At the same time, I have been reading outside of my comfort zone - focusing on writers like Khalil Gibran and Sri Chinmoy who write spiritual poetry. My reading is focused on two things: what are they saying and how are they saying it? And then how does that translate that to my own writing?

There are a few things that seem clear to me about this process. First, an authentic spiritual poetry is a natural outflowing from an authentic spiritual practice. In fact, I think the writing is most clear and true when it is springs from a moment of prayer or meditation.

I know that in my own present experience, my morning prayer time seems to evolve gently and naturally to writing. The attention of prayer and the intelligence and compassion that are awakened seem achieve a real flowering in the actual writing. The process of writing becomes an extension of the prayer itself.

I know a lot of writers for whom that is the case, by the way. I’m not unique and I don’t think the more popular writers of spiritual poetry are either. We enter the space of prayer – which is a space of creation – and our writing blossoms there.

But that is a separate issue from whether the final product, the poem itself,  is good or helpful or whatever (as I have tried to work out a bit in this post). It is easy to say for example that we ought to love our enemies. Anybody can write that – if you have some basic facility with language you can probably craft a twenty-line poem about this ancient teaching. But if you aren’t living it – and most of us are not – than what is our poem about?

Often, when I look back at what I wrote in the morning prayer hours, I find myself wondering how much of it is simply repeating the work of Tara Singh and Krishnamurti and Helen Schucman and so forth. I talk about the “new” but a lot of the work is pretty clearly a reworking of what is familar.

Do we have to be enlightened to write spiritual poetry?

I think the answer is no – so long as we are capable of rigorous honesty. Sometimes my poetry is akin to preaching – I am making broad statements and drawing conclusions and all of that and it has little to do with my actual experience. That writing loses its energy pretty quickly – and I don’t share it because it really is just egoic and repetitive.

On the other hand, when I talk about my experience of struggling – of stumbling beside Jesus, of hearing the Buddha mumble in my ear – that sort of thing – then the poetry begins to acquire some solidity. It’s important for me to give it some space. I like to write without deciding in advance what’s going to be said – and I absolutely don’t believe in editing as that first draft is coming out – but after a while, it’s helpful to go back and give it a look.

I ask myself: do I know this for a fact based on own spiritual experience or am I just repeating what somebody else said?

If it’s somebody else’s ideas – if it is borrowed wisdom – then I put it aside.

But if it reflects my own experience – my own learning – then I keep at it. I tweak it. I let it suggest other poems, other writing processes. Good writing always seems to inspire more writing. It is as if it longs to be joined or – perhaps better to say – it longs to continue creating.

As I said earlier, writing in this way tends to fall outside the realm of what I consider comfortable. But it’s good to be in a vulnerable place, even though it can be sort of rough going. It’s important to keep in mind that not everything needs to be shared right away – or ever shared at all. Especially in this sort of creating, it seems to me that some of the work is done simply that it might be done. We are edifying ourselves.

Indeed, that’s the final aspect of this that strikes me as important. Are we writing these poems because we feel called to write them? Or are we envisioning an audience? Do we see ourselves as gurus of some sort – making a living out in the world, having people feed into our egos, our idea of what constitutes a spiritual giant?

Or, rather, are we simply aware of ourselves as vessels or channels – humbe to be sure – through which the divine extends its light?

I submit that we long to be the latter and the impulse to the former is what clouds it. Let the light in, if you can. It’s okay to make mistakes. That kind of light doesn’t leave.

I’m a big believer in writing as process. In fact, the older I get and the more writing I write, the more I believe that the process of writing – of seeing words from the welter of feeling through the furnace of intellect to the page or screen – is more important than what we do with the finished product. Indeed, to think of writing as ever being “finished” is perhaps to misunderstand its real value and importance. Writing – as product – appears to be finished, formalized and beyond alteration, but its existence is always conditional upon the process of reading.

In a way, writing is always in motion. It is always moving. And to that extent, it is never as private or personal as we would like to think.

We tend to write with an towards what is created or made – we like the artifact. The finished poem or story. The produced play or published novel. But what happens if we begin to focus as much on writing as process? And let go of the inclination to give supremacy to what that process makes?

I would gently argue that to do so would be to engage writing – and Stein – in an authentic way. Even as we imagine we are making something – the way a painter makes a painting or a carpenter a house – we are really simply entering a broader movement, a sort of dialogue, in which our own words become part and parcel of a larger stream. It’s not to denigrate the form absolutely, nor to say that we shouldn’t pay attention to form. We should. But we should also keep in mind the movement behind the form. That movement – which gives the form its solidity, such as it has solidity – is what energizes the writing.

One of the consequences of approaching writing this way is that we begin to realize that all writing is writing – not just the writing that we intend will assume some important finished form and take some place in the world. Thus, even an email is writing. Even the notes we make for grocery shopping is writing. And as such, it is also art. It is a chance to practice our craft, deepen our understanding, broaden the cultural dialogue.

What would happen if every time you wrote an email you brought to it the same energy you bring to creating your masterpiece? What if that email is your masterpiece? Why not?

I am saying that once we identify as writers – once we make that choice - then every word we write – every sentence, every paragraph, every ditty – is writing. We are always writing writing. In truth, writing merits no less.

Sometimes, getting into the guts of the craft itself – pulling them out, laying them flat in the light – can make clear to us what we are doing and why. While most students resist the exercise, they almost uniformly come out out of it grateful and clarified, if not inspired.

Nor is this just an exercise in how to defeat writer’s block. That’s a real problem and it’s a serious one, but it’s not quite the golem it’s made out to be. No, I am suggesting that writing about the craft of writing can help you better understand why you bother with this frustrating and beautiful and mysterious process. It can help elucidate why you sometimes stumble and why sometimes it’s like you write with all the gods and goddesses of literature at your back. It can deepen you as an artist in a helpful way.

Lots of writers do this, by the way. The book shelves are full of professional writers who penned a how-to manual. It’s a lucrative field. And some of those books are amazing and some are so so and some are downright useless.

You aren’t – right now – competing with any of them. You aren’t trying to help anybody but yourself. You aren’t trying to direct the light of truth on any writer’s process but your own.

I really believe you have to keep it that simple when you start. I really do. Writing about writing seems to require some space. You have to be able to stay vulnerable. You have to be open to surprise and insight, neither of which are always felt as positive. You have to make a little space and just start. Give yourself thirty minutes or an hour. That’s enough.

What should you write about? How should you start?

I often suggest that people try to communicate with their muse. Someone – John Berryman perhaps – encouraged his students to drop to their knees and pray to their muse. I say just engage with it. What prayer could you write that would evoke it? What do its living quarters look like? What are its obsessions? Can you pen a dialogue in which it takes one side and you – as if you are separate from it – another?

Are you separate from it?

You might talk about how writing annoys you. Put down at the top of the page a good title – Top Ten Reasons Writing Really Sucks or Mama Don’t Let Your Children Grow Up To Be Writers – and go for it. Have fun. Don’t be yourself. Take on another identity. Shift identities halfway through each sentence. Why not?

What if you learned that civilization was going to end in half an hour and all that would survive on the subject of communication is what you write before the next big bang? What would you say? How would you say it?

All of that is simply writing about writing. And when we do it, we often begin to understand ourselves better – as artists, yes, but also as people. We get closer to our passions, our obsessions, our interior maps, our spiritual rules. Often, we aren’t even aware these things exist – or we know they exist but we rarely encounter them. And so making contact with them is a sort of healing, a sort of way of getting right with ourselves as writers.

This site began a few years ago for no other reason than that I wanted to create a space in which I could write about writing. For a while I had ideas it would be a clearing ground for my teaching creative (and other types of) writing projects, but that has sort of drifted away. In its place is simply a ground on which I can explore the impulse to create and the specific form it most often takes for me. It’s fun and more than that, it’s helpful. What else can we ask for?

Writing is one thing; publication another. The former is in the nature of a relationship; the latter, a deal. Moving from one to the other has always been challenging to me. Clarity is rare and confusion abounds. Yet it remains a ground – a conflict, perhaps – , the navigation of which remains essential. We write to be read, the one act joined to the other in a sort of circle. And so I come back to it, over and over, writing writing (as Gertrude Stein put it) and offering it up – some of it, sometimes – to be read. It pleases. And it rankles, too. Perhaps there is no answer.

Emily Dickinson is, as almost always, instructive. She was forced, more or less, to consider the question from a garret (both internal and external) that her immediate society could not – perhaps would not – comprehend. Choice in the matter was simplified, resulting in a depth of coherence largely absent for most writers.

Publication – is the Auction
of the Mind of Man -
Poverty – be justifying
for so foul a thing

Auction would likely have had a particularly troubling resonance for someone as well-read as Dickinson. She came of age in a country that was coming to terms – in a very public and violent way – with its habit of auctioning off human beings. It was not merely that one’s focus was entirely pecuniary. The whole movement – the whole process – was evil.

Thus, the inclination to offer up one’s writing to the public was, at the outset, a dubious enterprise. It reflected not only possible poor judgment, but collaboration with that which was broken – horribly broken – in human nature and thus culture.

Dickinson rarely saw life by halves. She passed beyond the shades of gray quite quickly and rarely looked back. To publish was to compromise an essential goodness. There was no middle ground.

We – would rather
From Our Garret go
White – unto the White Creator -
Than invest – Our Snow -

Notice the royal plural! Dickinson is assuming – literally – the mantle of divine right. The poet is not merely another tradesman or craftsman – producing flour, say, or a good pair of shoes – but is instead of a higher order. In that realm, one’s obligations are perhaps less susceptible to compromise. Or maybe the consequences of settling for a little of this and a little of that are greater. In either case, she will not do it. The price is simply too high.

Indeed, even as Dickinson portrays the poet as on par with Queens (a favorite trope of hers to be sure) of old, she does not neglect the greater – the higher – power to which even royalty answers.

Thought belong to Him who gave it -
Then – to Him Who bear
It’s Corporeal illustration -

The poem – the writing – is not ours to give. It comes from God – from the divine – and we are simply the vessel in which it assumes form. Credit where credit is due means that the poet – the writer – cannot do other than heed that voice which, energetic and alive in them, does not begin in them. We may be, as Dickinson suggests in the fourth stanza “the Merchant/of the Heavenly Grace” but that does not translate into unfettered right to distribute our creation – our “Snow,” as it were – far and wide.

Dickinson ends her poem on a note close to where she began it. She calls on writers – artists generally, perhaps – to “reduce no Human Spirit/To Disgrace of Price – ” Thought cannot be sold any more ethically or morally than a human being can. We must steer clear of auctions altogether. We must tend to the “Royal Air” – the inspiration – without supposing that its distribution is any less guided. In other words, we might infer that our work will find its audience without effort on our part. Dissemination – like the original creation itself – remains within the purview of the “White Creator.”

Dickinson’s own life – unwittingly – is powerful testament. She did not publish during her lifetime and directed that her work be destroyed. We are able to read her because forces outside of her – her sister, Lavinia, and whatever drove her in those days and weeks after Dickinson’s death – insisted on it. Emily Dickinson herself did not. Indeed, when she met her Creator, she could say in all sincerity that she had not invested her snow.

Easy for Dickinson, perhaps. But what are we to do with all of this? After all, Dickinson did not write poem #788 until after it was clear that the marketplace was not amenable to her work. She tried to publish, was found more or less wanting by the editorial powers that be, and so withdrew from the effort. A cynic might compare her to a child who, discovering that her playmates are not willing to play ball on her terms, takes the ball and goes home.

Perhaps. But I am less interested in holding Dickinson to some theoretical ideal than grappling with her expression of those ideals. We can say that she only applied them to her own work via stern – even unjust – necessity, but she did apply them. Can we do the same? And if we can, what exactly does that mean?

Dickinson is talking about attention in this poem – a sort of deep and sustained attention to the creative process. This is not merely about the poem – although that is the form in which this attention was brought to its zenith for Dickinson – but to living itself. Dickinson understood the creative process was deeper and more profound than the simple arrangement of words on a page. When she wrote, she was engaging the cosmos on terms she did not set but only observed and honored. I think at times this was confusing and mystifying to her; at other times, it electrified her.

This sort of attention is a gift in some people – Dickinson, say. Maybe Mozart too. For the rest of us, it is a discipline. It is a conscious choice to pay attention to the creative process and then to nurture that attention. To sustain it and stay with it. It is not intellectual. When you are out walking and you come upon a snake, your whole body is brought to attention – the intensity of your awareness permeates every level of your being. Dickinson lived in that space – or intimate familiarity with it – all her life. So that is the model.

When we are there – even when we simply aspire to be there – we are leaving behind those impulses that would compromise what is sacred, that would sell what is holy. If we follow our creative impulse – maintain a heightened awareness of it – we see that its roots, or ground, is not in the self that we think we are, or that we show the world. Its origins are broader than that. The currents from which the urge to write – to create – arise swirl outside of time and beyond the psychologically-bounded self.

As those depths give rise to language, so too they give rise to what we ought to do with that language. I am not suggesting it is as clear as bushes burning on the roadside from which dulcet voices emerge. It is not a sort of Heavenly blackboard on which the mighty finger chalks instruction. It is more in the nature of instinct and intuition. Offer up – publish – what we write? I think so. I think Dickinson would agree, on the condition that we be assured the directive is not the vain self that wants glory or any other trapping that accrues to the psychological self rattling in its temporary physical container that guides the publishing.

Write. Listen. Be attentive. Share. Be like the Queen who, seeing the Royal air for what it was, gave herself to its corporeal illustration and trusted the extension to that which had – in truth – created it.

Yes, yes. There is a bit of drama in all that. Listen to the muse or die! Perhaps it is not so stark. But sooner or later, all writers have the experience of watching the words wander off on their own. You are writing a love story about two women reconnecting in the small rural town where they grew up and all of a sudden a long distance trucker shows up singing Charlie Daniels songs and bragging about his hunting conquests.

Or maybe it’s more subtle. You set up some boundaries – each piece will have five paragraphs and each paragraph will be comprised of five sentences. And you hum along like that for a day or two or a year and then bam! Suddenly the pieces demand not sentences but lines. And they want a couplet at the end to boot.

Can you roll with that?

I think if we are going to make it as writers – and by necessary extension, human beings who are coherent and happy and helpful – then we are going to have to be able to roll that way. It’s hard, I know. I always want control of the writing and to some degree that’s necessary. But the writing has its own agenda and when I deny that, the writing just doesn’t have the same energy. It’s not as fulfilling in the creation stage and has little or no resonance in the sharing-with-others stage.

Sometimes the difference is technical. If you write poetry for twenty years then you are going to develop some facility. You are going to be able to sit down and crank out a poem. But will it have depth? Will it stand up to many readings? Crack open any literary journal and most of what we read is proficient but boring. It doesn’t change our lives. Emily Dickinson wrote Wild Nights and includes that lovely phrase “rowing in Eden” and all of history and much of eternity is immediately present. You can’t plan that. You can’t get there by reason and logic. You get there by faith.

Part of what I am saying here is that we have to be leapers. When we come to what seems to be an abyss it’s okay to pause. That’s understandable. But we have to see that our pause can become interminable. We start to measure the abyss – how deep is it? How broad? We begin to research the history – who has been here before? What did they do? We design some bridges and maybe a flying machine.

But the writer has to leap. She has to just step forward and learn that she can float or fly or that falling isn’t a problem because great winds are going to lift her before she hits the bottom. That’s the faith part and it’s also the courage part. You can’t have faith without some element of courage. This isn’t about being macho. You can shake and tremble and quaver as you prepare to leap, but you still leap. You still jump.

Look for those moments in your writing where you start to feel the writing pull away. Are you resisting? Don’t rationalize here, just feel. Can you trust the writing for a few sentences? For an hour? Can you give it the space to take you where it wants to go? You can always turn back if that makes more sense.

I said earlier that sooner or later every writer has the experience of their writing acquiring a mind of its own. That happens. But what also happens is that we learn – if we are faithful and if we keep coming back to the process – that the writing knows something we don’t and that it can teach us. I am saying that the writing may be healthier and wiser and more loving than we know – maybe even more than we can imagine. And when we listen to it – when we follow it – then we are going to become better partners and better friends and better lovers and, yes, better writers.

Writing is a solitary activity, a fact that I think is given insufficient thrift in a lot of contemporary dialogue about writing communties and programs and so forth. The truth is, even when we are ensconced in a high-energy writing group, we are always alone when we turn to the blank page. It is our mind and our voice that fills it.

I understand all the romantic – and not inaccurate – emphasis that our voices are not really our own. That they are in fact composites of all the places we have lived, all the work we have read, all the people with whom we have shared our lives. When we write, all those voices stream through our own. Writing is communal, damn it!

Well, sort of. It’s true, for example, that when I write about spirituality, my father’s voice is always nearby. I learned a great deal about the spirit and about faith with him, and it is natural that his elocution and so forth should filter into my own voice.

But he is not the one who brings that voice to bear. He is not the one who chooses this word instead of that one. He is not the one who decides when and how to rewrite. He is not the one who says, this works and this does not.

I am not disparaging – at all – the importance of allies when it comes to writing. And I don’t think it matters if you are a poet or a novelist or a speechwriter for a well-known politician. It’s good to have a friend who knows the craft – and even better if they know a bit about you and your struggles and whims and all of that. You think car mechanics don’t check in with each other from time to time? Of course writers should do this.

But having allies is a far cry from having a community. Communities can be problematic because they have their own needs. I have been part of projects that sought to being artists together and ended up crashing and burning because nobody could agree on the bylaws. Who needs that?

My time is precious – I have a family to raise, classes to teach, extensive reading lists to wade through before I die (I’m going to need at least three lifetimes to get through my current list). As a result, in order to ensure that I have time to devote to writing – time that includes meditation, physical writing, reading, reflecting, editing and so forth – I have to be disciplined about where my time goes.

One of the things that I have chosen to cut back on in recent years is community.

Yes, I cultivate friendships. There are people who will respond instantly if I ask for help – a critical read, a cup of tea and a pep talk, a vigrorous debate about whether Auden was write to censor his beautiful provocative poem September 1, 1939. I need that and I value that. And for those friend, I reciprocate without question. Those relationships are very much at the heart of my writing practice. I could not do this work without them.

And yet, I have avoided those larger communities that bring with them complicated questions of how to balance competing needs of majorities and minorities, this mode of writing vs. that, who is bringing the snacks to the next meeting, who is volunteering too much and who isn’t volunteering enough, and how are we going to raise funds to hire a lawyer and on and on and on. I am not saying those institutions can’t be helpful – they can and are – but I am saying that they are not for me.

I realize that in saying that I will offend some people. Communal work undertaken on behalf of artists benefits all artists. I think there is some truth to that. But ultimately, we are responsible for our craft. We are responsible for our right relationship to it. And we must be faithful. Art demands that of us.

If you are called to build community and partake of community – be it a large writing group, a 501(c)(3) that benefits local artists, a residency program, or what have you – then great. You should go for it. If it makes your art thrive, then do it. But if you need quiet – if you need simplicity – and if you need time, don’t be afraid to go for that, either. You are allowed to cultivate solitude. You are allowed to be alone. You are allowed to be the writer you are called to be.

My point in all of this? I think writers benefit from being busy – I think writing (and rewriting) every day matters. I think it matters a lot.

I also think that you have to stretch your skills a bit – you have to get outside of your comfort zone. For example, I don’t really enjoy writing marketing copy. Sitting down with business owners, discussing their ideas and goals, and then churning out some commercial zingers designed to make them more money . . . it doesn’t excite me. Never has. I do it from time to time because writing is a significant part of how I earn a living. But I don’t love it.

And yet, commercial writing – copywriting – is certainly not without its challenges. You really need to please two audiences: the person who hired you and who has articulated a vision for you, and then for their customers. You don’t have a lot of space generally in which to strut your stuff: most of the copywriting I have done is brief and to the point. Words count. Sentence structure may be compromised. It takes skill to do that well.

It also takes some discretion – and some maturity. When I was growing up as a writer, I always insisted on my writerly prerogative. You know, my poem has to repeat “wild nights” fifteen times per stanza because I’m in love with Emily Dickinson and look what she did with repetition. You know? But you realize – especially when you are selling your writing – that you can’t always be so selfish (that really is the word). You have to compromise. And so another challenge in writing local and national businesses is: can you bring all your talent and skill to bear even though you’re not personally excited?

I’m not suggesting you work for somebody you don’t respect. Not at all. I’m simply pointing out that being busy – and doing writing that falls outside your personal understanding of who and what you are as a writer – can be very fruitful. When you come back to the projects that really inspire you, you’re going to be a little stronger and a lot more grateful. That’s a good thing.

I used to think writing was like weight-training: you had to do it consistently and all of that. But these days I tend to think of it more in terms of an old water pump. If you use it every day, it’ll be there when you need it. Not everything we write is beautiful and inspired. Not all of it feels as if just flowed down from Heaven. That’s okay. But sometimes that writing does happen – and it’s nice when it does to just be able to turn the writing switch to on and know the mechanics are going to be there. Having many types of writing projects – creative and otherwise – helps you keep that pump primed.

Finally, maintaining a bevy of writing projects helps to keep boredom at bay. That is how it works for me anyway. My attention span is not the longest and so it’s good when I can move between writing a poem, say, and a journal entry, and a blog post, and an artist profile for the local daily. Sometimes deadlines and so forth drive the writing, but usually I can drift between my different pieces of writing and they are all better off for it. As is, importantly, my piece of mind.

I hate posts about writing that basically scream “write! write!” but sometimes it’s the truth. Writers write. It doesn’t matter if it’s the so-called great American novel or the label for a can of soup. You’re a wordspinner, right? So get out there and do it – as often as you can for as long as you can.

First, you have to make a commitment to journal writing as its own form. If you’re brainstorming plot points for your novel, creating back stories for your characters, jotting down lines for future songs or poems, then you’re not journaling. It’s not that a journal can’t be about writing – it can and for writers it sometimes should be – but that the journal isn’t just a proving ground for other projects. It is its own thing. You have to be clear about this.

Along those lines, you also need to relinquish the idea that what goes into the journal is going to be published. We might paraphrase the now infamous commercial and say that what goes into the journal, stays in the journal. Yes, yes. You might be famous someday and legions of aspiring literary writers will read your journals, scouring them for this and that. But before you get there, you are here. And here, you should accept that writing in a journal is a sort of private dialogue. It is very close to the interior.

Of course, we live in an age when a lot of what used to pass for private writing is public and that’s okay. Obviously if you want to publish your journal, you can. It’s just that if you do, it is a different experience. The creating of it will be different. Not better or worse, just different.

I need a private journal. One reason I need it is that much of my writing is public and having a space that belongs solely to me is critical. It’s almost like going into a private room and taking a deep breath. The writing in my journals is not especially interesting – nor am I conscious so much about form and style and all of that. Indeed, sometimes it’s like I’m just jotting down a few details about the weather and what else I’m writing. But there is some relief inherent in that which I believe is connected to the simple fact that it is writing for me. I am both creator and audience. The internal editor – that necessary but sometimes jarring voice – takes a nap. It’s quite and I like that.

On the other hand, there are times when I have needed the journal to perform differently. Not because I’m taking it public but because I need that private space to sustain me and nuture me with a bit more intensity. Does that make sense? It’s the difference between a quiet hour at home with tea and a three-day retreat to a Zen center somewhere. You know what I mean? And when that happens, it’s often not enough to just write a lot about the weather. Nor am I always into navel-gazing that sometimes characterize my – and maybe yours too – journal writing.

No, in those situations I have to get creative. What I do most often is play games with either author or audience. Now remember: I am both. In my journal, there isn’t anybody else. And so when I start putting on and taking off masks, there’s a kind of psychological dance that can be a little wierd if you look at it too closely. So don’t. Find what works – what gets the words flowing – and stick with it. Always trust that part of you that knows how to keep the writing in motion.

A few years ago I had a great experience writing my journal for the maple tree in our front lawn. I just imagined what a tree thinks about – what it wonders about the inside of the house. What it asks itself when the people who pass beneath it day after day disappear for hours on end. You know? And so I began to talk about my life in a way that I thought this tree might appreciate or find interesting.

Similarly, last year I kept a journal for a few months in which I had a rule: every entry had to focus on a stone. Now, I collect stones and am obsessed with them so it was a little easier for me than it might be for others. But every day I would write about a rock – one I had seen on the morning walk, one I have carried with me for years on end, stones I admire but don’t possess and so forth. The rock was the ground of the writing. Sometimes I wrote in the voice of the rock. Sometimes I talked to the rock (as I had talked to the tree) and sometimes I simply wrote around the word rock.

Sometimes we need to move our brain away from what we’re writing. We need to get off of our ideas about what needs to be said, how it should be said and so forth. It seems to unleash a deeper and more wide-ranging creativity. And that, in turn, gracefully lifts us sooner or later.

If you are struggling with your journal – looking for new ideas to deepen it or empower it or whatever – play around with the mask that the journalist wears. Or the mask the reader wears. Write letters to the tree that became the paper that became your journal. How would a cloud look at your so-called problems? What if every entry – no matter what else it talks about – has to also meditate on a certain color? What if every entry has to mimic the linquistic tenor of another era?

Challenge yourself. There is nothing arbitrary. Set up a project and stick with it for a couple of weeks. Stick with it for a month. Your journal will open and expand. New space will be created. And you will be altered – elevated – as well.

And the answer is a variation of Einsteins’s comments about genius (here paraphrased): it’s one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. The hard workers will trump the lazy genius every time. In the race for writing excellence, beware the turtles!

A long time ago, when I was coming of age as a writer, somebody – I believe it was Richard Hugo – said that writing wasn’t so much about big ideas or anything like that. It wasn’t even really a question of strong language skills. Rather, it had to do with some intangible qualities, some of which would only show up over time. I scoffed at that then, because I was deeply invested in being a genius. But I have come to see that it is true.

There is no doubt that such a thing as raw writing skill exists. Some people are naturally good with the written word. We have all met these people and read their work. Every time I teach a class, whether it is adults or children, there is always at least one student who – regardless of the fact that they don’t have a lot of experience – has a natural gift for making writing flow and sing and hold the attention of those who encounter it. You can’t fake that and you can’t manufacture it.

But it can only take you part of the way. It’s good to have an endless supply of clay, but you still have to practice shaping it. You still have to study those who came before you – the traditions in which they worked, the advances they made, the ideas they put forth. You still have to figure out how to handle the various tools. You still have to learn how to make hard choices – what to leave in and what to leave out. Or – hardest of all – how to structure your life to accommodate your art.

Doing all of that takes maturity. And by maturity I mean the ability to reflect on past experience and learn from it. I mean the ability to think quickly, recognize insight and act on it before the internal editor/judge butts in. I mean the ability to show up day after day, week after week, month after month and year after year and work the lines and sentences. You have to persevere – both when the writing is hot and fluid and when it’s stale and stagnant. You have to know the difference between fluid and stagnant. It is as much a spiritual practice as anything else.

On some level, what I have referred to as “mature” can also be understood as “human.” Indeed, I think the problem with focusing on genius is that it separates us from being human. We begin to think we’re special – as if we are the only ones who feel things deeply, long to express ourselves, admire craft, believe in a better world and so forth. Writing gets really interesting – and fun and life-changing – when we stop using it to keep the world at bay. Inclusivity – radical inclusivity – is what saves the work and, ultimately, us.

What do I mean by curiosity? I don’t just mean curiosity about how to write, although that helps. Writing is a craft and the more attention you pay to the details both large and small, the better your writing is going to be. I also don’t mean curiosity in the sense of a kitten who can’t stop batting a ball of yarn around the floor. It’s good to pay attention to life and find aspects of it fascinating. But the curiosity that sustains your work over a lifetime is deeper than that. It has to be.

I am really thinking about a curiosity that sees the surface and longs to know why it is the way it is. A writer watches relationships, for example – maybe his or her parents. Maybe his or her marriage. Or a close friendship. Maybe it’s a relationship between siblings, or close friends, or a dog and a person. Or a horse. And the relationship is fascinating and full of details. We all know that. One partner brings this and that baggage to the relationship and the other party brings another set. There are environmental influences and cultural influences. It’s a big beautiful melange.

Writers get into that – they see the details. The habit someone has of peeking out the window when they wake up each morning. A certain song that a man hums when he is happy. How a certain slant of light can reduce a person to tears for no clear reason. And so forth. Your writing is full of those details. It is built on those details. You pay attention and you build up this big bank of images and ideas and when your story begins and as you write and rewrite it you draw on that bank. It informs your work.

But it’s not enough. For all of their importance, those details are merely the surface. For all of their capacity to fascinate us and hold our attention and make us forget the tedium and dreck of our own lives, they are simply a shimmering surface.

Writers – the ones that we remember, the ones that we turn to over and over – go beneath the surface.

And it’s hard. Because that’s where the monsters are! There there be dragons! There are writers who go so deep – or drop so fast – that they never come back up. Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton left poems but paid with their lives. Emily Dickinson survived her interior journey but it burned her out – her poety was never so strong after 1864 or 65. It’s hard work and it can be dangerous work. We aren’t supposed to take it lightly.

Really, we are trying to make connections. It is important, for example, to get the details of our characters’ divorce right, but it is more important to figure out what drove them to that point. We want to go inside them and see the cause that yielded up the effect. And to do that, we have to go inside our own self. We have to own what we discover inside and we have to work with it. It takes courage and clarity and time.

I am not saying that we should wallow. Or double up on sessions with our psychotherapist. Rather, it is a kind of attentiveness. It is paying attention to the actual writing and seeing what it asks of us, where it wants us to go. You can come upon a surprising image – a woman standing in the rain looking at the keys in her hand – and you stay with it. You get close to it. You write it ten different ways. And eventually it will take you to the psychological space that woman inhabits. You will get there, you will know what it is and how it works, and it will show up in your writing. It might just be a single sentence. It might just be an artful phrase. But it will resonate. It will echo for your readers.

And to do that – to be willing to go that deep and sustain that sort of investigation – it takes curiosity. We have to want it. We have to care enough to understand what is going on. That’s the only thing that will keep us going and let us take the necessary notes and do all the processing that enables us to convert the messiness into art. We have to have the attitude that curiosity didn’t kill the cat – the cat kicked curiosity’s ass. We have to be that strong, that determined. We are going to be so curious that even death cannot scare us. And we are going to look at it and come back and write about it.