Writer and Poet

Many writers believe that writing is a question of discipline, of developing a practice, similar to the practice of meditation, that requires one to show up daily, at the same place, at the same time, regardless of one's difficulty (internal or external) in getting there. This is, without doubt, a beautiful approach and carries the wisdom of the great wisdom traditions.

Many writers also believe that writing is difficult, a form of suffering. Most who speak of writing in this way talk about the anguish of sitting down in front of a blank page (screen), and many say that it is the most painful, difficult thing they do.

I don't experience it this way, and when I work with writers I ask them to wonder why they do.

Why, for instance, don't they experience writing as a form of play, the sort of thing you wake up and can't wait to get to? Why doesn't writing seem to be a marvelous game, in which parts of the self, often submerged, get to emerge, gesticulate and chatter? Why don't we think of writing the way we thinking of gardening? It too involves work, regularity, care and concern, but certainly not terrible suffering on the part of the gardener.

I once gave an interview in which I said that I found writing fun. My publisher and editors warned me not to say anything like that again. Why? Did it diminish the value of the writing or of what I had to say, because I enjoyed it? Is suffering really the only experience that confers value and guarantees meaning?

When people come to me with a writer's block I teach them to play, to write whenever the impulse takes them, on the back of napkins, on envelopes, on shreds of paper you can stuff into your pockets or handbags, words and ideas that may seem silly or trivial or self-indulgent, all those things writers worry about being. It's as if to say: be what you are afraid of being and let's see what we can make of that. Why do you judge ahead of time what is only just emerging? Why not give voice to every voice that wishes to speak? You are a writer? To write is meaningful to you? Well, then, why don't you have fun with it and enjoy it?

I heard of a writer, a banker maybe, or head of a corporation, who only had little slots of ten minutes in which to write. And so he did, wherever he happened to be, whenever he could grab a moment. It turns out he was prolific and published any number of books through his work with these ten small minutes. Poetry, of course, is another matter, because it tends to come when it does, to deliver its first line or lines fully formed, to rise up from its own momentum and only turn into work after the flow or flood has been caught and confined to paper. Then, of course, there is work, or is there? Is revision a form of work, of struggle, of desperate quest for the exactly right word? Or is revision too a kind of game, a form of play, a magical, changing-partner dance between words that are given, words that are sought, words that seem right for a moment, then prove to be inadequate, words that get into place and carry the impression nothing can move or change them and then even they manage, sometimes, to give way?

Sometimes when I am writing I feel that I am sitting at the piano, playing and singing and banging out whatever comes into my head.