
Get Over Yourself And Get Writing
Writing advice blended from Zen Buddhism and a West Texas Newsroom
“I can never show what I am working on without being stopped — whether it is liked or disliked I am affected in the same way — sort of paralyzed — .” Georgia O’Keeffe
Creativity is a slippery thing — kind of like a shark, it has to keep moving. Staying in motion, as a writer, as a teacher is tremendously difficult.
About a decade ago, I spent a week of intense writing study with Natalie Goldberg in Taos, N.M. One of the simplest of her teachings, like O’Keeffe’s quote, has stayed with me. She applied three guidelines from her Zen Buddhist teacher, Dainin Katagiri Roshi to our writing practice:
Continue under all circumstances
Make positive effort for the good
Don’t be swept away by praise or criticism
I have to look at these often because I can’t seem to make them stick to my life. Natalie was talking about continuing the practice of writing under all circumstances, but it applies to anything that I’ve committed myself to doing. As a teacher, that’s meant staying focused on what I know is best practice for my students.
As a writer, it means being willing to sit down at a keyboard and tolerate writing so bad, I feel it throb in the fillings of my teeth. It means returning to that same pile of failed words every day, first thing in the morning, by myself.
No one is awake at 4:30 a.m. in the graduate dorm where I live, much less available for me to corner and force to respond to whatever I’ve written. Many mornings, I find myself stupidly surprised by the fact that writing is not only difficult and doesn’t pay, it’s also quite lonely.
The pain is magnified by my bad relationship with social media. Those platforms give me the illusion of camaraderie. As if everyone is sitting around with a cup of coffee nodding and smiling.
Social media is deadly for my writing because it’s bound me with small bursts of applause in the form of likes, shares, and retweets that I twist myself in knots to receive.
Forcing myself into the acid bath of building passable sentences from acceptable words steels me against their abrasive terribleness. It’s like learning to chew bubble gum full of broken glass.
The discipline of revision is like having to eat your own bad cooking — eventually you learn to cook well enough that you are content with your recipes. Sometimes, you get enough practice that you can offer the product of so much practice to others and they enjoy it.
Likewise, all that revision sometimes results in writing that surprises me because it clicks with readers. Those words who’ve seemed to sigh impatiently at me, waiting for me to get them to do something, sometimes get attention beyond anything I could imagine. Some get picked up by a national publication. This year, many of them held hands and created a book.
Writing practice, for me, is grounded in both Natalie’s Zen lesson, and also the West Texas pragmatism from Dan Packard, my former editor at the Amarillo Globe-News. He would catch me out on the loading dock hiding from deadlines.
“Smokin’ cigarettes and talkin’ bullshit with the boys isn’t going to get you closer to finishing that story,” he said, lighting up one of his own.
“But it sucks, Dan,” I whined. “I can’t make it work.”
“Well, here’s what you need to do then,” he said, tapping an ash. “Put your ass in the chair and get busy.”
In other words, keep writing. Continue under all circumstances.
At the paper, I learned to write through depression, anxiety, a cracked molar, and a cancer diagnosis. After a hysterectomy, I felt my body in two halves, yet deadlines were still there.
The paper’s “medical leave” was just that — something in quotation marks that might exist, yet no one had proof of it. So, I would have to keep working, filing copy from home. I attempted to type as though I were born without a spine to keep pressure off my stitches.
And I tried to make positive effort for the good.
Working with Dan taught me that even the most boilerplate kinds of writing can be important to readers. He assigned me the paper’s annual Christmas fundraiser called the “Empty Stocking.” Several reporters made fun of me for the assignment.
The series was an odd mix of the mawkish and the mundane; like Sally Struthers’ African charity commercials mixed with instructions for opening a checking account. But Dan took this assignment seriously and so I took it seriously. No lachrymose prose.
Because no one, his copy desk editors assured me, gave a rat’s ass about my precious words. What readers care about is what’s in it for them. Is it accurate? Is it clear? Did I “write tight”? He called this “smash-mouth writing.”
Lesson #2 from Dan came after I turned in a bloated feature on the business of synthesized flavors and fragrances. In news, I wrote in units called “column inches” and the shorter, the better. My feature was about 30 inches — or about half of a typical news page.
Dan shook his head, a burst of disgusted cigarette smoke framing his words:
“Look, if Jesus Christ himself were to come back today, it’d only be worth about 15 inches. You go cut that before I do.”
Taking scissors to your own work is painful. Ripping out whole sections of impressive prose feels like stripping yourself naked and going grocery shopping.
In the same way a doctor cuts away dead tissue to help the living, the writer must cut away even the most charming words if they don’t advance the piece.
The final lesson: don’t be swept away by praise or criticism first came to me from Globe-News readers. My music column was loved by three or so who took the time to praise it in a letter to the editor.
I bent over these like Gollum, rereading them to myself. All of that rereading kept me from writing, just like O’Keeffe warned. Then in one column, I criticized Alan Jackson for what I believed was a lazy song about 9/11.
People forwarded it to friends and family, which explained the death threat from Iowa, the labeling of me as a “terrorist” from someone in Oklahoma, and more demands that I be fired from people in South Texas.
Rereading them, I was convinced these readers saw the truth in a way others were too nice to tell me.
Even now, I’m seized with the compulsion to read over those old letters, those old columns. To excavate praise and criticism. Anything to keep me from sitting with the discomfort of white space.
But I’ve done this long enough that Dan’s voice is in my head, Natalie’s voice is in my head. Both say the same thing: Get over yourself and get writing.
