What a strange thing!
to be alive
beneath cherry blossoms.
By Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828), a Japanese poet known for his haiku poems and journals. Issa is regarded as one of the four haiku masters in Japan, along with Bashō, Buson, and Shiki.
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The beautiful spring came; and when Nature resumes her loveliness, the human soul is apt to revive also. – Harriet Ann Jacobs
You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming. – Pablo Neruda
I am going to try to pay attention to the spring. I am going to look around at all the flowers, and look up at the hectic trees. I am going to close my eyes and listen. – Anne Lamott
With the coming of spring, I am calm again. – Gustav Mahler
No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn. – Hal Borland
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Last night I dreamt of … Bear with me, please. I know, reading about someone’s dreams is as exciting as watching your computer progressing through system updates—even well-written ones.
I guess it has to do with their purely fictional character. We know they’re made up. Fiction pretends to be real, and we call it out when it’s not working. We’re willing to listen to the tale that is disguised as true, but not to the dream we know is not.
Dreams are second hand, involuntary fiction.
So, I had a dream. I won’t bother you with the details. But being through a scary experience (being lost in a city I didn’t know, walking very determined to nowhere), I did what all writers do: wrote about it in the dream. I had, apparently, decided that I could at least get a story out of that scare. Never let a good crisis go to waste, and all that.
And when I woke up, I wrote about the dream. As any writer would do.
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The lark sings through the long spring day,
But never enough for its hearts’ content.
by Matsuo Basho (1644 – 1694) was the most famous Edo period poet and a haiku master.
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One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
– Annie Dillard (b. 1945), American author. Her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a “sustained nonfiction narrative about the fields, creeks, woods, and mountains near Roanoke, Virginia,” won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
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All creation is an act of faith. Faith in yourself and your capacity. Your skills. Your persistence. Your vision. Especially your vision.
As an artist, you don’t have a blueprint, a manual to show you the way. No IKEA how-to-kit. “Follow these steps, assemble these parts; here’s the final product.” Only the vision in your mind, of what it could be.
At times, you may waver. Self-doubt creeps in. You run into a problem, and your vision seems to be more and more a fata morgana, a mirage drawing further and further away.
Other times, you cannot be even bothered to do the work. “What’s the use? It’ll be useless. It’s such a bad idea.”
That’s fine, in fact. Self-doubt is an artist’s constant companion. We have to learn to live with it. Acknowledge it, look it in the eye, and keep working.
There’s no other way.
If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means, paint, and that voice will be silenced.
― Vincent van Gogh
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I have caught up departing Spring
Here at the Bay of Waka-no-ura.
Matsuo Basho (1644 – 1694) was the most famous Edo period poet and a haiku master.
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Creativity thrives on constraints; I said it many times. Social distancing and closed meeting places hurt creativity, it’s true. But we cannot wait until life is back to normal (or to the new normal, rather) to be creative. We have to work with what we have, right here, right now. In solitude. Hurting. Hoping.
We have to become our own support system, our own cheerleaders. Acknowledge the hurt, the anxiety, the not knowing. And move past them. Otherwise, we’d become stuck.
In a scene from “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” Harry, Ron, and Hermione struggle to free themselves from a giant plant. The more they struggle, the more the plant tightens around them. Once they relax and stop moving, they’re free.
We have to stop struggling to become free.
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As a writer, as an artist in any field, in fact, you need stamina. Endurance. Grit. Persistence. The equivalent of Rule #1 in Zombieland: cardio. Cardio for the brain.
Laboring day after day, alone, with no other guidance than the vision in your head, takes its toll. You waver. You stumble and fall. You lose your way (even Dante needed a guide).
Self-doubt sets in. “Am I really doing the right thing? Should I have gone a different way? What if I fail? Is this good enough?” The inner critic gains on you; you start losing yourself, overwhelmed by his incessant, malicious chatter.
Patience wears thin. You look at the few lines you wrote and imagine the unfathomable amount of time it’ll take to stretch it in a book. A whole book. How would you ever get there? You can’t imagine it anymore.
Distractions attack your focus. You mean to check a synonym, and half an hour is gone, without a synonym to show for it. (But on the other hand, you know a lot more about the mating rituals of penguins).
Yet, somehow, you have to keep going. Keep working, keep realizing the vision in your head, despite, at times, crippling self-doubt, constant restlessness, and distractions.
How do you do that? How do you keep going when you feel you’ve spent yourself, and you don’t have anything left to give? When you can’t imagine writing one more paragraph, let alone a whole page or a whole chapter?
Simple. Small steps.
Forget the goal (a whole book!), just focus on the task for the day. Writing 500 words. Or 1,000. Then forget them as well.
Write one sentence. Just one. Then the next one. Then the next one.
Don’t think, just write. One word at a time. Pebble by pebble by pebble, as Donna Tartt says*.
Successful writers are the ones who keep working, not the ones who have talent or write beautiful sentences. Yes, there may be more talented writers, and yes, some may write better than you. But this means nothing if they don’t persevere and actually finish the project. What matters, in the end, is the end result.
So, you write one word, and another one, and another one. Day after day after day. There’s no other way.
* It is just pebble by pebble by pebble by pebble. I write one sentence until I am happy with it until I go on to the next one and write that one until I am happy with it. And I look at my paragraph and if I am not happy with that I’ll write the paragraph until I’m happy with it and then I go on this way. And, of course, even writing this very slow way, one does have to go back. One does start off on the wrong foot sometimes and a whole scene has to be chopped and you have to start over again. Generally, you know that pretty quickly though. You realize you have painted yourself into a corner and you think, “Okay I am just going to trace my footsteps back to the last solid bit of ground that I know. Look around start again and take a different tack.” It’s the way that William Styron writes and he said, when he was about my age, that he realized that he had maybe four or five books in him—the way that he worked—and he said he was fine with that. I’m fine with that too. It’s okay by me. – Donna Tartt
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My gift to you will be an abyss, she said,
but it will be so subtle you’ll perceive it
only after many years have passed
and you are far from Mexico and me.
You’ll find it when you need it most,
and that won’t be
the happy ending,
but it will be an instant of emptiness and joy.
And maybe then you’ll remember me,
if only just a little.
by Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003), Chilean novelist, short-story writer, poet and essayist.
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