OBSESSIONS

Writers end up writing about their obsessions. Things that haunt them; things they can't forget; stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released.

We are run by our compulsions. Maybe it's just me. But it seems that obsessions have power. Harness that power.

An obsession for writing is good. But then write. Don';t let it get twisted into drinking. An obsession for chocolate is not good. I know. It's unhealthy and doesn't help the world the way peace and writing do.

Carolyn Foche, a poet who won the Lamont Poetry Award for her book The Country Between Us, about El Salvador, said, "Change your innermost obsessions to become a political writer." That makes sense. You don't write about politics by thinking you should. That will become doggerel. Start caring about politics, reading about it, talking about it, and don't worry about what it will do to your writing. When it becomes as obsession, you will naturally write about it.

ORIGINAL DETAIL

Use original detail in your writing.

Be awake to the e details around you, but don't be self-conscious. "Okay. I'm at wedding.The bride has on blue. The groom is wearing a red carnation. They are serving chopped liver on doilies." Relax, enjoy the wedding, be present with an open heart. You will naturally take in your environment, and later, sitting at your desk, you will be able to recall just how it was dancing with the bride's redheaded mother, seeing the bit of red lipstick smeared on her front tooth when she smiled, and smelling her perfume mixed with perspiration.

THE POWER OF DETAIL

Our loves are at once ordinary and mythical. We live and die, age beautifully or full of wrinkles. We live and die, age beautifully or full of wrinkles. We wake in the morning, buy yellow cheese, and hope we have these magnificent hearts that pump through all sorrow and all winters we are alive on the earth. We are important and out lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn't matter.

BAKING A CAKE

In a sense this is what writing is like. You have all these ingredients, the details of your life, but just to list them is not enough. "I was born in Brooklyn. I have a mother and a father. I am female." You must add the heat and energy of your heart. This is not just any father; this is your father. The character who smoked cigars and put too much ketchup on his steak. The one you loved and hated. You can't mix the ingredients in a bowl; they have no life. You must become one with the details in love or hate; they become an extension of your body. Nabokov says, "Caress the divine details." He doesn't say, "Jostle them in in place or bang them around." Caress them, touch them tenderly. Care about what is around you. Let your whole body touch the river you are writing about, so if you call it yellow or stupid or slow, all of you is feeling it. There should be no separate you hen you are deeply engaged. Katagiri Roshi said: "When you do zazen [sitting meditation], you should be gone. So zazen does zazen. Not Steve or Barbara does zazen. This is also how you should be when you write: writing does writing. You disappear: you are simply recording the thoughts that are streaming through you.

LIVING TWICE

In a rainstorm, everyone quickly runs down the street with umbrellas, raincoats, newspapers over their heads. writers go back outside in the rain with a notebook in front of them and a pen in hand. They look at the puddles, watch them fill, watch the rain splash in them. You can say a writer practices being dumb. Only a dummy would stand out in the rain and watch a puddle. If you're smart, you get in out of the rain so you won't catch cold, and you have health insurance, in case you get sick. If you're dumb, you're more interested in the puddle than in your security and insurance or in getting to work on time.

So it is good to be a little dumb. You carry that slow person inside you who needs time; it keeps you from selling it all away. That person will need a place to go and will demand to stare into rain puddles in the rain, usually with no hat on, and to feel the drops on her scalp.

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