The Way It Starts

Sometimes it can start with an image--a red apple held in your father's hand, say, or the weathered wall of a wooden barn in Wisconsin.

Sometimes you aren't given an image at all but a word--raisin, for instance, or magenta, or owl, or hope.

Sometimes it can begin with silence, with the sound of your breath, with nothing but a blank sheet of paper waiting beneath your pen.

You have a choice.

You can sit for years complaining about why you have nothing to write, nothing to say.

Or you can learn to sit with silence, waiting.

It isn't until you learn how to sit and accept the silence that you can begin to hear words singing beneath the silence and see how they fit together to form phrases, sentences, paragraphs, pages.

It takes a good deal of patience to learn how to do this, how to sit this way for weeks and months, listening to the silence rather than running from it and from whatever might be scaring you.

When you start out, no one will tell you that you need courage or a reservoir of hope or faith in your own ability. (When I started out, I was told all I needed was a typewriter.)

No one will tell you how the blank pages will remain blank day after day with stories left untold, or how the silence of the blank page will haunt you on days when words refuse to come.

If you persist, though, and can find courage and hope and patience and faith, you'll discover a part of yourself that you never knew existed.

If you persist, you'll discover stories hidden inside you which have the power to reaffirm your belief in life, in the world, in those around you.

You'll find the energy of life that runs through all beings, all stories, so you can feel connected to something larger than yourself.

First, though, you must sit with the silence and wait.

Coming Up Empty-Handed

It took all day to write something that I didn’t even know I wanted to write.

I sat at my desk for hours trying to think of something to write and at the end of the morning I left an unmarked sheet of paper on my desk, the same blank sheet that I'd started with when I sat down earlier.

It was like diving and returning to the surface empty-handed.

I hadn’t found any pearls on the sea floor.

I hadn’t seen anything at all.

And then, out of the blue, as I sat my desk after lunch and watched as the sun sent a dust-filled ray into my office and listened to an airplane thrumming overhead, I found the idea that I’d been waiting for and began to write.

But that notion of diving and coming up empty-handed has stayed with me.

It reminds me that writing is much like diving.

We plunge ourselves into the water (no matter how cold, no matter how dark, no matter how deep), in the hope that we’ll discover treasures on the sea floor.

And yet why, if writing is like diving, do we criticize ourselves so harshly for coming up empty-handed?

It’s as if we feel less of a writer for not having written.

But it’s not a diver’s fault if there are no pearls to be found on the sea floor, is it?

If a diver returns to the surface empty-handed, she simply shrugs and prepares for her next dive later that afternoon or the next morning.

Maybe the next dive will be different, she thinks.

No matter what she finds—radiant pearls or slimy strands of seaweed or a stunning shell—she is still a diver.

As writers, we need to keep learning this lesson.

We need to cultivate patience, acceptance, persistence.

We need to enjoy the process of diving without any expectation of pearls that might be waiting at the bottom of the sea.

We need to remember that whether we come to the surface with an armful of pearls or empty-handed, we can still dive for the pure joy of diving.

A Snail’s Pace

This little guy, this snail (possibly known as the Globose Button or Mesomphix globosus, although I’m not a snail expert so I can’t be certain) is my hero, an inspiration for writers everywhere.

I love the patient way this snail moves, accepting the pace of his life as he inches forward without regard for what other species might think of him.

I love how he carries his shell on his back with pride. It reminds me of the way a writer carries his stories in an invisible sack in his imagination.

In each case the snail and the writer carry their homes—the shell and the sack of stories—with them, except one home is visible and the other invisible.

Most of all, I love the way the snail is absorbed in the task at hand, unperturbed by obstacles, focused on what he needs to do in order to take that next step, and the next, to reach his destination.

Of course, a snail doesn’t have an editor breathing down his neck shouting about a missed deadline. A snail doesn't need to worry about a broken computer keyboard or power outage or an empty ink cartridge.

Nor does the snail, I suspect, feel the same frustration as a writer at having to retrace his steps to find a different route, even after having gone many miles in the wrong direction.

But I love the snail’s devotion to movement, his persistence, his willingness to stick his head out and take risks, his desire to see just a little further than he might have been able to see from inside the safety of his shell.

The snail is such a vulnerable creature. His slow pace makes him ideal food for birds of prey, I suspect. And yet he keeps sticking his neck out, taking risks, searching for something that he hasn’t yet found. 

One step at a time—the snail is, after all, a monopod—he heads in a direction guided by some inner voice, some mysterious inner compass.

If a snail can listen to that inner voice and follow its own mysterious inner compass, so can we, don't you think?

If you want to see the grace, curiosity, and patience of the snail, click on this link to watch a brief YouTube video: http://www.jaxshells.org/treexx.htm