The Writing Life by Annie Dillard

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

Leaf by Niggle by J.R.R. Tolkein

Annie Dillard is a wonderful writer and her book The Writing Life is filled with great stories, metaphors, and advice. Writing a piece is like building a house, you lay the foundation, you stack the bricks, you nail some boards… (I have no idea how a house is built) … you put the roof on, your paint the sides, etc.

But what if all you have is a really nice doorknob and no house to put it on? Maybe you’re like Dave Chappelle – a fishbowl full of hilarious punchlines, with no premise to attach them to. An orphanage of impactful moments, with no family of context in which they can live. You’re impatient to get the house built so you can show off that shiny doorknob, the crown jewel of your recent mental activity.

Dillard doesn’t seem keen to give advice to aspiring young writers, but rather capture the experience of a writer’s lifestyle. Still, with so many literary notches on her belt, a little instruction inevitably leaks out.

My takeaway is to imitate what she does – go to a remote cabin in the Pacific Northwest, take nothing for the journey, no staff, no bag, no second cloak. Lock yourself inside this windowless toolshed with a typewriter and mercilessly choke out all distractions. As you sit alone, in this dimly lit cell, start chain smoking some cigarettes and binge drink strongly brewed coffee. After 12 hours of this your reward will be to go outside and observe the dead logs that wash ashore from that inhospitable, hypothermia inducing ocean water.

After weeks of this miserable man versus nature experience, where you’ve only slept on a hard cot in the corner of the toolshed for several hours at a time, and there’s a very real risk that some backpacker is going to find your shriveled remains hunched over the typewriter in a few years – a paragraph or two of something resembling words on a page crystalize from the extreme heat and pressure of your mind. Congratulations, you’ve written something!

Dillard is hilarious and witty, but she seems more hard boiled than a small market comedy club owner.

However, for all her posturing, Dillard really is getting off easy.

Oh, what a life, to be surrounding by pine trees and white noise from the ocean, coffee grounds and thick tobacco smoke – all alone in a room far from demands. Sounds like an ideal vacation to me. For as any parent can tell you, the greatest escape is to be left alone, unsupervised for a while.

I also binge drink coffee, but I don’t grind up the beans when the words stop flowing and I need a break. They are already ground when the water stops boiling, I plunge the French press and sit down for twenty minutes while my son takes a bath. This entire blog is written in those twenty minutes, brick by brick, while someone shouts at me from the other room “BABA COME LOOK AT THIS!!! BABA, I NEED HELP!!! BABAAAA!!!”

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Steven Pressfield has an amazing life story and wrote The War of Art, one of the great recent books written on the creative process (and a tremendous title to boot).

His book is structured in the same manner as Sun Zi’s The Art of War, pithy snippets on how to defeat the inner enemy that holds back your creative productivity. He gives personification to the enemy of creative production, naming it The Resistance.

The Resistance is the inner demon that keeps us from accomplishing our intentions, artistic or otherwise. This is mostly accomplished through rampant procrastination, avoidance, self-sabotage, and medicating away the present moment. Pressfield seems to hint that The Resistance may be Satan himself, the chief spiritual thief of our joy and fulfillment.

Having been somewhat of an aimless, wandering, lazy, quasi artist until his early 40s, Pressfield’s breakthrough came when he put his life in order, by transforming himself into a highly organized individual in every area of his life. Having been a former U.S. Marine, surely his ethos is influenced by that military experience.

His remedy to the Resistance is a work regiment that ruthlessly eliminates all excuses and distractions. The book is a no nonsense, kick in the pants from a whistle blowing drill sergeant for writing. Having seen the carnage of an undisciplined life, he will not hold your hand or shed a tear when you share all the reasons why what you meant to accomplish isn’t yet completed.

As he describes it, his routine is to warm up, write for a brief and highly focused period of time, and then power down for the day. If I’m recalling correctly, the whole process is done well before lunchtime.

Pressfield is like your unforgiving Uncle, who won’t speak to you for months after you dropped a pass in the end zone. So, if your confidence is low or your reserves are spent, may I suggest you instead check out to Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write. She is going to mother you, tend your wounds, and encourage you back on your way.

Astoundingly she published the book in 1938, a time period in the world when “expressing yourself” via weekly blog was considered socially deviant behavior. (That’s how Addy Hitler first wrote the bulk of Mein Kampf).

Writers at that time were reprobates: a bunch of heroin addicted, jazz loving, long haired losers, writing poems in their mom’s basement. Yet Brenda (or Aunty Bea, if you prefer) loves them and even encourages ordinary folks, good people who work in mechanic’s shops and tall buildings where suits and ties are required, to become creatives!

Surely, she was ahead of her time. This book is cutting edge, she essentially wrote Creative Quest, decades before drummer Questlove’s parents even had a glimmer of attraction in their eyes.

Is she advocating enrichment or anarchy for society? Do we need a class of professional makers to stand apart from the rest of our communities or is there some deeper value when everybody gets in on the action – Cousin Terry whittling away at his carvings or the kid next door Dante writing songs on the trombone.

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Anne Lamott would probably agree that everybody should get a chance to be creative, just as long as they don’t expect to enjoy professional success. She is keenly aware of the joys and limitations of writing (and getting published).

Her book Bird by Bird is laugh out loud funny, her voice is neurotic and self-aware, and she gives good advice. Like the other authors she is a strong advocate for putting a little something on the page each day – good or bad.

However, you want to look at it – Bird by Bird, Brick by Brick, Moment by Moment against the Resistance – doing a few words each day is the commonly prescribed remedy for writer’s block.

I remember the heydays of writing my first book. It was the waning months of our time in Shanghai. Still no children, a job that was fairly flexible, and I would leave the office each day in the early afternoon to go to the 1001 Nights Restaurant. I went so much that the staff all knew me. As soon as I walked through the door, the waiters would go in the back to fire up my grape shisha and Turkish coffee. I would sit in a smoke-filled booth, binge drinking cardamom flavored coffee from tiny cups, sucking on the hookah, WRITING A BOOK.

I felt very cool and bohemian. The atmosphere was like a magic genie had blessed Annie Dillard’s lousy little toolshed.

But the writer’s block was very real during that period. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t just go bowling some days instead of writing a few lines. According to my understanding, writer’s block is when you have too much time and no ideas for the page or stage.

In many ways, the challenge is the exact opposite now – too many ideas and a very small window in which to squeeze them all out.

At thirty-three in the morning, rocking a baby to sleep, both hands completely tied, interesting phrases and ideas alluringly dance in my mind. I’ve got to try and remember these. Hang on to the thought until I can get somewhere to jot it down. I inevitably fall asleep, hoping to remember.

And like manna from heaven, the ideas have disappeared when I wake in the morning.

***

Long before director Peter Jackson turned Lord of the Rings into an ordeal chronologically longer than waiting in line at the local ICBC (工商银行), J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a book called Leaf by Niggle. Perhaps writing is more like the plot of this book.

Niggle is a man who lives out in the country and loves to paint. He has a huge canvas in the barn out behind his cottage, where he is working on his masterpiece – the painting of an enormous tree. He has put years into every detail, he spends months, even years painting the most intricate contours of a single leaf on this tree.

But mostly Niggle is interrupted by the chores and responsibilities of daily life. A neighbor comes by to ask for help, people from town show up to see if he’s busy, he has errands to run.

While he is out running errands all he can think about is getting back home as quickly as possible and continuing work on his painting. Fresh ideas and images come to him while he is away from the house. He tries desperately to keep these new ideas intact in his mind and rush back home to put them down on the canvas before he forgets.

Unfortunately, Niggle finds that whenever he is away from the canvas inspiration seems to flow to him freely, but as soon as he has a quiet moment at home and climbs his ladder to paint, the ideas vanish. He is a frustrated and overextended artist. People take, not just from him, but also from his painting, which they view as mostly superfluous.

Niggle dies without ever having finished his painting. He is in a strange medical purgatory for a time, until being released to go to heaven. There in paradise before him is the tree he has been painting all along, only it is completed and real now. Niggle realizes that what he’d been trying to paint all those years was in fact his heavenly reality. At the end of the book he is invited to leave the tree and go paint other far wilder territories of heaven with his expert brush.

***

The creative flame sits inside us all, yearning to be released. Whether it be painting, comedy, cooking, music, administration, customer service, building a deck, or even just a well mowed lawn – we innately are drawn to paint our version of heaven. The world becomes better when we do, so that inner voice is not to be ignored.

For me, ideas are like a lit stick of dynamite, I must get them out of my hands quickly. They are a gallon of milk that will turn sour if neglected for too long.

Yet the writing life is not so realistic. Like Niggle, these ideas are nestled in with work that pays, dishes, laundry, baby, doctors’ appointments, and negotiations with children. There are no office hours of uninterrupted silence imposed with Marine-like strictness, no months long retreat to a windowless toolshed in the San Juan Islands.

Make sure the coffee pot is ready ahead of time. If you want to write, run some bath water and get the kid in the tub.

The water is warm, the bubbles are fun – write, write, write, because the clock is ticking.

If You Want to Write...