You have to get comfortable with the inevitable when as a writer you hit that brick wall. Unfortunately, it's usually at about 90 miles an hour. I know there are people reading this right now who've recently crashed and burned, so for all those frozen at their keyboards, here's my particular take. Maybe a better description for this piece would be “What I stumbled on in trying to live life that helped me in my writing,” or is it the other way around?
This brings me to how tenets of Buddhism have fit into my personal search and influenced aspects of my work. For a while it seemed inexplicable to me why I should feel this intense affinity with its approach of acceptance and surrender, but as I delved into some books more deeply, something began to click for me. What never worked for me with writer's block was the push, push, push, do, do, do, that has always been a hallmark of my personality (ask my friends - seriously), but as I made a sincere effort to change my thinking and look at aspects of Buddhism, something freeing occurred.
I would hardly call myself a Buddhist, having some sense of the level of meditative discipline it requires and its simplicity. I am self-aware enough to know that part of me needs and thrives on a complicated life in a complicated universe. Part of me desires desire all too much, relishing the chances to feed it whenever possible. It seems clear to me I've had some kind of fundamental shift in how I look at the world, one I hope will deeply inform my work as a writer and artist.
A key thing was coming to realize that writing is not separate from the rest of my life. Aside from the inherent anxiety I experience when new work is about to come into being, I had difficulty accepting the particular, intuitive nature of how I work. I can’t fully articulate what's going on when new writing is forming. It's just impossible to fully describe it. It seems to be located in a place of no words, which for someone like me, a quintessential Buddhist monkey mind, was a hard pill to swallow.
It seems more clear to me than ever that writing is a truly a synthesis of intuition, discipline, and organization. One book that brilliantly illustrates this is Natalie Goldberg’s Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life, where she advocates timed writing exercises. She compares it to Zen practice and believes the practice of writing can free your mind of clutter by getting past the stuck points of our thinking. The best way to get past these stuck points is to just write until the predetermined time is up. She also talks about falling short as inherent in living, with the only true failure being when we stop ourselves from trying to obtain the life we long for.
Article comments