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I am deep in the tremendous learning process that is writing. One of the reasons I believe that bright, successful adults take on the project of writing—of being beginner writers—is that writing has such a steep learning curve. Think treadmill set at the highest hill. Even if everything else has come easy for you, writing won’t.
Oh, it might at first. The thrill of carving an image onto the page using ink, using words. But then, the more we learn, the more we realize we have to learn. Everything we read that knocks the breath out of us has to be re-examined as a lesson in the craft of writing.
But at heart, we love the challenge, don’t we? You can never just phone it in.
There’s more, too. It’s like meditating. Writing asks you to be in the present, in your senses, in your body and in your emotions—as you experience them through your senses and through your body. There’s just no escaping those senses, that body.
There’s a great article in the recent New Yorker about new research on psychedelics. What psychedelics do that no other drugs (or alcohol) do but that meditation does do is shut down your “default mode network.” This is the physical equivalent, in the brain, of the ego—a massive control system that regulates the communications between the other pieces of the brain.
When that shuts down, incredible, creative connections are possible. Writing asks us to shut down the default mode, too—without drugs, without meditation. To get really present. To trust what bubbles up. Mostly we can’t turn off the default mode, and so we have to ignore it. As you can imagine, it does not like to be ignored. It panics. It issues dire warnings: what you are doing is dangerous, stupid, vile, a waste of time and energy. Child’s play. Idiotic. Forbidden. Just plain bad.
Lull it to sleep. How? Keep writing. Let the other pieces of the brain connect. Let whimsy rule. Instinct. A mash-up of the visual, the reptilian, the imaginative. Kaleidoscopic. Powerful. And if you can’t lull it to sleep, learn to ignore it. It’s just the background noise, the music, to which you create. And you have so many things to say.