Hello again, readers! The past month has been a time of reemergence for me: from the book-writing cave, into some summer activities and chats with old friends back home, also into sorting out next projects and new ideas.
And in the meantime, I’ve thought a lot about writing itself, about the meandering steps and winding trails that words can carve through the mind. There are some mantras that have stuck with me for many years now:
Good writing is patient writing.
Good writing is language under pressure.
Writing is rewriting.
Credit still goes to my very first writing teachers, who got these phrases embedded in my head. They are still true, especially the last one, which I now say with a wry grin whenever someone comes to me with a book idea: That’s awesome! Go for it! Full speed ahead! But also know that, along the way, you will throw out most of what you have written.
Yes, the thing you’re trying to say will be born and reborn, again and again. Most of your words, even your favorite ones, will wind up in the trash or in some random “discard” document on your computer (I call mine “scrapings”).
I still remember a creative writing professor during my college years who challenged us to strike out our very favorite sentence in whatever draft we’d just written.
“Take it out,” he said, “no matter how much you love it. Maybe because of how much you love it.”
In some ways, this was just a class exercise, one of those tasks we undertook to hone our skills, to challenge ourselves and find more ways to say the thing. But now, I can see how right he was, too.
Because sometimes your love for the words, your beautiful brilliant words, these gems that came out of your mind, can block you from seeing what the draft really needs. Sometimes the thrall of these words can turn into a distraction, or into unnecessary fluff, simply not suited anymore to what you’re trying to do. Sometimes you do need to find a new way to say the thing.
Or sometimes not. Sometimes the beautiful words need to stay. This is why writing is endlessly fascinating.
I’m sure the next book I write will be different, even if many bits will be the same: butt in chair, discipline trumps motivation, one day and one paragraph at a time, et cetera.
And yet. I’ve also become convinced that so many things really are writing, beyond these tried-and-true mantras, beyond the pen and paper and the computer keys and the butt smooshed in the chair.
So, as part of some ongoing reflections about process, fresh out of the quirks of my book-writing cave, I’ll venture into a few non-writing activities that I’m sure really are writing.
Today’s edition: Walking Is Writing.
This one is no real revelation. It’s very often a cliché. See: Henry David Thoreau, J.R.R. Tolkien, William Wordsworth, Rebecca Solnit, et al, ad nauseam.
Also see: an abundance of books and articles written about the creative benefits of walking, or on writers walking, or sallying forth, or wandering, or sauntering, or what have you.
Want to think of a writing idea? Just go on a walk! The end! This might seem like another bit of conventional wisdom. But, for me, there are still further contours to narrate. Hear me out with this particular sketch.
A few months before my book was due, I suddenly had some nasty mold in my apartment. To spare some of the gross details, my landlord wasn’t being very responsive, the mold was turning up everywhere, I was starting to feel not-so-great, and I knew I couldn’t stay. Those weeks threw me into unexpected crisis — and fortunately I was in a position where I was able to get myself out. Fortunately, I also had some sweet friends offer to let me stay in a spare studio on their property outside of Boston. It was quite literally a godsend. (Hallelujah for friends and new farm-communes!)
After downsizing my stuff, putting most of my belongings in storage, and taking a carload or so to this new place, I landed on a little farm in the woods for the last two or three months of book-revising. This became my time to play Thoreau.
I mean it — I was living just a few miles from Walden Pond, which I biked past many times on the way to Concord and surrounding environs. I took my dog on a walk in the woods every day, often with a cool new neighbor of mine who is also a writer. And also often by myself, which I love just as much.
Sometimes, when I take a walk, I set out to think about a particular “writing problem,” often linked to structure or sequence of ideas — how one section of a piece connects to the others, for instance, or how to follow a particular loose thread and pull it tight.
I walk in space and, by looking around at the trees and houses and fields and birds, I start to think spatially, too — to gain the distance it takes to think of an idea as its own complete entity, with its own particular shape and relationship to all its parts. This is the “deep-thinking” bit of writing that always feels deeply tied to movement, to my body.
But, just as often, I go out and try not to think about writing at all. The ideas are elusive. Or the walk is an end in itself, a respite, separate from my modern human goals of efficiency and productivity. It becomes part of my process of living, of settling into my body and the world around it. And it’s simply a pleasure — which I think is really the point.
I remember taking many walks in the Massachusetts woods while trying to completely rewrite my final book chapter (kudos to my writer-neighbor who listened to me complain plenty of times about this!). I could feel the deadline approaching fast. When I went out by myself, trying not to think about this last chapter and my frustrations with it, sometimes I’d get home a little less frustrated. Ready to try again, to keep on keeping some parts and throwing others away. I’d feel invigorated by what I’d seen out in the woods, beautiful birds or leaping deer or beaver-dams on one of the local marshes, or random quirky things I’d discovered beside the trail.
Or it would just be buggy and gross (it was May by then) and I’d check the walk off my list for the day and go take a shower and eat some food, maybe infused with a small new sense of proportion and perspective. Also the point.
Only some of the time would I actually have one of those proverbial breakthroughs on a walk — not in sum, as if a final draft is a mythical thing that just comes to you like a lightning-bolt out of the sky, but bit by bit. I pulled out my phone and typed notes to myself in the woods. I thought of spiteful little words that had been eluding me. (Aha!) I chuckled at delicious new ideas. Some of them failed me. Others were decent. No matter. They pointed to bits of the trail ahead — again, not all at once, but as part of a process of thinking and breathing and living.
There’s more to say, but these woods walks joined all the walks I’ve taken over the last few years, the walks I’ve set out on because I feel stuck or I need a hour to myself or just because it’s a gorgeous day and I want to. I did think about Thoreau in those woods and New England marshes, just because Walden was so close. I thought about my breath, the air, my body, the other bodies around me, about the importance of time outdoors each day, of preserving “a margin to one’s life.”
Ideas sometimes spring from that margin, or from being comfortably someplace with ourselves. Writing is rewriting. Which can mean walking, too.