WRITERS HAVE GOOD FIGURES

What people don't realize is that writing is physical. It doesn't have to do with thought alone. It has to do with sight, smell, taste, feeling, with everything being alive and activated. The rule for writing practice of "keeping your hand moving," not stopping., actually is a way to physically break through your mental resistances and cut through the concept that writing is just about ideas and thinking. You are physically engaged in with the pen, and your hand, connected to your arm, is pouring out the record of your senses. There is no separation between the mind and body; therefore, you can break through the mind barriers to writing through the physical act of writing, just as you can believe with your mind that your hand won't stop at the wood, so you can break a board in karate.

Remember this. They are in tune, toned up, in rhythm with the hills, the highway, and can go for long stretches and many miles of paper. They move with grace in and out of many worlds.

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LISTENING

Writing, too, is ninety percent listening. You listen so deeply to the space around you that it fills you, and when you write, it pours out of you. If you can capture that reality around you, your writing needs nothing else. You don't only listen to the person speaking to you across the table, but simultaneously listen to the air, the chair, and the door. And go beyond the door. Take in the sound of the season, the sound of the color coming in through the windows. Listen to the past, future and present right where you are. Listen with your whole body, not only with your ears, but with your hands, your face, and the back of your neck.

DON'T MARRY THE FLY

A responsibility of literature is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader too will wander. The fly on the table might be part of the whole description of a restaurant. it might be appropriate to tell precisely the sandwich that it just walked over, but there is a fine line between precision and self-indulgence.

Stay on the side of precision; know your goal and stay present with it. If your mind and writing wander from it, bring them gently back. When we write, many avenues open up inside us. Don't get too far afield. Stay with the details and with your direction. Don't be self-absorbed, which eventually creates vague, muddy writing. We might really get to know the fly but forget where we are: the restaurant, the rain outside, the friend across the table. The fly is important, but it has its place. Don't ignore the fly, don't become obsessed with it. Irving Howe wrote in his introduction to Jewish American Stories that the best art almost becomes sentimental but doesn't. recognize the fly, even love it if you want, but don't marry it.

DON'T USE WRITING TO GET LOVE

Writers get confused. We think writing gives us an excuse for being alive. We forget that being alive is unconditional and that life and writing are two separate entities. Often we use writing as a way to receive notice, attention, love. "See what I wrote. I must be a good person." We are good people before we ever write a word.

WHAT ARE YOUR DEEP DREAMS?

Once you have learned to trust your own voice and allowed that creative force inside you to come out, you can direct it to write short stories, novels and poetry, do revisions, and so on. You have the basic tool to fulfill your writing dreams. But beware. This type of writing will uncover other dreams you have, too--- going to Tibet, being the first woman president of the United States, building a solar studio in New Mexico--- and they will be in black and white. it will be harder to avoid them.

SYNTAX

We think in sentences, and the way we think is the way we see. If we think in the structure subject/verb/direct-object, then that is how we form our world. By cracking open that syntax, we release energy and are able to see the world afresh and from a new angle.

Here are some examples of poems taken from Shout, Applaud, a collection of poems written at Norhaven, a residence for women who are mentally retarded. These women were never solidly indoctrinated in English-language syntax, so these poems are good examples of what can be created outside of it. Also they are fresh in another way: they are full of surprise--- because you had breakfast yesterday doesn't mean it isn't amazing to eat eggs today!

Maple Leaf

by Betty Freeman

That I dream the lady does to be young
and to be in her pretty red Christmas ball.
Her dress looks beautiful like a swan.
The swan floats with his thin white feathers
when his soft snow head
floats under to be like snow again.
Then I like to be a woman like the one,
to be with a long wing.
 

Everybody
by Shirley Nielson

I was wearing a blue 
coat.  it was cabbage and wieners.
They were big cooked wieners,
the smell was cabbage
ah delicious smell
of cabbage out not summer noise was
running water in the kitchen somewhere.

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