Today concludes a four-part series on a two-day writing workshop given by Richard Tarnas at Pacifica Graduate Institute last year.
The hardest part of the day
The hardest part of the day for the writer is that point near the beginning where you know you need to say something. The page is blank. The screen is blank. There is tremendous resistance to putting anything down; you are like Sisyphus only you can’t see the boulder or the mountain. This is where it takes a brave, self-reliant, determined act of will, or gumption, to write. It takes a choice to not do one more procrastinating thing that you must do. Just push into it; just make the mistake, get into and write the first sentence that you may not even use in the long run. Just go ahead and write it. Write the awkward sentence, the convoluted paragraph. As you’re writing, something happens after a certain amount of time has passed, and the argument begins to unfold; boldness has a certain type of grace to it. The angels come to help; clarity and creative energy start to flow.
Begin it now
In a quote often misattributed to Goethe, William Hutchinson Murray wrote:
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.
Faith only grows in darkness; it is the seed that requires the coldness and darkness of being underground that grows.
If you are young, do not rush into print
Get a lot of criticism from leaders in your field, if you think your first work is going to be really great. Let enough help and wisdom from others come to you before you publish. You want what you publish to be something you can be proud of ten years from now, without too much immaturity or inflation. We need a combination of rigor and imagination. If you can walk that tightrope, great creative work will come through.
Tarnas mentioned Taylor Mali’s, “The Impotence of Proofreading,” to illustrate (what else?) the importance of proofreading–and a good editor!
Note to conservative parents: Mali uses a variety of sexual puns to hilarious effect in this poem, but you may not want your kids around while you’re listening to it.
is it good?
How do you know something is really good? Because it is elevating. You know it’s good because you have read so much other work that is great. You are elevated by being with great works over and over again; this helps form your aesthetic judgment. You forge your judgment through wise reading in your field and in the larger cultural tradition; also you find those among your colleagues, friends, and community whom you trust to be discerning and to tell you the truth about your writing. Often it is not the best thing to give your work immediately to someone who deeply loves you, who is close to you and who can’t tell you the worth of your work.
A lot of writing comes as a result of someone else’s writing; the other person’s writing is a catalyst for you. Hillman reads widely and responds through writing to that. He writes impassioned and even irritated responses to what he reads. He once went a few years without writing and told a friend, “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to write again, because I’m not angry about anything.” Derivative means when you ape or copy another writer, not when you write originally as the result of what you read that serves as your springboard.
What role does structure play?
James Hillman wrote one of his books on scraps of paper, little notes, etc. Tarnas gets his books in bits and pieces, too, and many other writers do. Bertrand Russell wrote 3000 words and didn’t edit it; but there is some superficiality and maybe a bit of arrogance to that.
Follow your nose, your sixth sense, your playful spirit, your personal interests; go to the point of least resistance; that’s where the creative spring will push through. Often you will end with a structure that is radically different from what you imagined.
Don’t try to solve all the problems of the overall structure of your book or essay at the beginning; don’t think you’ve got to figure it all out at the beginning. It will unfold in ways that you can’t anticipate. Just pay attention to what wants to come through now, at the given moment.
Hold your structure flexibly, loosely. It will likely change with the unfolding of your book. The beauty of creativity is that on some level, the book is already completed and you’re finding your way to it. It will have solved problems that you cannot anticipate at the beginning or in the middle of it. Just go with it and trust that it will unfold. Often this means writing a sentence, a paragraph, even a whole chapter, and later you will say, “Oh! That’s where that goes!” It will be like a missing puzzle piece fitting in. There is a trust in the creative unconscious.
Writing the mundane
When you’re writing in the later part of the day, you will do different kinds of writing such as email or other correspondence. Make every bit of writing you do count. Email is a more challenging medium because it is so flat, and so difficult to convey what you mean to say. People regularly think that their email sounds friendlier than it is; there is a great deal of research showing that email is not effective in terms of communication. You have to work even more to contextualize your words and make them explicitly clear in terms of feeling tone. Pay attention to making sure that it says what you want to say as well as you can, as clearly and as precisely as possible. That discipline will make your daily writing easier, because you have been sharpening the sword.
go where the energy is
In the moment of writing, go with where the energy is. Your delight in saying something, what unfolds most readily in you is a good place to begin. It primes the pump, it gets the waters flowing. If you leave what you actually feel like doing as a writer, but then some super-ego inside you says no, you should be doing this other thing or a harder part of the task, then that could leave you stymied for hours. You may lose the magic moment of when something wanted to be said to you. This is a writer’s version of Joseph Campbell’s following your bliss. It is a kind of delight or pleasurable energy, even quite subtle. Inspiration can’t be called up on demand; the muses are extremely unpredictable. When they are present and available, don’t say, “I’d love to, but I want to do this first,” or “I’d love to, but I want to go do this instead, watch this program or go to this party.” Pay attention to that inner calling, your inner bliss. That’s why it’s also important to have your notebook at hand. The original force of creativity is at hand, so that’s when you need to write it down. You will also lose what you could have gotten had you actually written your thought down and attended to it. Something about writing it down draws forth more from that place. It’s quite a process, something like making love, like a caress. Caress the detail, the divine detail (Navokoff).
Elevate your own sense of taste by reading deeply.
The most local can convey the most universal truths; remember Faulkner.
develop the capacity to read your own work as if you are someone else; develop the capacity of the reader over your shoulder.” Envison your audience; maybe it’s a complex group of many readers of widely varying knowledge, temperament, and convictions. If you’d really like to reach most of them, your work will require a certain amount of emotional intelligence, some intellectual flexibility, and an escape from your ego-bound myopia. Broad writing requires an ability to engage in an I-Thou dialogue all the time with this invisible reader or set of readers. Each sentence is forged out of this crucible of the tension between Self and Other. You are moving from your “ascendant” position of “I” to the opposite side of the mandala, to the Other.
the pole of doubt in their own writing, so that the reader will trust you to be fair; they will trust you not to be brow-beating them or deceiving them, exaggerating or trying to put something over on them. If they see you articulating your perspective in a way that is faithful to the opposing side’s argument, it is so important to set forth the other perspective in a way that the holder of the other perspective would say, “Yes, that is just how I would state it.” Otherwise, you’re just trying to get away with something by setting up a straw man.
good or perfect writer has to anticipate what the reader wants or needs, too, and give it to them. Within each sentence and looking ahead, you have to anticipate the order in which the reader is reading your sentences. You know where you are going, but the reader does not. Readers are generally in a confused state, and you need to give them direction as you write. Lead them gently; your knowing where you are going can fool you into thinking you are being more clear than you are! You may need to re-phrase so they can follow, or else you may write a howler, a sentence that says exactly the opposite of what you intend to say.
a real turnoff for the intelligent reader. Therefore, it is especially important that you do the readers the honor of assuming that their generosity and intelligence equals your own.
Joseph Campbell once gave a lecture about initiation, and talked about Rasmussen, an explorer going across the North American continent. As he went, he met with many old shaman, and one of them told him about being taken by the village shaman and put into a tent on ice. He was put in there alone for 30 days and given only occasionally a little meat or water. He said he died many times in that 30 days and heard many things. “Sometimes I would hear the voice of the universe,” he recalled, “and it said, ‘trust the universe.’” When he came back out of that threshold, he came back with a spiritual security and a depth that he brought back to his tribe.
dissertation. There will be times when you feel you won’t make it, when you just want to put your head down on your arms on the desk and just weep, when you say, “I’m not going to be able to do this.” Every mother knows that point you come to during labor when you feel a truly inexpressible level of painful heart labor in the service of something that doesn’t seem to have any possibility of success. When the writer has a similar experience, he or she needs a source of trust that will keep them able to stick with it and push through. This is where the vertical relationship to God comes in. You have to trust something larger than yourself to help you, to carry you through. You pray to open yourself to larger resources.
He comments that a writer should maintain the idea of being with the self the way a loving parent is with a child; this is a reality when you are in the process of writing. “We have to forge ourselves as instruments that can carry the meaning of the whole,” he explained. But how do we forge ourselves as writers?
Use a thesaurus. When you know that you’re in the ballpark, but the word isn’t exactly what you had in mind, you can benefit from a thesaurus.
Campbell, David Miller, and Houston Smith); and three who were on the Princeton faculty did not. They said it was too narrative, and shouldn’t be published, “Who does this person think he is?” they asked, “We’ve never heard of him.” And, in fact, Tarnas was a nobody who had written the book from his little cabin in the redwood forest. He had little money because he had consciously chosen this writer’s life. As Nietzsche wrote, “Praise be a moderate poverty, for he who possesses less is so much the less possessed.”
and rejected as a spiritual being. When we go through that, then we are born as writers and people; gratefully dead, twice born. What dies is something that needed to die in order for birth to take place. (Here, I was reminded of when Jesus said, “Unless a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it remains alone by itself. But if it die, it bears much fruit.”)
must read, read, read. Read the great works, as many as you can. Thoreau said, “Don’t just read the Times, read the eternities.” Reading great cultural and historical works will expand the quality of your writing and deeply expand your breadth of reference and your depth of understanding.
such as Bergman, Fellini, and Trousseau. Be familiar with the works in your field that constitute the set of assumptions you’re drawing upon or want to transcend. Certainly, our task is challenging in this day and age because so much has been written and published. Aristotle could have read everything relevant in about two months-and he did. Even Descartes could read all the original sources in his lifetime, but by the time you get to where we are, you really have to depend on great scholars who write works that will mediate your access to large realms of ideas, many works, and whole traditions. Today, we depend on secondary scholarship to open up the vistas.
