They say if you want to write

They say if you want to write

you need to write about

what hurts the most,

so you ask yourself

what's causing you the most pain,

and then you wait

to see what your heart reveals.

But what if they're wrong

and you don't need to write

about what hurts the most?

What if you need to write about

what you love most? About life?

About what you're most grateful for?

What if you need to write about

what you notice in the world

around you--the beauty

of a cardinal's red feathers

flashing in the morning light,

the sound of the wind riffling

the leaves on a spring day,

the pleasure you feel when

you stretch and open your eyes 

to wake up each morning?

What if you feel pain on some days,

love and gratitude on others, and 

you let your pen take you

wherever you need to go each day,

creating a path as you go?

What if you give your heart a chance

to reveal what it feels,

give yourself a chance to hear

what you need to hear and

write what you need 

to write?

What I love about writing

What I love
about writing with
a fountain pen

the moment before
I begin writing
when the pen's nib
is poised above
the page

and I can see
its shadow
curved
like a face
staring up from
the paper
wondering
what the first word,
the first letter,
will be

And how it will feel
to touch the page again,
shadow and nib
kissing the paper,
their kisses
leaving a trail
of words
behind.

--

Each morning
writing
is
like jumping
out of a
plane
and
praying
the parachute
opens...

--

I love the precision
of a fountain pen's
sharp nib

the mysterious way
ink flows onto
the paper from its
point

the clean lines
the way letters form
beneath it
on a page
that was blank
a moment
before.

--

Look -- footprints
in the snow

ink stains
on the page

smudges on glass
evidence

someone was
here.

--

The Ten Truths of Writing

The first truth of writing:
You don't know anything.

The second truth of writing:
You know more than you think.

The third truth of writing:
Your fear of not knowing is an illusion.

The fourth truth of writing:
Unless you learn to push through the illusion,
you'll never write anything.

The fifth truth of writing:
Everything you need to know is already inside you.

The sixth truth of writing:
Touch your pen to the page and begin.

The seventh truth of writing:
Write until there is no more ink left in your heart.

The eighth truth of writing:
Let the well refill itself.

The ninth truth of writing:
Begin again.

The tenth truth of writing:
And again.

Connecting

As long as your pen or pencil is moving across the page, your fingers typing at the keyboard, your words flowing onto the screen or onto a piece of paper, you are connecting with a part of yourself that is hidden until the moment you tease it out with words.

It doesn’t matter if you’re writing poetry or prose, it’s the act of writing that matters, the challenge of opening your heart to the world so you (and others, if you decide to share what you’ve written) can know what’s there and can make a connection.

Call what’s in your heart the treasure beneath the sea or the pearls hidden within a shell that only you can find if you have the patience to dive deeply enough and pry the shell open with a stroke of your pen, a tap of the next key.

Whether you’re writing every day in a journal, starting a new project, or returning to a work-in-progress, you come to the page each day, if you’re like me, in the hope of connecting with the deepest part of your self, each word offering a chance to discover something new about yourself or your life that will help you understand how to live fully in each moment.

If you’re writing, you are connecting with the air you breathe, the sound of leaves rustling overhead, the taste of a peach on a warm summer day.

You are connecting with memories and with the people around you, with the feel of sea spray on your skin, with rain falling against your eyelids, with snowflakes tickling your lips and nose.

You are connecting with those you love who are no longer alive and with the person you once were and the person you are becoming.

No matter what you are writing, you’re connecting with each moment of life and with yourself as you experience life in all its mystery and beauty.

What’s so strange and wonderful about writing is the way the process reveals thoughts and emotions that you don’t always know you have until you see the thoughts and emotions expressed in the words that you write and which appear on the page in front of you like gifts from the sea.

Whatever you’re writing this morning or tomorrow or later this week, I hope you’ll persist and keep writing so you can find whatever you’re looking for.

I hope that you’ll make the connection with the deepest part of your heart so that you keep coming back to the page and learn more.

I hope you’ll keep writing and searching and exploring, and, after you’ve spent time writing, I hope you’ll look down at whatever you’ve written and discover what is most important to you.

Mostly, I hope you’ll take that first step… even if it feels like you're stepping into thin air... and find the treasure waiting for you.  

x

Still Writing

So much of life can conspire to keep us from writing. It takes a strong will to resist the urge to surrender to the vicissitudes of life—the frustrations of rejection, the disappointment of reviews, the critical (often negative) comments made by people who don’t understand what it means to write and who ask if we're still writing, as if by now we should have grown up and gotten a “real” job.

Those of us who manage to survive as writers, who continue to put words on paper, to write our stories, poems, and essays whether or not our work finds a publisher, have managed to endure the challenges of writing through the years because early on we understood the need to reach out to other writers, to welcome their support when we felt we’d come to a dead end, and to offer our support in return when the roads our friends and colleagues followed happened to disappear unexpectedly into the dark.

If you are looking for a writing guide written by someone with the kind of gentle, soothing, and supportive voice that can calm the nerves of the most anxious writer, whether a novice or a seasoned professional, you might want to pick up a copy of Still Writing by Dani Shapiro, the author of numerous memoirs and works of fiction, who has taught writing at Columbia, NYU, Wesleyan, and The New School.

Gifted with insights about the writing process from her own years of experience, she offers chapter-by-chapter advice on how to navigate the tricky shoals of this often crazy, often frustrating, and often unpredictable craft.

Here are some of her thoughts, just to give you an idea of what you’ll find in the book: 

The writing life requires courage, patience, persistence, empathy, openness, and the ability to deal with rejection. It requires the willingness to be alone with oneself. To be gentle with oneself. To look at the world without blinders on. To observe and withstand what one sees. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks. To be willing to fail—not just once, but again and again, over the course of a lifetime. 

Writing, after all, is an act of faith. We must believe, without the slightest evidence that believing will get us anywhere. 

Practice involves discipline but is more closely related to patience. 

It is the truest lesson I know about writing—and about life—that we must always move in the direction of our own true calling, not anyone else’s. 

I try to remember that the job—as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy—of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it. To be birthed by it.

Take a look at her book if you get a chance. You won’t find a more compassionate, nurturing guide to help you keep writing.

For more info about Still Writing, visit: https://www.amazon.com/Still-Writing-Perils-Pleasures-Creative/dp/0802121411/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8

And for more info about Dani Shapiro, visit her website: http://danishapiro.com/

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Each time I put pen to paper

Each time I put pen
to paper the pen takes
an unexpected turn,
this way or that,
a new path I hadn't
seen before that moment
of discovery.

It's what makes the
act of writing so
fraught with tension,
the not knowing
what will happen,
the not knowing if
anything will happen,
or if the pen will stand
motionless over the page
not moving at all,
leaving the page as fresh
and unmarked (without
a ripple) as when
I sat down to begin.

The secret to writing is,
simply, to begin, to let
the pen move across the
page, not knowing what
will come next, the nib
touching the blankness
of the page, and, like a
pebble skipping across
the still surface of
a pond, sending ripples
outward, reaching
toward shore.

A Writer’s Self-Worth

 Every writer reaches a point in the writing process when he hits a wall, swims into a net, gets snagged by a shoal, and is unable to swim past it.

Whether it’s loss of confidence in one’s writing, fatigue from spending too much time with words, hand cramps from carpal tunnel, emotional resistance to investigating one’s imagination, physical discomfort from sitting too long, or eye strain from staring for hours at a computer screen—one or more of these walls can lead a writer to question his worth.

And questioning one’s worth as a writer can lead to questioning the worth of one’s words, which can lead inevitably to questioning what value your work has and if there’s a point to putting words down on paper at all.

When such a moment comes, it drains away the writer’s love of stories, passion for searching for words and truth, eagerness to find something new that no one has ever found before or written in quite the same way. It’s all forgotten.

The moment a writer hits such a wall, he can feel stuck in quicksand, believing that he’s written his last word, that he has no more strength to swim another stroke. There are no more words left to give. Why, he wonders, did he get into the water in the first place?

As soon as I hear myself asking such questions, I can become discouraged. Our society places so much emphasis on riches and success. If you’re not a NY Times Bestselling author—in the top ten!!— you’re a failure. And if you’re a writer struggling financially, it’s easy to think you might have been better staying in law school.

Such thoughts raise red flags and alert me to when I might have hit a wall and need to do the backstroke to regain my perspective.

I have to remind myself that writing isn’t solely about earning money. Few writers can support themselves with their work (though it would be lovely for the rest of us if our work gained sufficient acclaim to support us). Writing, rather, serves as a way for me to understand the world and my life. It is a process of exploration, a tool that lets me see and learn and discover new things about my relationship to the world and myself.

The criteria for measuring our success don’t have to be how much money we report on our tax returns each April or how many books we’ve published in the past decade. Instead, we might ask how much we’ve learned in the past year about writing and life. We can look back at the past year and see the number of journals on our shelf and feel that we succeeded simply because we faced a blank page day after day and managed to put words down. We are successful writers because we understand something differently, something that we might not have understood without having written.

On days when I feel like I’ve hit a wall, I tell myself (again and again) that writing isn’t about worth or financial gain. It’s about exploring and discovering things that I never knew before putting my pen to paper. It’s about trying to wrest meaning from a world that often seems to lack meaning or whose meaning is hidden beneath the surface of events.

The next time you feel yourself hitting a wall and questioning your self-worth as a writer, remember your words do have value. You are a writer worth all the effort you’ve given to make sense of the world.

Hitting the wall doesn’t have to signal the end of a project or, on a deeper level, a career. More likely, it’s just a temporary pause, a sign that something needs to change.

Sometimes a writer simply needs to alter his direction and shift his perspective to see a particular problem from a different angle and discover a path past it.

Start with a question: What do you love about writing? (Or: What did you used to love about writing?)

Find what you love about the process... and go from there.