How I Finally Built the Writing Habit (After 10 Years of Failure)

“There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself.” — Rainier Maria Rilke

Phase I: Seeker

When I was twenty, I took a leave of absence from college and traveled to India, to find my guru and seek spiritual enlightenment. What I was looking for was not what I found.

It was a long journey, and a story for another time. It involved three months of backpacking, buses, auto-rickshaws, a 40-hour train ride, ashrams, gurus, illicit drugs, a 400-year-old Kali temple in the jungle, tarot cards, my friend Jason, the moon, a religious experience, fever, tropical dysentery, poetry, loneliness, existential angst, and a tsunami that killed 230,000 people.

That journey ended in the cheapest guesthouse in Darjeeling, 7000 feet in the foothills of the Himalayas, when I found a book called Letters to a Young Poet by Rainier Maria Rilke. When I pulled the worn paperback from a shelf of books left by other travelers, I had never heard of Rilke or his book. But I knew he had written it for me.

I had written before I found Rilke. In high school, I wrote poems and was the editor of our school literary magazine. In my first year of college I’d taken a creative writing class with one of…