The
Writing
Warrior
DISCOVERING THE COURAGE
TO FREE YOUR TRUE VOICE
Laraine Herring
SHAMBHALA
Boston & London
2011
Shambhala Publications, Inc.
Horticultural Hall
300 Massachusetts Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts 02115
www.shambhala.com
© 2010 by Laraine Herring
Cover art: Keiji Iwai/Getty Images
Cover design: Deborah Hodgdon
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Herring, Laraine, 1968–
The writing warrior: discovering the courage to free your true voice / Laraine Herrring.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN 978-0-8348-2322-8
ISBN 978-1-59030-796-0 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Authorship—Psychological aspects. I. Title.
PN171.P83H475 2010
808′.02019—dc22
2010008804
for Jeffrey Hartgraves
1961–2008
ciao
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART ONE: Breaking Ground
1. The Way of the Writing Warrior
2. Structure Is Alive
3. The Practice
The Writing Warrior Practice
PART TWO: Building Your Foundation
4. Release All Desire for Results
5. Direct Experience
6. Theory and Practice
7. Attachment and Aversion
The Writing Warrior Practice
PART THREE: Dissolving Your Illusions
8. The Writer’s Wheel of Suffering
9. Illusion of Time
10. Illusion of Thoughts
11. Illusion of What a Writer Is
12. Illusion of Identification
13. Illusion of Control
14. Illusion of Distractions
15. Illusion of Publication, Success, and Fame
16. Illusion of Money
17. You’re Not the Only One
The Writing Warrior Practice
PART FOUR: Committing to Your Authentic Path
18. Self-Observation without Judgment
19. Absolute Vulnerability
20. Soft Eyes
21. Self-Study
22. Wake Up
23. Perhaps You Never Did This, But I Remember It Just the Same
24. Stories We Tell Ourselves
25. Revision
26. Intuition
27. Resistance Is Futile
The Writing Warrior Practice
PART FIVE: Deepening Your Writer’s Roots
28. Alchemy
29. Hark! Who Goes There?
30. I-10 between Phoenix and Tucson
31. Writing Is Not Like Making a Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich
32. Sand Paintings
33. The Beginning Is Not the Beginning
34. Sacred Communication
35. Characters as Teachers
36. Let’s Do the Limbo
37. Seasons of the Work
38. Texas
39. Disconnection
40. The Mysteries of Fiction
41. Tools
42. Rhythm
43. Papa Don’t Preach
44. Who Hears You First?
45. Loneliness
46. Betrayals
47. Natural Talent
48. Spiral Dance
The Writing Warrior Practice
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Gayle Brandeis: for being my first reader, my deepest reader, and the companion of my writer’s heart.
Cain Carroll: for teaching me to stand steady without sticking.
Keith Haynes: for being present and helping me soften and open.
Linda Roghaar: for unflappable belief in my work.
Jennifer Urban-Brown: for faith in my writing and a brilliant editing of this manuscript.
Alma Luz Villanueva: for embodying the writing warrior so I could one day see it in myself.
My parents, Glenn and Elinor Herring, who taught me to be fierce and fearless.
And finally, my students, without whom I would have learned nothing.
Introduction
To change skins, evolve into new cycles, I feel one has to learn to discard. If one changes internally, one should not continue to live with the same objects. They reflect one’s mind and the psyche of yesterday. I throw away what has no dynamic, living use.
—Anaïs Nin
I taught writing long before I truly believed I was a writer. Fortunately, I learned a few things quickly in the classroom. One: teaching is hard. Two: teaching keeps you in the moment. And three: I love to teach. These three pieces of information begged the next logical question: did I have anything to teach? Most of my students were decades older than me. I had some publishing credits, but not many. I was young and looked younger. I had enough arrogance and ego to act like I’d done it a million times before. And, fortunately, enough awareness to know I had no idea what I was doing.
During my second year of teaching, I taught creative writing classes during the evenings, while still working full time and attending graduate school. I had learned early, thankfully, the first rule of effective teaching: talk less, listen more. I didn’t yet know that was a foundation for writing as well. I began to notice that even though I was teaching fiction, my students were writing their lives, loosely disguised with fictional places or times. They were writing their fears, their obsessions, and their wounds in black and white on twenty-pound bond paper, but many of them didn’t know it. Many of them believed they were indeed making everything up. They believed there was nothing of themselves in these men and women who peopled their work.
For the first time, I began to understand the courage and absolute vulnerability it took to put words on a page. It was no more or less courageous if the author didn’t know what she or he was doing. The work knew what it was doing. The more their work came from their brains, the less effective it was. The more they planned, the less they grew. Students outed themselves in their stories. They wrote themselves into their own sexuality without trying. They longed for the absent love of a mother or mourned the loss of a child. They wrote and rewrote mistakes of their past trying to find a different ending. They showed me that writing is not a series of ingredients (character + plot + dialogue + setting + conflict) placed in a particular predetermined Aristotelian order. Writing was alive. Through writing, the writers became electric.
“You are writing warriors,” I said one day in class, and we growled and made warrior sounds until we laughed. “You have no idea how brave you are.” And they looked at me with open, surprised eyes, their brains not quite grasping what I was saying, but their hearts responding. Message received.
In Writing Begins with the Breath, I wanted to give people an opportunity to view the writing process as something more than a series of steps one could cross off a list. I hoped to expand writing for the reader. Put it on a cellular level. Expand it like the belly on an inhale. And most of all, I hoped to surprise people by the ease with which they could contact themselves through writing if they opened up channels within themselves to listen.
When thinking of the next step after Writing Begins with the Breath, I returned to that first moment of bravery required to expose yourself on the page and the first moment
I learned not just what was at stake for those who choose to write, but what was at stake for those who choose to guide people into those hidden places. I returned to the writing warriors I met in my classrooms, the writers who showed me what it takes to be authentic. And I learned that unless I remain a constant student, not just of the craft of writing, but of its process and of myself, I will quickly become a fraud. I will turn into the didactic, rigid writer who speaks more than she listens, who rants more than she questions. I didn’t want to be that writer. I didn’t want to be that teacher.
I continue to learn something new about writing, the role of writing, and myself as a writer every day. If I pay attention. That’s the anchor beneath it all. Pay attention. Notice what is, not what I want something to be. I must remember I am always a beginner, always a student, of the art of writing and of life. If I forget that and believe I have mastered something, I inevitably fall on my face and have to start again.
Throughout the book I will talk about the importance of letting something go. When I bring this up in workshops, students often ask questions such as:
Do you mean something emotional or spiritual? Or something physical?
What does this have to do with writing?
Do you really mean every day?
Yes, yes, and yes.
Everything.
Yes.
And here’s why:
We don’t write in a vacuum. Our work comes from us, and we inhabit a space. The most intimate level of that space is our body. The next level is the house where our body lives. Then our neighborhood. Our town. Our state. And on and on. If we purge something from our homes, we’ll likely notice that we’ve purged something on an emotional or spiritual level. For example, the tightness over the loss of a lover may vanish when your last pictures of him or her find their way out of your home. Conversely, doing emotional and spiritual clearing will frequently result in a cleansing of our physical space as well.
Let it go. Don’t overidentify with either material things or emotional matters. And don’t classify one type of healing as more valuable than the next. Donating a pair of shoes to Goodwill is no more or less valuable than doing personal grief work. Resist the temptation to operate from a place of dualism, to say, This matters; this does not.
Let it go. Cluttered writing is writing that is simply carrying too much. It’s overladen with adverbs or adjectives. It restates itself over and over again. It tries to tack on too many phrases to modify a noun or verb. This leaves the reader hacking her way through your brambles to find out what you meant to say. Pare down your work. You don’t have to develop a minimalist style like Hemingway if that doesn’t feel natural for you. Find the simplest, most concise way to say what you want to say in the way that you need to say it. This style will be different for every writer. Just check every word. What is it doing? Is it serving the sentence? The paragraph? The chapter? How? If you can’t figure out how, cut it. If you notice five words doing the same thing, cut four of them.
When you let go of what is no longer necessary, the authentic essence of yourself and your writing bubbles up. This is freedom. This is flexibility. This is being utterly, completely alive. Are you ready? Take a deep inhale. Expand your belly. Now, let it all go. Hold nothing back. Relax your jaw. Release your shoulders. Soften your gaze, and step into yourself, one warrior word at a time.
PART ONE
Breaking Ground
CHAPTER 1
The Way of the Writing Warrior
If true freedom is going to survive within you, you have to be willing to fight for it. You have to have a sword in each hand at all times. One sword is for your own mind and the other sword is for everyone else’s mind. You must be ready to use them. Anyone who wants to be truly free must be willing to stand alone in the truth.
—Andrew Cohen
The beginning always starts off easy. “I want to write a book,” you say. So maybe you take a class or two. Maybe you buy a book on writing. Maybe you join a critique group. In the beginning, you are filled with possibilities, burning with potential and promise. In the beginning, you really believe that in one semester you can learn all there is to learn about writing and be on your way to the Great American Novel. And then the beginning, a time of sweet kisses and daily flower deliveries, turns into the middle. Ideas that were once svelte and flexible and able to party until three o’clock in the morning turn into the same old stories, the same old conversation over and over.
“This is no longer love!” you exclaim, and toss your idea, once burning with fire and promise, onto the pyre of self-loathing and vow to start anew with something fresher, more exciting, more flexible and inspiring than ever before. This new idea’s kisses are even sweeter, the flowers more fragrant. This is the one. And then this beginning becomes another middle. And this middle has a spare tire around its belly. And this middle lost its job. And this middle’s eyesight is failing. What to do? This one was the one! Obviously, you don’t know how to pick ’em. Next time you’ll pick one even younger. Stronger. With a faster car.
Stop.
Anyone can fall in love. Not just anyone can stay in love.
The Writing Warrior’s path is about staying in love. The Writing Warrior’s path is about ruthless self-study. The Writing Warrior gazes in the mirror and notices, without judgment, what she sees. She is also aware that she cannot see it all. The Writing Warrior acknowledges that he sees the world through lenses, and he knows each lens creates a distortion. He has the courage to remove the lenses as he becomes aware of them, and he also has the courage to know when he still needs a lens.
The Writing Warrior stands steady in the center of her work, not reaching too far into the past or too far into the future. She is rooted to the earth, and her spine reaches toward heaven. She identifies and acknowledges the distractions and illusions in her path and, with compassion and clarity, strikes them down. She is aware of her patterns and any tendencies to get in her own way, and she can laugh at herself, openly and with wide lips.
The Writing Warrior knows his time on earth is finite and wants to live it fully. He knows he has essays to write, stories to share, poems to create, and he knows it is his charge to write them. She knows that writing is sacred, that it carries great power, and that it takes work. She knows that though the stories and poems appear as gifts, they require her diligence, her patience, and her discipline to realize their full potential. He must be alert. She must be faithful.
The Writing Warrior’s pen is a sword, used both to slice away the mind’s illusions and the illusions of the world around her. The Writing Warrior does not pick up the pen lightly. He respects its power, its magic, and its teachings. He knows it carries responsibilities. She steps up to the page, the morning’s battlefield, bows to the pen, the page, and to herself. She is ready to cut away what does not serve. He is ready to carve out a new landscape. The pen is also ready, and bows to the warrior, offering its ink as a sacred covenant.
Welcome to the path. We have been waiting for you.
CHAPTER 2
Structure Is Alive
No smallest atom of our moral, mental, or physical structure can stand still a year. It grows—it must grow; nothing can prevent it.
—Mark Twain
Structure is alive.
Write this down. Keep it in your heart. Move it into your body. Structure is fluid. It’s essential, but it must breathe. There must be space around any structure you impose—whether it’s around your writing discipline and practice or around the form and shape of an actual project. You must allow air in to the framework you erect. You must allow for some bending, some stretching.
The next chapter will outline the primary practice for this book. It consists of three parts: breathing, shaking, and writing. I offer this discipline as a gift, not a prison. Each section closes with additional writing exercises to help you with your inner writing journey and your primary writing projects. Take what is valuable to you and let th
e rest go.
Any structure that does not come organically from the person working within it will not hold. Any structure for a novel that does not come organically from the spirit of the work itself will not hold. So proceed deeper into this book with caution. It’s likely you’ll resist some of the practice structures I suggest. That’s OK. But it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try them. It also doesn’t mean you should do them forever. Anything that doesn’t have fluidity will freeze, and being frozen is the last thing you want—in your writing or in your body. Throughout the book I will remind you to look within and ask yourself what is authentically right for you. You, not me, must have the discerning eye for your practice. Are you choosing not to do something because it isn’t the right thing for you, or are you choosing not to do something because you’re practicing avoidance? Only you will know the truth.
I have provided a sample structure because structure is essential. However, just like with clothing (no matter what the labels say), a one-size structure does not fit all writers. There are many paths to the same center. But most writers I’ve worked with, myself included, need someplace to start.
The breathing practice I ask you to begin with helps you quiet down and settle into your body and your space.
The shaking practice brings you quickly into your body and, since the body is a holistic organism, as you move energy through it, you will break up stagnation and make space in your mind. (Don’t be scared! I’ll explain this later.) Remember, the mind is indeed a part of the body, not its own separate entity—much though it would like to be! Making space within allows our art to flow. The shaking practice is simple and fast; however, there are many ways into the body. Try shaking. If it’s not a fit, then dance, jog, practice yoga, qigong, or gymnastics; find a physical outlet that creates opening, not contraction, for you. But don’t be afraid of the shaking just because it’s unfamiliar.
And finally, the writing practice should be obvious in its intent—thou must write! But it’s more than that. Because of the order of the practices, the writing will often serve more to stretch your writing muscles than to develop a character study or dramatic scene. It’s not the content of the writing that matters here. It’s the consistency. Just like you can’t run a marathon well without training and stretching, you can’t expect to show up at your writing area without priming the pump with some consistency. That’s what we’re looking for with the writing practice—consistency regardless of the outcome. This will help you recognize that your writing, like your body, is different every day. You are not a machine. You cannot produce the same number of pages or words every day for the rest of your life.