A MEAL YOU LOVE

If you find you are having trouble writing and nothing seems real, just write about food. it is always solid and is the one thing we all can remember about our day. I had a writing group once that just couldn't get off the ground. Every exercise ended in bland writing. Then one day I had an idea: "Okay, you have ten minutes. Write about a meal you love." The writing was vibrant, full of colorful details. No abstractions. There was energy in the room. When it comes to food, people know what they like, are definite, concrete, explicit.

Okay, so some of you may not be social. You've never eaten a good meal in your life, you're broke and don't have any friends. Well, simply begin with the last stale cheese sandwich you had in that empty apartment on First Avenue with the cockroaches floating on the top of your two day-old coffee. It's your life, begin from it.

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USE LONELINESS

When I was separated from my husband, Katagiri Russia said to me, "You should live alone. You should learn about that. It is the terminal abode.

Writing can be very lonely. who's going to read it, who cares about it? A student asked me, "Do you write for yourself or do you write for an audience?" Think of sharing your need to talk with someone else when you write. Think of sharing your need to talk with someone else when you write. Reach out of the deep chasm of loneliness and express yourself to another human being. "This is how it was for me when I lived in the Midwest." Write so they understand. Art is communication. Taste the bitterness of isolation, and from that place feel a kinship and compassion for all people who have been alone. Then in your writing lead yourself out of it by thinking of someone and wanting to express your life to him. reach out in your writing to another lonely soul. "This is how I felt when I drove across Nebraska, late August, early evening alone in my blue car."

Use loneliness. Its ache creates urgency to reconnect with the world. take that aching and use it to propel you deeper into your need for expression---to speak, to say who you are and how you care about light and rooms and lullabies.

A SENSATION OF SPACE

When you want to write in a certain form---a novel, short story, poem---read a lot of writing in that form. Watch how that form is paced. What is the first sentence?e? What makes it finished? When you read a lot in that form, it becomes imprinted inside you, so when you sit down to write, you write in that structure. For instance, if you are a poet and want to write a novel, you have to learn to write full sentences, the steady hand of setting scenes, knowing the color of the tablecloth and how the writer gets her character to move across the room to the coffeepot.

We may write three novels before we write a good one. So form is important, we should learn form, but we should also remember to fill form with life. This takes practice.

GOING HOME

We hear about people who go back to their roots. That is good, but don't get stuck in the root. There is the branch, the leaf, the flower---all reaching toward the immense sky. We are many things. In Israel looking for my "roots", I realized that while I was a Jew, I was also an American, a feminist, a writer, a Buddhist. we are products of the modern era---it is our richness and our dilemma. We are not one thing. Our roots are becoming harder o dig out. Yet they are important and the ones most easy to avoid because there is often pain embedded there---that's why we left in the first place.

So go home. Not so you can boast, "My uncle was a colonel in World War II," but so you can penetrate quietly and clearly into your own people and from that begin to understand all people and their struggles.

All writers, at some level, want to be known. That's why they speak. Here is a chance to bring your reader deeper into your heart. You can explain with deep knowledge what it means to be Catholic, a man, a southerner, a black person, a woman, a homosexual, a human being. You know it better than anyone else. In knowing who you are and writing from it, you will help the world by giving it understanding.

A STORY CIRCLE

Try calling a story circle with some friends. All you need is a candle. You don't need drugs or alcohol. Once the stories begin, they are all the enchantment you would want. Then later, on your own, write your stories down. To begin with, write like you talk, nothing fancy. This will help you get started.

WRITING MARATHONS

You don't necessarily need a class to do a marathon. I have done it for a whole day with just one other person. This is how it works: Everyone in the group agrees to commit himself or herself for the full time. Then we make up a schedule. For example, a ten-minute writing session, another ten-minute session, a fifteen-minute session, two twenty-minute sessions, and then we finish with a half-hour round of writing. So for the first session we all write for ten minutes and then go around the room and read what we have written with no comments by anyone.

It is important to spend at least a half hour alone afterward. Doing something physical and concrete is helpful. Suddenly after a marathon I become an avid dish-washer or I madly plant twelve extra rows of bean plants where the grass seed was supposed to be planted. Just last week there was a marathon at my house, and before the last student left I left I had the vacuum cleaner out, vacuuming rugs in the living room where we had all just been sitting.

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