Work Soft

Today is my last full day on American soil until October 21^st. I’ll be in the UK to teach at a few conferences, then to France to conduct a week-long retreat and then to Paris to meet my long-lost husband.

One of my writers, hip to my manic ways, admonished me not to work too hard on the trip. Until she said this, I hadn’t been aware of the engine of purpose revving under my hood. It thrummed with ambitious plans to teach brilliantly, document vividly, blog, finish my play, read a stack of books, have  revelatory dreams and earthshaking epiphanies, generate fresh ideas for new writing exercises, see everything on the beaten path and then see everything off the beaten path, people watch, shop, awaken my senses, run and do yoga every day, visit friends, make new friends, network  and then have the perfect two-and-a-half-years-deferred honeymoon ever in Paris. I think that’s everything… Oh, and expand my palette without expanding my fanny.

I was raised by hard working people. Blue collar, scrappy, make-do survivors. They  taught me that hard work led to redemption. It was never intimated that it led to success or wealth, mind you. Success and wealth were suspect for some reason that I’m still figuring out.

As a result, I can put in the long hours, keep on ticking. I can burn my candle end to end and back again. Working hard is easy. And as a creative person in an economy that’s reluctant to shell out for the soul-lifting art that keeps humanity on this side of the zombie apocalypse, I am compelled to burn my candle at any available end, just to hedge my bets.

Unfortunately, a steady diet of hard work can make us, well…. Hard. Muscles turn ropey, bones bear down on each other and the body hardens up. For creative people, hardening is no bueno. You don’t want the world bouncing off your shell. Maintaining a level of soft receptivity is ideal even as we put in our time at the keyboard, easel, wheel or barre.

So, what to do? Well, rather than unpending my world order with a mandate to “chill,” I’m hereby inventing the practice of Working Soft™.

To work soft is to notice and then to notice what you notice, to feel, to dream, to process, to steep in the senses, to drift on the tide of curiosity, to check in with the heart.

So, before I get on the plane, I’ll soften up. Like a sponge. No, like a wave. No, like a jellyfish. Riding the current, letting the light pour through me, colors flying out behind, everything filter through, absorbing only what nourishes me, swooshing out the rest. Is that what a jellyfish does? See there I go. I will begin my soft work by NOT Googling “jellyfish biology.”

For the next 30 days, I may or may not make any blogging noises. I might not return emails in a timely manner and when I do, I might do so irreverently. I might write or I might just muse. If I write, I might only write on gum wrappers and café receipts. I probably won’t check in with Facebook. It’s hard to know what will happen in jellyfish mode, but I’m curious.

Work like a jelly.

Legitimate Pain

Who are you to complain? It’s not all about you, you know. Oh, wait, let me call the waaambulance.

When I’m steeped in grief over the death of my lizard, it doesn’t help to think of people who have it so much worse.

“It’s not as though you lost a person.  I mean, at least you didn’t lose your mom, your husband, your brother…”

“No, I just lost my best friend.”

Judge me if you must  around the fact that my best friend’s a lizard, but devastation is devastation.

You may be halfway through a memoir about your divorce, and into your head comes that eye-rolling voice, “What are you whining about? Poor me, my marriage failed. Are you kidding? People are being tortured and blown up in war-torn countries. People are being worked to death. People are living on the streets, living with debilitating disease, dehumanizing abuse, disenfranchisement. Your troubles are so insignificant! Put that pen down and do something useful!!”

So, what do you do, then? Stick to the shallows? Keep it light? Do you go out and get yourself some real suffering to write about?

Is it possible that to compare useless? That context is all? A dismissive look from a parent can feel like torture. It can plant landmines that will blow you apart for years to come. Hell, you could break my heart with a story about how your toaster stopped working if I understand what it means. And I will definitely go to the depths with you over the death of your lizard if you really let that relationship live on the page in a way that puts me in touch with my humanity. Because suffering is suffering, and if you can’t eliminate if from the world, at least you can alleviate it by easing isolation that can accompany it. You can do this with gravity or humor, in sacred or irreverent tones, but don’t underestimate the power of letting me know through your writing that I’m not the only human being whose ever felt this and furthermore, there might be something of value in it.

If we only write when we’re certain that our suffering is truly legitimate, we’ll never write. Suffering can’t be legitimized. Someone’s always got it worse.

Storytelling isn’t about the scale of the suffering. It’s about what the suffering means, the opportunity it provides for understanding something new about this human condition, the window into another’s humanity. A therapist once said to me, addressing my outrage at having to feel all these, uch, feelings, that pain is information.

“Just like physical pain tells you not to touch a hot stove,” she said, “emotional pain is there to teach us what’s good and bad for us, what feeds us and what depletes us, what needs attention, what needs work.”

In other words, without it, we wouldn’t know what anything meant.

So, we write about it and create art from it in an attempt to share and connect over that meaning. It’s how we progress. It’s how we grow. It’s what keeps us from living in isolated darkness and confusion.

When it’s a choice between obeying your creative impulse to write about it or obeying your inner critics admonishment to suck it up… Well, I’m just not feeling the societal value of sucking it up.

So, go write!

Prompt: Launch from the sentence starter, “I suffered…” and keep your pen moving. Notice the urge to judge your pain significant or insignificant and blow right past it. Everything that occurs to you gets on the page, whether it’s “legitimate” or not, interesting or not, true or not. 6 minutes

Note: this is a good prompt to do from your character’s point of view. What have they suffered. Are they prone to find meaning in their suffering, to share it, to wallow in it, identify with it or to suck it up?

The Problem with a Problem Solving

The problem-solving rut sneaks up on me. It happens to me in a few different ways.

Scenario I: I’ve gotten my characters into some nice trouble and the resulting tension is thick. Without my noticing, my mind shifts into analyzing mode and goes to work solving all the problems. Bye, bye tension.
Scenario II: I wake up from a dream and, wonderfully, I understand the theme of what I’m writing. My mind excitedly latches onto the goal of expressing the theme and, yikes, my characters are pronouncing platitudes and proverbs in a landscape of ham-fisted symbolism.

Not a lot of stories about happy meditating people

Once my mind gloms onto a goal, the juicy tension and heat dry up into analysis, evaluation, organizing and strategizing. Images and experiences are examined for their personal growth value. Characters start verbally therapizing themselves and others, become self-actualized and happily sit down to meditate.

When you meet one of these mental ruts, and feel the urgency evaporate, check in with the senses: sights, smells, sounds, textures, temperature, tastes. This will give your mind the concrete task it seeks, while leading it away from the linear track it’s so attached to.

1. Have your character look out the nearest window and describe whatever is in view.
2. Search your character’s car, the top shelf of their closet and the back of their sock drawer.
3. Have your character talk about a smell or food they hate and how it affects them.
4. List 7 sounds your character hears every day.
5. Smell your character’s favorite bathroom products. Are they clean and antiseptic? Spicy? Herbal? Cheap? Expensive?
6. Have your character talk about the kiss they’ll never forget.

You get the idea. The senses are a direct line to emotion, memory and meaning. Draw your mind out of the problem-solving rut with something that it can dig into and things will get lively real quick.

Let me know how it goes…

Don’t Make the Writing Shy

My students complain, “I’m grinding away at the writing for hours and all I get is few lousy pages I can maybe use.” The facial expression is one of disdain, like they were given a moldy mushroom for Christmas.

Look, no matter what words we get on the page in a day’s work, they won’t live up to our soaring expectations. Still, do you want to treat those few good paragraphs like a nuisance? If you make the small gifts feel shy, why would the big gifts show up?

If I write for 3 hours and I get 4 pages of which 2 are useful, I’m grateful. If I get 10 pages of which 2 sentences are useful, I’m grateful. Sometimes those two sentences are a key that I can turn in the lock of tomorrow’s writing and open the door to a whole new room in my story.

When my niece was little, before she acquired all those critical thinking skills, she would tremble with excitement in anticipation of opening presents, then squeal with joy at every gift. Whether it was a potholder-making kit or a puppy, every gift was “Perfect!” I got great enjoyment out of giving her gifts.

Celebrate the smallest progress and be curious to see what will show up next. Make the writing feel welcome.

PROMPT: Launch from the sentence-starter, “I welcome…” and keep your pen moving for 6 minutes. No thinking. Practice being curious to see what words will show up on the page. See if you can receive them eagerly.

Jump to the Junk Book

Writing project Junk Book at the ready

One of my most important writing tools is so unassuming, it’s easy to overlook. It’s my Junk Book. I always have a Junk Book on my person, just in case. Each full-length project has its own Junk Book.

These cheap, ratty notebooks are filled with such terrible writing that I have made my husband sign a blood oath that he will incinerate them immediately should I have an untimely passing.

Without the Junk Book, I don’t know where I’d dump all of my false starts, digressions and awkward explorations. They’d just lurk around in my head, stinking up the place. The Junk Book allows me to road-test an idea before I buy into it, saving me time and precious mental electricity. I mean, I don’t feel I have a lot of either to spare. If I take the idea for a spin, really pushing my pen at top speed, I’ll know, pretty quickly whether I was just attracted to it for the shiny paint job.

I don’t like staring at a blinking cursor or a blank page. I can feel the momentum coming to a grinding halt behind a bottleneck of not-quite-right words and ideas. Sometimes there’s a good idea in there, but it’s hard to see when it’s mixing with all that other gobbledegook. If I’ve been staring for more than a few moments, it’s time to jump to the Junk Book. Everybody out! Onto the page, where I can get you sorted.

Purse Junk Book

Maybe I get a brilliant idea and then can’t move forward under the weight of my desire to express it perfectly. In the Junk Book, I’m permitted to rough it out, get it wrong, write the cave man version, explore that seemingly unrelated image that keeps insinuating itself and waste a lot less time on my way to expressing the idea well.

Or I might be immersed in writing a scene and it’s going quite well and in lumbers an ill-timed idea about a completely unrelated project. It’s a great idea, but I’m in the middle of something here! I jump to the Junk Book and pin the impertinent idea to the page in a few quick sentences. Now, I know where to find it when I’m ready. I might even hit it with a highlighter to make sure I don’t lose it in the word pile.

Same goes for intrusive thoughts about bills that need paying, errands that need running or calls that need making. I put them in the junk book the minute they arise so that they don’t keep floating back through my head with their red “urgent” flags flying. Later, when I’m finished writing, I transfer them to my to-list.

What tools do you use to keep your momentum up?

Prompt: Launch from the sentence-starter, “I’m test-driving…” and keep your pen moving for 6 minutes.

it’s just ink

Honestly, you’d think there was an ink shortage.

Why, when it’s the least efficient method possible, do writers want to do all the work in their heads?

It’s a renewable resource.

This results in endless hours of tortured staring at the blinking cursor, the blank page, the wall. Endless hours trapped inside your skull with all those mouthy inner critics. Endless hours that could be reduced to minutes if you were just willing to waste some ink. I mean, it’s just ink. There’s no shortage.  No wars are being waged over ink drilling rights.

In high school, the math teachers didn’t expect us to do the calculations in our heads. They wanted us to show our work. Yet, in English class, our papers were supposed to just pour out of us fully formed. No trying the ideas out first.

1. Think it up.
2. Write it.
3. Turn it in for a grade.

I could have grabbed a pen and noodled around. What do I know about Pilgrims? What don’t I know about them? What images come up? What memories? What would my bedtime ritual be if I was a Pilgrim? Twenty minutes of throwing some ink around on the page and I’m sure to find a surprising angle on Pilgrims.

But, it feels like a big deal, putting something in ink. Now it’s real. Someone will read it and think this is how I really write. That bully kid will steal it and put on the bulletin board, with a stick figure in a dunce cap. Nope, better to do my messy exploration on the inside.

Screw it. Why am I afraid of somebody who can’t do better than a stick figure? Better him than the bullies inside my head.

You don’t expect to dig a shiny gold necklace to out of the rock. First you have to hack out some knobby lumps of gold. You’ve got to mine or there’s nothing to refine.

When you find you’ve been staring into space for 5 minutes, or picking off the last of your nail polish, or cleaning your screen for the 3rd time today, it’s time to waste some ink and show your work on paper.

Prompt: Launch from the sentence-starter, “I’m wasting…” and keep your pen moving for 6 minutes.

Stay Curious

I was taught that the second worst thing you can be is wrong. Not knowing the answer exposes ignorance, which is a symptom of laziness, and lazy is the first worst thing you can be. The Golden Rule: If you don’t know the right answer, keep your trap shut until you do.

Perhaps this indoctrination was meant to protect me from becoming a washout, to instill initiative, to drive me to the top of the heap. Sadly, I came late to the discovery that striving to be right was not nearly as nice as opening up to understanding. In my panic to be right, I forgot, for the longest time, to be curious.

My fear of being wrong caused many a crisis in my acting days, since there is no right way to play a character. And when I tried to write my own stories, I was paralyzed.  “Is my protagonist wearing a green shirt? Should it be purple? Maybe a flower print is the right answer. “

As artists, we work with the unknown, making something from nothing, translating the invisible. The unknown has no right answers. In art, there are only different permutations that get closer or further from fulfillment. And there’s going to be a lot of getting it wrong on the way to that fulfillment. This may seem obvious, but when you’re programmed to “be right or be quiet” it can be tough to find a willingness to get it wrong.

So, I had a choice. I could be miserable or I could be curious. I could wait for the right word to come to mind, or I could get excited to see what word would appear next. I could wait until I knew what the story meant, or I could let the story lead me to next thing worth knowing.

You know the old saying, “You can be right, or you can be married.” Well, creation is a relationship. You, the artist, are in partnership with what you’re creating. Allow it to surprise you. Allow it to give you back something new and revelatory for your efforts. Be curious. Be ready to love what shows up and you’ll find your process has a lot more energy and a lot less fear and hesitation.

PROMPT: Launch from the sentence-starter, “I’m curious about…” and keep your pen moving for 6 minutes.

Care and Feeding of the Part-Wild Partner

I didn’t think twice before encouraging my husband, Chris, in his wish to go walk the Appalachian Trail for six months and write a book about it. Immediately after he left, though, things started breaking – pond pump, internet thingy, car thingy, dryer. The reality of single-handedly holding our two-person life together set in and for the first time, I thought to ask, “Um, hey, what do I get out of this deal?”

In times past, when my women friends and I gathered, we didn’t talk about the ways in which our men delighted us. We brainstormed ways to help them overcome their seemingly intractable flaws. So, years later, when I was thinking of writing a book called, Everything I Know about Relationships, I Learned from my Dog, I wasn’t too thrown when several girlfriends reacted with, “Oh, you mean dog training, but for guys? I would read that book!”

At the time, The Dog Whisperer had popularized the “alpha dog” approach to training.  In trying to imagine the marital equivalent of this, I was visited by images of 5’ 2’’ me flipping 6’ 2” Chris onto his back and towering over him with icy authority until he let go of the pizza slice, got off the couch and got started on his honey-do list.

But, that’s not the book I was thinking of writing. By then, I’d had eight years of mentorship under my Queensland Heeler mix, Al, and had been in a committed relationship with Chris for some time and the three of us had begun to develop a different system. The book I was thinking of would have chapter titles like “Take Time to Play,” “How to Ask for What you Need,” “Forgive and be Stoked,” “Say Yes to Things that Scare you,” and most importantly, “Enthusiasm and its Many Applications.”

A husband who attacks items on the honey-do list without being asked, if he exists, is a husband truly to be desired. But, is that the number one quality I want to cultivate in my man?

Back when acting was my thing, I worked for a range of directors and decided that they fell into two camps. There was the director that Alpha-dogged you with disdain and outrage at your pitiful attempts at artistry and there was the one that encouraged you to take risks, make bold choices and trust your instincts. The effect is very similar to that of the human/dog relationship. Yell at a dog, they crumple into a smaller target. Shower a dog with enthusiasm – “What a beautiful dog! What a strong dog! Good dog! Brave dog!” – they perk up, hang on your every word and will do anything for you.  Crumpled/diminished or frisky/alert? Which would you choose for your dog? Which would you choose for your sweetheart?

So, to foster your creativity, spend time with people who embolden you, who celebrate the wild part of you, the part that strives, the part that is particularly, uniquely you.  And if you are in a relationship with a creative person, see what happens if you vigorously fan their flames. See how much you care about the honey-do list when your sweetie is glowing with inspiration and filled with courage. It’s in this state that your part-wild person will give you their best and reach their fullest potential as an artist, a person and a mate.

If I have to screw in my own light bulbs for half a year, so be it. This is a six-month investment in my part-wild partner that will pay out years of marital and creative dividends.

Why Writers are so Hot

Some men go off to fight wars. Some men go off to make their fortune. Mine has gone off to find meaning.

Folks are having a hard time concealing their worry, confusion and sometimes disapproval, when they hear that my husband, Chris, has left home for six months while he hikes all 2,178 miles of the Appalachian trail.

Chris is generally known as a wild man who has a hard time holding up under many of the expectations that the world has for him, no matter how reasonable. He’s been called unconventional, combative, excitable, intense and many other adjectives that you wouldn’t use to describe Cosmopolitan magazine’s pick for husband of the year. But, disappearing into the woods for six months instead of putting nose to grindstone in the resource-challenged moments after our recession-era stint in the non-profit world… That’s taking it too far, right? Aren’t I outraged?

Actually I’m inspired, more in love with him than ever and, frankly, really turned on.

I get why money is wonderful and absolutely am interested in having great roomfuls of it. But, while money is key to a pleasant existence in the material world, nothing material matters until it has meaning. Meaning is what gives something value. Even money. It may as well be packing material until you know what it means.

Even though “meaning” is not a “legitimate” industry, we meaning makers find ways to survive while serving our calling. Sometimes survival and vocation come together in the form a of a job, such as running a theater or teaching writing. Sometimes it comes in the form of a writing gig or a book sale. But, whether or not there is compensation, we are wise to obey the creative call, for if we ignore it, there is a price to be paid, a loss of life force or a taxing of spirit.

And nothing is more attractive to me than someone in hot pursuit of meaning – whether they are driven by demons, inspiration or passion, this, to me, is the most beautiful a human can be -vivid, juicy, awake in all their senses, on fire for their vision.

So, when I found a man whose need for meaning was on par with mine, I knew I was meant to pair with him, even though we were different in just about every other way – temperament, politics, areas of expertise, physicality – we had virtually nothing in common. Well, we both liked growing vegetables, but how far is that going to get you in a relationship? And we both worked in theater, though we had very different reasons for doing so and very different ideas about how to go about it and very different notions about what it was for. But, I couldn’t resist his sensitivity to and hunger for meaning, for unlayering the moment-to-moment chaos of life and reconfiguring it to create something that would strike a resonant chord. That chord that unites all the disparate tones into a harmonic thrum connecting us all through our shared humanity.

There is nothing better than hitting that chord and if he has to walk for six month in all kinds of weather to do it, then I love him all the more for his willingness. Sometimes it can’t be done with any less effort and sacrifice than that. Sometimes life and events and relationships pile up and pack down so that unlayering is painstaking, laborious work and it calls on all of your patience and skill. But these people, and my husband is one, who lean lovingly into the task and bring all their heart and muscle to it, are the sexiest people in the world.

I want him to go on an epic quest and return to me stronger, wiser and packing treasure chests, shiploads, a heart-full of meaning which he’ll mill into story, which he’ll pin to the pages of a book, which he’ll share with those who wish to have the perspective that only he can offer. What more could I ask of my husband than that?

And besides, after the closing of the theater that he poured himself into for years and years, Chris is owed a mother of a mid-life crisis melt-down. I am thankful that it will involve hiking rather than flailing attempts at fending off mortality and rewriting history in the arms of younger women who don’t appreciate his meaning-making abilities one bit.

If you would like to say “amen” to the idea of the epic meaning-making journey and to Chris’ in particular, you might do so by going to his Kickstarter campaign and pre-purchasing his book. If you would like to follow his progress and hear his raw on-the-trail insights, you’ll want to check out his blog. I’ll send you a heads-up when it goes live sometime in the next week.

FAQ: Is Writing Public Therapy?

Is writing just a way to overshare about family traumas and display our hurts for sympathy? For many it is, sure. That’s undeniable in this age of media-borne gut spilling, nudity – emotional and otherwise – and melodrama. From Facebook rants and revelations to the sad manufacturing of shocking secrets on reality shows… It seems there are millions lining up to can their personal pain for public consumption.

It’s true that many who are attracted to writing and creating, are driven there by an assortment of personal demons. They grew up in toxic emotional environments, were bullied for their sensitivity and experienced traumas ranging from unsettling to devastating.

These people might, in their desire for acknowledgment, put their pure and unadulterated pain on public display on any number of forums. On the other had, they might, at some point, become proficient in an art form that will allow them to melt and re-forge their crummy childhoods, misadventures and miserable mistakes into something beautiful, useful, maybe even something that can heal.

Sometimes I wonder how all those, who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear, which is inherent in a human condition ~Graham Greene

Recently, I’ve had several writers come to me with the concern that what they want to write about is too dark, “I can’t subject people to this sad, difficult stuff… Can I?”

Please do.

We will follow you into the dark night of the soul. We’ll match you step for step as you plunge headlong into the inkiest shadows. Without shadow, nothing has dimension, which is why some of the darkest writing can be the most illuminating. And besides, unless we’ve been kept in a cryo-sleep chamber since birth, we’ve all accumulated some dark matter. And what is better than a story that acknowledges our vulnerabilities, bringing light and warmth to the cold, abandoned parts.

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. ~Joan Didion

Maybe you don’t want to spend time in the dark. It could be that your inner critic speaks to you of fiends and monsters. Your inner critic would not want me to remind you that princesses have to go into the woods, princes have to enter the cavern to battle the dragon and heroes have to journey to the underworld. But, all of them return with treasure.

With insight, humanity and some craft, you can hold both the dark and the light and bring across what you find in the tension that comes of that holding, acknowledging our human frailty in striving and loving.

And don’t let your inner critic shame you away from the dark, either. Yes, writing is therapeutic. It’s the most ancient of therapies. Humans have been healing themselves through story before they even found language. The pursuit of meaning is our most human trait, and writing is a very efficient way to mine meaning.

For more on this topic, here’s an article in the NYT that came out just as I was writing this: inspired partially by this article in the NYT: Why Talk Therapy Is on the Wane and Writing Workshops Are on the Rise.