money?" I grinned and told him that I ask myself every morning why I write and never does "to make money" surface; otherwise, I would've stopped writing long ago. He smiled back and said, "You know, you'd make a lousy stockbroker." I didn't detail to him exactly what I write for, because sometimes the reasons are difficult to articulate, but I should have told him about my father's journal.

When I was five, my father gave me possibly the most important gift he's ever given me: one of my grandfather's datebooks that my father had used as his own daybook. It contains my father's scribbled boyhood descriptions of mowing the lawn and walking to the lake with his friends as well as such sketchy observations of my own as I saw a hobo by the tracks today. I wonder where he goes. What he sees. I want to ride a train someday. I've been riding the train of language and imagination ever since. With that journal, my father gave me the writing bug that never left my system. Fiction writer Ellen Gilchrist says there is next to "... nothing the outside world gives me in exchange for my writing that is of value to me. I do not take pleasure in other people's praise, and I don't believe their criticism."6 Would that I could always be that clear. Gilchrist knows why she writes: She loves language. For some writers, it's as good a reason as any.

So, before I write, I stand before my desk, hold my hands at my heart, close my eyes, take at least two full breaths, and quietly ask, "What am I writing for?" This gesture prepares my body, mind, and imagination before I take a leap. The answer's content and nature often depend upon my writing project. Sometimes an answer wells up in fragments and phrases: "to help others," "to tell the truth," "to hold myself together," "to figure out what I think I think and what I think I know," or often even something as vague as "to follow language's currents." Sometimes, I have to wait for several minutes, and, granted, some mornings give me little more than faint images. Yet lately, voices more urgent have surfaced in the morning: "Fight the tide of complacency" and "Do something for peace." Words may not save us, but it's worth reminding ourselves of our words' intention. Doing so gives me hope.

I take students through two important parts to setting a writing intention. Once we've listened for a few breaths to whatever rises in response to our question about what we're writing for (the first part), we clarify the simple topic or specific focus for the day's writing session (the second part). Maybe it's something direct like "concentration to finish a book's chapter" or something juicier like "wild images for a new essay." This second part does not take away from writing's magic; it gives the magic direction. Sometimes, writers choose to keep this part general and say, "I'm open to the moment." Novelists such as Milan Kundera and Norman Rush often begin drafting a novel with little more than a faint voice, a shred of dialogue, or a character whose face won't leave the writer alone. In one of my workshops in New York City, a veteran short-story writer said she rarely writes with an intention, but doing so ironically prepares "her imagination's soil" so that she can be open to whatever happens in the moment of creating. Sometimes she starts with one intention and then follows another.

Other writers tell me that making a simple twofold intention grants them more ease while writing, and one writer in Portland, Oregon, says that setting this two-part intention lifts her out of what she calls her "morning neuroses" so she can promptly move on to "writing that matters." As a writer who can get lost in distractions and digressions, I enjoy the hazardous interplay between having an intention and not knowing where the train's taking me; the intention gives my wanderings some slight direction, like the pull of my mother's voice calling years ago whenever I had strayed miles away into the woods. Remembering both my larger intention of what I'm writing for, morning after morning, and the more specific intention of a single morning's session often brings me home.

Many of the exercises in the rest of this book will offer you possible specific intentions. Take them or leave them. They're there to help you focus your imagination and your mind.

Two last words about intentions, though: First, let go of the outcome. If, after one session, or if, after a week or a month, you still haven't written what you set out to write, don't fret. The writ- ing likely took you somewhere you wouldn't have arrived had you avoided the desk altogether. On the other hand, if you do accomplish precisely what you had intended, relish it and move on. And this: Sometimes the answer about what you're writing for is right in front of you. One writer I met in a workshop in California last year said that one morning no answer was surfacing until she heard her four-year-old son's laughter in the next room. "To sustain that laughter," she said, " - that's what I'm writing my stories and essays for."

It's a little past dawn, the mountain mist rising with the sun. From the window above my desk I spot a wild turkey walking across my lawn, then two, three, soon eight baby turkeys with one adult leading and a second adult following. Like schoolchildren lined up on a field trip, the chicks are being led near the garden and beneath the oak to find their morning feed. This, I think, is as good a reason as any to rise early, put on my tattered robe, and sit at my desk: to watch hope manifested in ten awkward bodies hobbling across my lawn like words in a sentence in search of some small seeds of reassurance.

TAKE A BREATH

It can be just this simple: Do what you need to do to settle some of your inner chatter. Sit comfortably in a chair, on the floor near your desk, or stand in front of your desk. See the Appendix for seating options. I usually prefer to stand in MOUNTAIN POSE (t¯ad¯asana), my feet hip width apart, my spine long, my hands at my heart. Try it. As you breathe, focus on your lower body and feet to help ground yourself literally in your physical connection to the earth and to draw attention away from your chatty head. Chuang Tzu noted, after all, that the venerable teacher breathes with her heels.

Just breathe. Stand or sit for two minutes or so simply listening to your breath. Take a deep inhalation from the base of your belly, and a full exhalation. Do as a fiction writer in Connecticut told me she does: Close your eyes and center on your heartbeat.

When your thoughts stop whirling long enough that you can follow two full inhalations and exhalations, you're ready to set a twofold writing intention. First, ask yourself with a quiet voice, "What am I writing for?" You may remind yourself of something residing in your creative wellspring that nourishes your writing. Listen. Don't force a response. Let it bubble up.

Second, clarify a more immediate focus for your writing, a subject (for example, my grandmother, the fourth scene of Chapter Eight in my novel, fear) and/or an intention to receive insight (for example, to gain insight into what motivated my grandmother in her later years, to get to the heart of this scene's surprising conflict, to understand the complex joys of fear). Then, while you're writing, you can return to those intentions, to whatever invisible source rouses you to write.

An intention can be made in a simple or complex way. It's up to you. Regardless of your intention's intricacy, practicing a gesture such as the one described above can radically alter your writing process and connect your source or your motivation for writing to something great and still within.

Copyright © 2005 Jeff Davis

About the Author

A poet, freelance writer, and editor, Jeff Davis founded the Yoga as Muse for Authentic Writing Workshops and has taught writing for sixteen years, assisting students of all ages and from all walks of life. His work has taken him to numerous locales, including Omega at The Crossings; New York City's Om Yoga Center; and Bliss Yoga Center in Woodstock, New York, where he writes and teaches.