It’s easy to be that smug, clever, verbally glib toast of the cocktail party, to drink just the right number of gin fizzes to find just the right combination of words to turn just about anything into a joke.
Not so easy to find something sacred in your life, something you respect for the simple reason that it deserves it. And to know it deserves it for the even more simple reason that it has earned it.
People read those sacred words of yours even when you wish there were more of them, or they wish there were fewer of your words, and those readers, which is what we call people when we forget why we started writing in the first place, talk to other people, who have hearts full of searing desire, who share, persuade, love, hate, kill, hug, nurture, and sleep around because of your words, or mine, or those of their parents, who might not have loved them as much as we do.
If in that tiny office of yours that always feels too hot or cold you write This word, That word – Verb my Noun! your words move me to hate, love, laugh, think, desire, and crave, and so I share how you’ve made me feel, and in sharing shape the world atom by atom, and we both know how pesky those little atoms can be.
Your writing is sacred because people are, and our earth is, and the things we love and hate and care about are.
Participate in the sacred because we need your sacred words, flawed as they are, like you, you beautiful, immoral, uplifting, passionate, desperate, decrepit animal.
Participate in the sacred because we need your words to remind us to save,
to love
to nurture,
to judge and excoriate,
to forgive and apologize,
to dream,
to ground.
And to remind me to scream
Stop!
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Things matter. Not like people, but they’re still important.
A pen that inspires you to write beautiful words because you want to do its form justice, its feel, the way it spreads ink across that particular shade of paper you found after looking for weeks, which you’ve placed on top of that
desk you’ve always had in the family,
or just bought, and on top of which today you’ve set up a laptop instead of paper, and tomorrow maybe an iPad, although not that many yesterdays ago you wouldn’t have known what that meant.
What you choose to write with, on, and seated at will draw you in, or push you away. Writing day after day after day is hard. As in very. Make it easier by falling in love with objects that you enjoy touching, seeing, celebrating. That way, even when the writing does not end perfectly, the act of writing will.
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We have an arrangement in our house. If the door is closed, it means I’m writing but it’s okay to knock if something really urgent comes up. If I’ve also hung the Do Not Disturb sign, better not knock unless your injury is so severe it will be hard to dial 911 by yourself. Here are some things that are NOT exceptions to the rule regarding my Sacred Space:
We knocked because a delivery requires your signature (that’s why they leave we’ll try again notes).
We knocked because the school’s on the phone (that’s what answering machines are for).
We knocked because we can’t seem to remember where we put the peanut butter and crackers.
Knocking for any other reason you can think of.
Sacred space is so important that until you find a way to say my writing is more important than… (everything) you’re going to have a hard time finishing anything, because there are all sorts of worthy adversaries clamoring for your attention. The beauty of finding a sacred space is that once you have it set up, you’ll know the rules about what intrusions are allowed, and so will everyone else. Having a sacred space says This is mine, that is yours, and all the rest is ours. Or to paraphrase the late Swiss writer, Hughley Ericcson: Having a sacred space means sitting in one particular chair in one particular room, for the same reason you sat there yesterday – To write.
I certainly have known writers who can write anywhere, and I have done my fair share of writing in spaces that are anything but sacred, but if you read Part I of this mini-series on the sacred you can probably predict what I’m going to say about that: Variety may be the spice of life, but until you have established a solid habit of productive writing you should probably be searching for rules, not exceptions. When you get to page 300, or you’ve written 300 poems, you may be able to write anywhere. Until then…
- Find yourself a Sacred Space and claim it.
- Get everyone you love to agree to the rules regarding your Sacred Space.
- Sit in your Sacred Space during your Sacred Time (see Part I).
- Do your Sacred Thing, during your Sacred Time, in your Sacred Space.
- When you reach page 300, or finish poem 300, email me at philipdealbooks.com and I’ll give you a shout out.
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Children
Jobs
Lovers
Friends
Jury Duty
Q: What do all of the above have in common?
A: They are legitimate challengers for your time, the real people and the real reasons it is sometimes hard to find time to write.
But here’s the thing, and there’s really no escaping it: Unless you are an emergency room M.D., a soldier in active battle, or the single parent of more than six children, you have time to write. You may not have time to write and watch the same amount of football you’ve always watched, or time to write and go out with friends every night, but you definitely have time to write.
Spend more than a few minutes examining your day-to-day life and you’ll see that I’m right. The problem isn’t that you don’t have time to write; the problem is getting yourself to set aside a time that is reserved for one thing and one thing only – writing – and then doing it.
So here is today’s lesson, and you should probably start scratching these lessons into your walls in giant letters:
CREATE A SACRED WRITING TIME, THEN WRITE DURING THAT TIME EVERY SINGLE DAY.
No buts, what ifs, or I have to do something elses. Create a sacred time, a time that no one has a right to question you about, a time that you let nothing or no one steal from you. Then write today during your sacred time. Then write tomorrow during your sacred time. Repeat, repeat, and then repeat some more.
After you’ve written 300 pages, or 300 poems, feel free to take a day off. For now, for the simple reason that you have never written a book, or compiled a volume of poems, you have no reason to believe you can or ever will. But have no fear; that is the beauty of creating sacred time. Respect that time every single day and you cannot help but add pages together, one at a time, until, one day soon, you will look up and say – I did it!
I have already done that, written THE END, not once, not twice, but five times and counting (and that includes only books I did not throw away after finishing). When you have done it just once we’ll talk about writing when you feel like it, or when the muse visits, or at different times on different days. For now, better to think of yourself as an apprentice who has something very important to prove, exactly one important thing: I can do it!
So do. Write today during your sacred time. Then write tomorrow during your sacred time. Repeat, repeat, repeat. When you reach page 300, or finish your 300th poem, email me at philipdealbooks@gmail.com and I’ll give you a shout out right here. You have my sacred promise.
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I’ve already suggested there is exactly one step to writing a novel: Sit in a comfortable chair during a block of time you protect like Fort Knox and write.
But we all want to believe – need to believe? – there is a plan we can follow, a series of steps, shortcuts, tips, something that will make it easier. So I’m going to play along. I’m going to tell you the six steps I follow to write a novel (although you abandon my single step approach at your own peril):
Step 1 – Before writing a word, I try to think well about what I’m going to write, without over planning.
Step 2 – I write intuitively until I hit a roadblock (which I almost always do).
I follow steps 1 and 2 because I desperately want to be that writer who somehow blasts through his first drafts without losing interest or energy, and because part of me believes that a writer’s best work is created when his built-in editor is sound asleep.
If only everything were up to me. But it isn’t, and that is where roadblocks come in.
Step 3 – While I’m stopped at my roadblock, I try to figure out what lesson that book is trying to teach me.
Thankfully, I’ve always been smart enough to stop when I muck things up (although one time it took me two years to figure out it was time to stop), and when I do get stuck I am not shy about asking for help. My good friend, Bart, unstuck me while I was writing Love In An Iron Bowl by telling me to write more about China (the Iron Bowl in the title) to balance the love story. “You’re writing a novel,” Bart said. “You have all the time in the world to be discursive.”
Lesson 1, while writing Love In An Iron Bowl – Allow the reader to touch, taste, and feel place.
Lesson 2, while writing OHM – Write real people, even if they don’t like your story.
Lesson 3, while writing Peculiar Hallelujah – Welcome surprise, even while writing the final scene.
Step 4 – I do whatever it takes to learn that lesson.
These are all lessons you can read about in any decent “How To Write” book, but reading isn’t writing. Trust me. You usually have to learn these lessons on the job, and often in the middle of trying to figure out what went wrong with your first draft.
Step 5 – I rethink the book I’m working on with that learned lesson in mind.
Step 6 – I write the new book that the writing of the old book taught me how to write.
Sounds easy, right? Correct a mistake by learning from it and doing something different. But what if that translated into reality this way?
Seven notebooks of double-sided hand-written pages, which you’ve already transcribed into eight hundred and sixty-eight typed pages, and then transformed into a first draft, turn out to be missing big pieces of place, and have to be re-written? What a daunting task! Not only would you have to go back and find all the places in the book that needed more description, or where more description would be interesting, you would have to find the right places to add description, places where more description would add to the natural layering of the book. And then, of course, you would have to write all that new description, make it interesting on its own, work it into your existing text, then make any changes that those changes mandated.
Or, if after one year of working on the second section of a five-section novel, you discovered that not one single word of what you had written during the last year was worth keeping, so you re-wrote that same section during the following year, only to learn, once again, that not one word of what you had written was going to make the final draft? (that’s two years to end up with nothing, if you’re keeping track)
And, of course, there is this bonus. You get to do all that new writing while feeling particularly inadequate, weak, tired, frail, fragile, and despondent. After all, you just spent months (years?) writing a first draft that wasn’t good enough, and no one can guarantee your second draft will be any better.
As a writer, you don’t get to know how you will get to the next level, or how you will solve a particular writing problem; you can only do your best thinking, aim, do the work, take the painful rebuffs, do your best thinking again, then wait, never knowing if you’ll break the cycle, until you finally do (or don’t).
So why do it? That’s the easy part. It doesn’t matter how long it takes to write a good book, or how many lessons you have to learn. In the end, you have a good book. Think about that.
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Photo Credit: Jim Larrison @ https://www.flickr.com/photos/larrison/14866933889. License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ Modifications: Changed shop name to NOVELISTS at top of photo
I didn’t say a good novel. I just said a novel. A steady string of new titles once a year for the rest of your life. So here you go, the last piece of writing advice you’ll ever need. Lest you forget this (and I’m definitely paying homage to stealing this idea from Craig Vetter) FIND SOMEWHERE TO TATOO THIS ON YOUR BODY. While you’re finding a good ink shop, let me share my advice:
- Find a comfortable chair. Sit in it for a PROTECTED amount of time every day. Don’t let anything, or anyone, convince you that it’s more important than this block of writing time. And now that you’ve found a comfortable chair, and a sacred time to write, do this…
Write.
Don’t ask me what, and please holy mother of all gods don’t ask me how to get over writer’s block. Just write. And then write again. And then perform the same task over and over again in lieu of all the interesting things your weak human mind will remind you you are missing while you are trying to be a “writer.”
If after a few pages you discover you are not that interesting, which you very well might unless you have been writing a long time, you definitely cannot afford to miss a day feeling sorry for yourself. You have a lot of bad writing to get out of you before you become competent, and then a lot of merely competent writing to get out before you write something inspired. Having fun yet?
Or maybe not. Maybe you will jump from here to there like a kangaroo on ‘roids, and the very next thing you write, or maybe the one right after that, will kick some serious artistic ass (usually pronounced arse) and you will enjoy the fame and fortune you seek, and no doubt deserve, much sooner than my surly middle-aged approach suggests. But guess what? You still have to sit down and write to get from here to there, even if far fewer times than I’m suggesting.
All joking aside (a place I am loathe to hang out, so please don’t make me stay here any longer than needed), I have a question:
Is it really advice you seek, or inspiration?
Three guesses where you find inspiration.
Better get started.
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