The inside of my head
The graphic just below is not a tag cloud but a WORD cloud, generated by a site called Wordle, which is just amazing. Paste in text (or give it the url of your blog, as I did) and it presents you with a randomly formatted cloud of words sized according to their frequency in your text. Then you can redesign your cloud using the many available fonts, layouts, and infinite colors.
It’s like looking into the inside of your own head. You suddenly, literally, have a picture of what’s on your mind. How come I used the word “book” so much? Why is “really” so large? It was a surprise to see that “something” and “everything” appear a lot in these posts. I don’t like abstract words. Was I being lazy? Did I not have a clear idea of what I really meant? (Click the image for a larger, legible size.)
This blog as a Wordle
Though I initially saw Wordle as a mirror of my mind, when I looked through the gallery of clouds other people had posted, I realized that was only one possibility. You can create designs deliberately by manipulating your text, like the person whose “dog breeds” Wordle is dominated by an enormous yellow terrier. Some people make Wordle form whole sentences pointing in different directions. Others send a message, like this advocate for the food democracy movement.
After making my blog Wordle, I tried passages of work I’d done for clients, and saw that my notion of the mind mirror was actually quite limited. I’d been thinking just in terms of concepts. But the Wordle is also a graphic representation of your writing style. Some of my clients like long words, some short; the respective texts create different visual patterns.
Much meditation for me lately is about reflection—nonconceptual reflection, that is, as opposed to thinking. So here’s a completely nonconceptual way to reflect on writing.
Writer’s block? Foolproof trick for breaking through
… At least it always works for me. I generally freeze up when I’m afraid I don’t have the chops for whatever the job is: an article that requires synthesizing interviews about a topic I don’t feel totally in control of (especially if one of the people I spoke to intimidated me); a book chapter whose concepts are so complex that I fear I’ll never be able to fit them together in a satisfactory way.
So I tell myself that I’ll just sit down and write something. It doesn’t matter whether the copy is any good, since it doesn’t count —it’s just for practice. This little maneuver relieves the pressure, and I do produce “something.” If I’m lucky my energy starts moving, I get connected, and the “practice” turns into a productive session. Even if it doesn’t, and what I write turns out not so great, I put it away and don’t look at it for a day or so. In the meantime, I’ve given my unconscious a chunk of material to work with. When I revisit my copy, either I discover it’s halfway decent or I suddenly know how to really do it right.
The funny thing is that this trick has saved me time and again, even though I’m totally aware that it’s a stratagem I’m using on myself. It breaks through whatever the resistance or the fear is. I don’t know exactly why—I’m just grateful.
Writer as flypaper
Have you noticed that when you’re deeply involved in something, you turn into a magnet for anything related to it?
I once interviewed Kay Gardner, a musician and composer of healing music (sadly, she died in 2002), who told me that during a time when she was intensively exploring the physical effects of sound—teaching experimental workshops and reading extensively—all sorts of information found her. “People sent me books and articles. Books would fall off shelves. A book would be handed to me through a crowd—just a disembodied hand like one of the aces in the tarot deck.”
In that state of focus, you become like flypaper—things sail in out of the universe and stick to you. That’s what it feels like, anyway. To take just one example: writing my book on homeless women, I struggled to untangle some complex ideas about what these women meant to people inside society. I was tackling a chapter about mental illness–which I was choosing to call madness, a term that gave this condition a lot more meaning.
One bright Saturday afternoon, walking down my block toward a nearby park, I came across a stoop sale, which included a bunch of books. (In my brownstone New York neighborhood, we don’t have front yards, but everyone has a stoop, so that’s where we set the items out.) I was tempted, but figured I’d check it out on my way back.
Not the book I read, but MK's own account of her life
A couple of hours later, the sale was still going on. I stopped and glanced through the books. A little paperback caught my eye: Six Medieval Men & Women. Why that? I wasn’t interested in the Middle Ages. But I picked it up. It consisted of brief narrative accounts of the lives of six notable characters. One was Margery Kempe, and I guess some significant aroma wafted up at me from the page, because I paid the quarter or whatever they wanted and took it home.
Turned out that Margery was a 14th-century woman who in her extraordinary eccentricity amazingly resembled the shopping bag ladies I worked with at a shelter for homeless women, down to her patchwork dress, her hysteria, and her loud proclamation of truths from God that she alone was privy to. Unlike them, though, she fit into a defined social niche: recognized as a minor mystic, Margery went on pilgrimages, conversed with learned theologians, and was appealed to for help at moments of crisis, as when the local church was endangered by a fire (she saved it). She died peacefully in her home town at an advanced age.
This brief story was the key not just to that chapter but to other large chunks of my book. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was that I happened to pass that house on the day someone decided to hold their sale, and that no one else snatched up the book while I was in the park. But was it really luck?
I’d call it synchronicity, and it’s one of those unexplainable but absolutely reliable mysteries of writing. When you’re obsessed with anything, you become a magnet for it. Who knows why—I’m just grateful. And would be happy to hear more examples of this phenomenon.
Structuring a book = working a jigsaw puzzle
My years as a manuscript editor taught me how to structure a book. Many authors are experts with great info to impart, but when they try to produce a book they end up with a shapeless mess. Book writing is a craft, a professional specialty, like making violins.
For the past few months I’ve been working with a client who has terrific material and a clear idea of what she wants to say—in general. But she’d only written articles and hadn’t a clue about how to put everything together into a book.
I began by making her do an outline. Now we’re working through the chapters, honing the concepts for each one. It’s making her brain sweat. She knows her data, but has never thought her ideas through at this level of detail. When you work on the scale of a book, you need to create connections that never come up when you’re only presenting a bit of your data in an article. A comment in chapter 5 seems to conflict with a piece of evidence already presented in chapter 3. Are they really contradictory, or did you just not realize all the implications of that piece of data? It’s in actually working with the text that you really figure out what you mean to say.
- Years ago I went with a friend to hear Grace Paley speak. Paley talked about how she wrote one of her short stories, explaining that she found out what the story was about by writing it. My friend was baffled. She has a capacious, logical mind and had produced her own book by creating a conceptual structure based on her research, organizing all her notes, then writing everything out. But my own process—even though I write nonfiction—is like Paley’s: it’s through struggling with the connections of the clauses in a sentence, then the sequence of ideas among the sentences themselves, that I learn what I really mean to say.
I explained to my client that putting together a book is like working a jigsaw puzzle—when you get everything properly arranged, the pieces all fall into place with a click and the structure is solid. In an extended piece of writing, the structure—the organization of ideas—is actually itself a concept. All the subsidiary concepts in the separate chapters must fit snugly into this overall conceptual structure. When they do, the argument is not only clear, but pleasing.
- Tip: repetitive passages are always a sign that something is wrong with the overall conceptual structure. Reorganize your presentation of ideas, and the repetition will vanish.
For me, putting the puzzle together is another part of the pleasure of writing: first, sinking into intense concentration, seeing deeply into your material, and shaping your concepts to agree with it; then, fitting everything into place with that aesthetically satisfying click!
Writing & pleasure, part 2
I’ve always loved pens. I used to keep a journal, and aside from its value as an aid to reflection, the physical act of writing in it gave me pleasure. Many people are passionately attached to fountain pens; they’re particular about nibs, ink, and paper. But I love all pens, even the cheap ones. At conferences I go for the free ballpoints; I don’t care about the tote bags.
When I got serious about being a writer, I developed the same sensory fondness for my typewriter. I’ve read comments by writers who say they need to start out with longhand drafts in order to feel the connection between their ideas and the sentences they produce. I felt that connection on the typewriter, as a flow of energy from my gut through my hands striking the keys onto the paper. Organic. When I had to switch to a computer, I worried I’d lose that feeling because the keyboard was so different. But all it took was getting as proficient at word processing as I’d been at typing. By now I enjoy the physical sensation of keyboarding as much as writing longhand and typewriting.
Typing is only pleasurable, though, when it produces sentences. I don’t get any enjoyment from filling out an Excel spreadsheet. But I do get it even from writing a report for a nonprofit, a training manual for a body therapist, or a newsletter article.
Best of all is writing a book—even if it’s someone else’s—because that introduces another factor—the pleasure of fitting together the pieces of a puzzle. More on that in next entry.
The role of pleasure
I spent last weekend at a meditation retreat receiving instruction in a technique that uses the breath to develop concentration. It was more technical than any practice I’d learned before—structured and specific, moving from step 1 to step 4 (as far as we got in two days, though the technique itself goes to step 16). The method (called anapanasati) is designed to develop concentration, the ability to focus the mind on one particular object (in this case, the breath) and keep it there. Concentration is said to make wisdom possible (“wisdom” meaning “perception of the true nature of reality”).
I went because I’d had a brief experience of this technique that had a powerful effect on me, so I thought I should learn more of it. Whether I develop greater powers of concentration and thereby wisdom is still to be seen (and indeed, beside the point, as I explain below); but what’s relevant here is a comment by the teacher that struck me.
Concentration is hard work, he said, but this work of developing a skill is inherently joyful—more so than achieving a finished result. This is literally true, because once you get to step 3, you begin to move energy through the body, developing a physical sensation called piti (classically translated “rapture,” though a more realistic description of my experience would be “pleasure”). In step 4, you develop sukha, an emotional state translated as “contentment” or indeed, “joy.” So it is actually the process that creates the pleasure, not achieving the goal.
So it is with writing. To be totally immersed, with your whole being, in creating a form that expresses the most profound awareness you’re capable of is deeply pleasurable. I once said something like this to a woman I knew from a writing class, adding rhetorically, “What could be more satisfying?”
She responded, “A roll in the hay!”
“But that goes away the next day!” I exclaimed. “The other doesn’t.”
I realized later that she was probably just trying to show off a little. But my instinctive response made me understand my own experience more clearly. In fact, I find even writing that doesn’t emerge from the depths of my being to be highly enjoyable. The next entry will enlarge on that.
The sky of mind: vast like space
Buddhist meditators practice experiencing the mind as a vast, clear sky, through which thoughts, feeings, and all other experiences pass like clouds, appearing and then vanishing in an open space of awareness that’s not limited to the inside of the head. (Meditation teacher Jack Kornfield describes this practice here.)
Kandinsky’s painting Sky Blue combines that image of the mind as vast open sky with an experience I’ve had when writing at a very deep level. Part of the conceptual work for my books about homeless women and about sacrifice was simply discovering what they were actually about. I came across incidents, articles, and books, and generated images from my imagination, that I knew were important, but I didn’t know why, or what exactly they meant. And normal-type thinking about them didn’t help. Read more
Practice and inspiration
The notion of practice is a funny combination of the mundane and the transcendent. Disciplined meditation practice leads over time to a level of skill that supports the development of wisdom, or insight into what Buddhists call emptiness, the interconnectedness of everything. And long practice of the pragmatic necessities of making a living turns out to be a foundation for writing that goes beyond mundane.
All these years, I thought I was just slogging through various writing jobs, some really interesting and some pretty boring. Turns out it was like physical exercise. Read more