Monthly Archive for December, 2008

As I have mentioned before, when I started writing I was one of those writers who waited for inspiration to strike. I can remember with vivid detail each and every time that it struck, which demonstrates just how few times it happened. One such inspiration struck after an evening of far too many cups of espresso combined with red sinus pills that I had innocently taken in hopes that I would quit sneezing, sniffling and snorting through the twelve page reading of a soporific self-referential fiction by a Vietnam vet who lived in a sober-living home and whose favorite word was “haunches”. He had the word haunches more times in his tiresome piece of prose than I had semi-colons in my three page sudden fiction.

I came home buzzing the buzz that comes from excessive amounts of coffee, Sudafed , adrenaline and cortisol due to the 50-something rotund, recovering Vet’s repetitive raunchy haunchy imagery that left me a bit shell shocked. I remember exactly where I was sitting on our sofa and the amazing sense of flow I felt as I wrote, almost as if I was dictating, ( cosmology alert: I do not believe in channeling). But, it most certainly did feel as if this story came out of me fully formed. It was a story of a girl on a flight from LAX to Miami who was on her way to see her boyfriend, a middle-aged Latino singing star, and the anxiety attack she had as a result of sitting next to a morbidly obese man and the rapid fire internal monologue that occurred within her due to excessive amounts of an illegal substance she had ingested prior to boarding the airplane.

I loved this piece and in a moment of inflation I got off my haunches and sent it off to Granta. Bill Buford wrote to tell me how much he liked the piece and how he was sorry that it was too short for Granta but that he had really enjoyed it, this was the second-best rejection letter I ever received. There had been another piece that I wrote in a flash of inspiration that had inspired an enormous act of hubris, I sent it to the New Yorker. It was from that piece that I received the best rejection letter of my writing career. I got a rejection letter written to me from the New Yorker. These, my friends, are rare. I had sent pieces to them before and I always got a printed and generic slip of flat rejection that they send out to over 95% of the work they receive. I got a letter from the New Yorker in which they typed out personalized praise for my piece. I was as happy as one could be and still be rejected.

I tell you all this not to gloat, not that many people would be impressed by my a-list rejections, but rather as a means of explaining why I had no discipline as a writer. I had learned that if I just hung out and lived my life that every now and then I would be struck by inspiration and that the piece would be good enough to get a really high-quality rejection. But, my system was a very-very-very bad one. What I have to show for the ten years that I employed my inspiration method were nine pieces of writing that I was really happy with and these are not books, plays or manuscripts, but are short stories and essays.

My system of waiting for inspiration clearly did not work. I got the message when I decided I wanted to write a book after I completed my graduate work after a year of “working” which amounted to about two days of full writing and 362 days of waiting for inspiration. During this period I remember sitting in the waiting room of my dentist’s office and reading Dorthea Brande’s “Becoming a Writer. Even though the cover was pinkish, pretty and had the sort of flowery font the content was anything but. The tough-love words that Dorthea wrote were the kind of hard truth I needed to hear. Dorthea argued in definitive and authoritative tones that if you aren’t writing at least two pages a day you are not a writer. Her words hurt more than the root canal that awaited me. At the end of that year I decided that since I did not write two pages a day every day that I needed to give up the identity as a writer. It was difficult and painful decision, but it seemed the best thing to do; if I wasn’t writing I was not a writer.

It was at the strangest of places that I was born again as a writer. I found my identity as a writer and the daily discipline necessary to follow Dorthea’s instructions at the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. I had gone to D.C. to a friend’s birthday party and so as to atone for a night of too much Moroccan food, my friend and I attended services as a means to take in the majesty of the architecture in action. The sermon was on “Finding faith.” I am not a person who has faith in much so I listened to the sermon with a great deal of skepticism and with a growling and growing anticipation of the brunch that awaited us once he was done with his homily. But as I listened between growls and visions of lox and eggs dancing in my head was something that made a lot of sense to me. He said that if you want to have faith you have to put yourself in situations where faith is likely to occur. The minister who was pretty much preaching to the choir, save a few other agnostic, atheists and other non-believers who attended the National Cathedral the way tourists visit the Louvre or St. Paul’s, suggested that one should attend church, do service, develop a community and read books that have a tradition of leading one to faith. Now, I can assure you that I left that church as much of an agnostic as I when I arrived. Only, I had, because of the sermon, found faith that I could be a writer if I put myself in the right circumstances and put myself in situations where inspiration could occur. I had rarely shown up to the page or to the computer hence inspirations rarely showed up.

It was also at this time when I discovered Julia Cameron’s “The Artist Way”. I hated the exercises and did many of them in a half -ass manor and I didn’t do a whole lot of Artist’s Dates either. But I did do the morning pages and I did them every day for a year, and that was the most consistent writing I had ever done.

What are Morning Pages, you ask? They are stream of consciousness writing that are done immediately upon awaking( no newspaper, no coffee and not even a salutation to the sun). All you have to do is get up and get your pen and paper and write whatever comes into your head for three pages and no stopping for inspiration you just keep the pen moving.This writing is never supposed to be writing that you are going to turn into anything else. It is not product it is process that gets you writing product. Often my morning pages were filled with profound sentences of truth such as “I cannot wait to be done with this” or “I need coffee” or “I am tired and I hate doing this and I have a whole page more to go”. And, no, you can’t do them in the evening and you can’t type them and if you are going to use Cameron’s methods and you are blocked with some creative endeavor it is best not to break the rules with the morning pages. Just get up and write long handed for three pages every a.m. without fail and see what happens.

I did the morning pages for a year and after three months I started to have more frequent bouts of inspiration and I started to write more regularly. I had somehow through this process developed some discipline. I had learned the value of not asking myself if I had something to write about but just to sit and write even if I had nothing to write about. After a year I was writing re
gularly and I felt that I didn’t need the morning pages anymore. But, I can assure you that if I started to feel at all blocked that I absolutely would return to them.

Dorthea Brande says two pages a day, every day. Julia Cameron says three pages every morning. Carolyn See suggests three pages, Monday through Friday so it feels like a real vocation and not a mere hobby. Or, as the Las Vegas Senior citizen in my Learning Strategies class suggested, turn the timer on and write for an hour or thirty minutes. I say, pick one of these methods and do it and stick to it and do not ask yourself if you feel like writing. Don’t check to see if you have something to write about, just show up at the page and write. I promise you that if you choose one of these lengths and practices and commit to them and show up everyday and write whether you feel like it or not you will find that inspiration will occur.

I am now at the point where I need to create better limits about limiting how much I write than working on getting myself to start writing. That said, I know for sure that if I had not started with the three pages of Morning Pages and moved on to the 30 minutes and then hour timed writing I would have never-ever-ever gotten to the point of writing up to eight hours, and sometimes more, a day. I was, I assure you, the most undisciplined writer ever. I was telling a friend about this the other day and she said I sounded like an infomercial “If this can work for me it can work for anybody.” I know it sounds hokey but I assure you it’s true.