Writer's block, an owner's guide: Find your work and let it go

This short entry is my return from the great vacation I told you about. I was just hanging out with my visiting daughter at my home here in Southern California; a quiet time of regrouping on beaches and among mountains; a chance to inscribe a peaceful period and end a self-imposed sentence of years of multi-tasking. I’d been trying to simplify life and here at last was a break from the constant multi-tasking which prohibits doing anything thoroughly and getting into flow.

I was still writing during the vacation (but by telling you I was not going to be here regularly, I liberated myself from some “shoulds”). In fact, I was writing some items that were well received. It’s maybe not a coincidence that they were things I threw together quickly and in a good mood. I’m still getting responses to the thing about uninhibited speedwriting, which took minutes to write and whose ending was unplanned when I began.

Also appropriately, when I found time to read, I was melting into the quiet thrill of John Daido Loori’s book The Zen of Creativity. Loori is a Zen master and an often-exhibited photographer. I read it for fun, not as part of my research on writer’s block. It’s certainly not a book about writing. At one point he does say he is about to discuss writing but he never seems to get there. But he had some things to say that I would like to share.

“Ordinary life has its own rush. We feel it when, being completely present, we step out into the world. There can be a rush in simply driving a truck or bus, or digging a ditch, building a house, washing clothes, doing the dishes, but only if we don’t blanket the unknown manifestation of the moment with our preconceived notions. We just allow each event to be what it is, entering it completely.” Don’t you wonder what would happen if this master met Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi?

There was a section I wanted to summarize for you about the relationship between artist and subject. But, you know, it defies summarizing. Part of it is the importance of being with your subject, waiting while it does what subjects do: “reveal different aspects of themselves if you’re able to be patient and allow this revelation to unfold.”

For my purposes here I want to say again that just because you’re not typing it doesn’t mean you’re not writing. One secret to being truly a writer is, maybe, how would I know, in knowing the moment to crystallize what has been growing in your imagination, the moment to show it to the rest of us, when it is ready to be perfect and has not begun to fester.

He also has a lovely story about letting go of our children. “Once I got so upset that I refused to sell a photograph to a man whom (sic) I felt didn’t appreciate it… I bought the photograph myself, just to keep it out of the man’s hands. What saved me from perpetuating this torture was eventually realizing that it was painful to be so attached… I began spending each night before an exhibition just being with the photographs, sitting quietly with them. I thanked them for the teachings I received in the process of creating them, and let them go with a bow. That helped me to shift from feeling like their creator into simply being their temporary custodian.”

Once again I am coming to an unplanned ending. I had expected to tell you that this sort of thing is all very well for photographs but could not be fitted into the writing life. But, y’know, I find that I can imagine taking a half hour to say a respectful thanks to a screenplay, or raise a glass of Glenmorangie in appreciation to my Scottish Expatriate Novel five or ten years from now.

Whatever of that, it’s certainly important to be able to release our words into the wild. They tell me – I wouldn’t know – that when you sell your novel to Hollywood you have to know that it is no longer yours (that’s what “sell” means, I guess) and will be adapted by people who possibly don’t even get why you wrote it. If you can’t deal with seeing your words go beyond your control, then you need to do as I did – become a blogger, so that even years later you can go back in and tinker with what you already published.

Every time I post something here – and already I can feel that today is going to be a major case of this – every time I post something here, it’s no sooner posted than I realize how I could have expressed myself better, how much shorter the sentences and the words could have been, how I could have made the clever remarks less irritating. And then I fix it!

Responses to this article (2 responses)

Published on May 22, 2005 at 6:31 pm. Linking to this article? Thank you! The permanent address is http://www.todayiwrite.com/journal/find-your-work-and-let-it-go.html

2 Comments

Good writing is also knowing what NOT to write, knowing what to leave out, wouldn’t you say?

Comment by me — May 23, 2005 @ 4:08 pm
.. knowing when to stop.

Comment by still me — May 23, 2005 @ 4:09 pm