Remember then that picking a field to write in is totally different from slanting within that field. If your great love happens to be the world of the future, it is only right that you spend your energies on science fiction. Your passion will protect you from slanting or imitation beyond the allowable learning-point. No field, fully loved, can be bad for a writer. Only types of selfconscious writing in a field can do great harm.
Why aren’t more “creative” stories written and sold in our time, in any time? Mainly, I believe, because many writers don’t even know about this way of working which I have discussed here. We are so used to the dichotomy of “literary” as opposed to “commercial” writing that we haven’t labeled or considered the Middle Way, the way to the creative process that is best for everyone and most conducive to producing stories that are agreeable to snobs and hacks alike.
As usual we have solved our problem, or thought we solved it, by cramming everything in two boxes with two names. Anything that doesn’t fit in one box or another doesn’t fit anywhere. So long as we continue to do and think this way, our writers will continue to truss and bind themselves. The High Road, the Happy Way, lies between.
Now — are you surprised? — seriously I must suggest that you read ZEN IN THE ART OF ARCHERY, a book by Eugen Herrigel.
Here the words, or words like them, WORK, RELAXATION, and DON’T THINK appear in different aspects and different settings.
I knew nothing of ZEN until a few weeks ago. What little I know now, since you must be curious as to the reason for my title, is that here again, in the art of archery, long years must pass where one learns simply the act of drawing the bow and fitting the arrow. Then the process, sometimes tedious and nervewracking, of preparing to allow the string, the arrow, to release itself. The arrow must fly on its way to a target that must never be considered.
I don’t think, after this long article, I have to show you, here, the relationship between archery and the writer’s art. I have already warned against thinking on targets.
Instinctively, years ago, I knew the part that Work must play in my life. More than twelve years ago I wrote in ink on my typing board at my right hand the words: DON’T THINK! Can you blame me if, at this late date, I am delighted when I stumble upon verification of my instinct in Herrigel’s book on Zen?
The time will come when your characters will write your stories for you, when your emotions, free of literary cant and commercial bias, will blast the page and tell the truth.
Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations. Plot is observed after the fact rather than before. It cannot precede action. It is the chart that remains when an action is through. That is all Plot ever should be. It is human desire let run, running, and reaching a goal. It cannot be mechanical. It can only be dynamic.
So, stand aside, forget targets, let the characters, your fingers, body, blood, and heart do.
Contemplate not your navel then, but your subconscious with what Wordsworth called “a wise passiveness.” You need to go to Zen for the answer to your problems. Zen, like all philosophies, followed but in the tracks of men who learned from instinct what was good for them. Every wood-turner, every sculptor worth his marble, every ballerina, practices what Zen preaches without having heard the word in all their lives.
“It is a wise father that knows his own child,” should be paraphrased to “It is a wise writer who knows his own subconscious.” And not only knows it but lets it speak of the world as it and it alone has sensed it and shaped it to its own truth.
Schiller advised those who would compose to “Remove the watchers from the gates of intelligence.”
Coleridge put it thus: “The streamy nature of association, which thinking curbs and rudders.”
Lastly, for additional reading to supplement what I have said, Aldous Huxley’s “The Education of an Amphibian” in his book, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.
And, a really fine book, Dorothea Brande’s Becoming A Writer, published many years ago, but detailing many of the ways a writer can find out who he is and how to get the stuff of himself out on paper, often through word-association.
Now, have I sounded like a cultist of some sort? A yogi feeding on kumquats, grapenuts and almonds here beneath the banyan tree? Let me assure you I speak of all these things only because they have worked for me for fifty years. And I think they might work for you. The true test is in the doing.
Be pragmatic, then. If you’re not happy with the way your writing has gone, you might give my method a try.
If you do, I think you might easily find a new definition for Work.
And the word is LOVE.
1973
… ON CREATIVITY
GO PANTHER-PAWED WHERE ALL THE MINED TRUTHS SLEEP
Not smash and grab, but rather find and keep;
Go panther-pawed where all the mined truths sleep
To detonate the hidden seeds with stealth
So in your wake a weltering of wealth
Springs up unseen, ignored, and left behind
As you sneak on, pretending to be blind.
On your return along the jungle path you’ve made
Find all the littered stuffs where you have strayed;
The small truths and the large have surfaced there
Where you stealth-blundered wildly unaware
Or seeming so. And so these mines were mined
In easy game of pace and pounce and find;
But mostly fluid pace, not too much pounce.
Attention must be paid, but by the ounce.
Mock caring, seem aloof, ignore each mile
And metaphors like cats behind your smile
Each one wound up to purr, each one a pride,
Each one a fine gold beast you’ve hid inside,
Now summoned forth in harvests from the brake
Turned anteloping elephants that shake
And drum and crack the mind to awe,
To behold beauty yet perceive its flaw.
Then, flaw discovered, like fair beauty’s mole,
Haste back to reckon all entire, the Whole.
This done, pretend these wits you do not keep,
Go panther-pawed where all the mined truths sleep.
WHAT I DO IS ME — FOR THAT I CAME
for Gerard Manley Hopkins
What I do is me — for that I came.
What I do is me!
For that I came into the world!
So said Gerard;
So said that gentle Manley Hopkins.
In his poetry and prose he saw the Fates that chose
Him in genetics, then set him free to find his way
Among the sly electric printings in his blood.
God thumbprints thee! he said.
Within your hour of birth
He touches hand to brow, He whorls and softly stamps
The ridges and the symbols of His soul above your eyes!
But in that selfsame hour, full born and shouting
Shocked pronouncements of one’s birth,
In mirrored gaze of midwife, mother, doctor
See that Thumbprint fade and fall away in flesh
So, lost, erased, you seek a lifetime’s days for it
And dig deep to find the sweet instructions there
Put by when God first circuited and printed thee to life:
“Go hence! do this! do that! do yet another thing!
This self is yours! Be it!”
And what is that?! you cry at hearthing breast,
Is there no rest? No, only journeying to be yourself.
And even as the Birthmark vanishes, in seashell ear
Now fading to a sigh, His last words send you in the world:
“Not mother, father, grandfather are you.
Be not another. Be the self I signed you in your blood.
I swarm your flesh with you. Seek that.
And, finding, be what no one else can be.
I leave you gifts of Fate most secret; find no other’s Fate,
For if you do, no grave is deep enough for your despair
No country far enough to hide your loss.
I circumnavigate each cell in you
Your merest molecule is right and true.
Look there for destinies indelible and fine And rare.
Ten thousand futures share your blood each instant;
Each drop of blood a cloned electric twin of you.
In merest wound on hand read replicas of what I planned and knew
Before your birth, then hid it in your heart.
No part of you that does not snug and hold and hide
The self that you will be if faith abide.
What you do is thee. For that I gave you birth.
Be that. So be the only you that’s truly you on Earth.”
Dear Hopkins. Gentle Manley. Rare Gerard. Fine name.
What we do is us. Because of you. For that we came.
THE OTHER ME
I do not write
The other me
Demands emergence constantly.
But if I turn to face him much too swiftly
Then
He sidles back to where and when
He was before
I unknowingly cracked the door
And let him out.
Sometimes a fire-shout beckons him,
He reckons that I need him,
So I do. His task
To tell me who I am behind this mask.
He Phantom is, and I facade
That hides the opera he writes with God,
While I, all blind,
Wait raptureless until his mind
Steals down my arm to wrist, to hand, to fingertips
And, stealing, find Such truths as fall from tongues
And burn with sound,
And all of it from secret blood and secret soul on secret ground.
With glee
He sidles forth to write, then run and hide
All week until another try at hide-and-seek
In which I do pretend
That teasing him is not my end.
Yet tease I do and feign to look away,
Or else that secret self will hide all day.
I run and play some simple game,
A mindless leap
Which from sleep summons forth
The bright beast, lurking, whose preserves
And gaming ground? My breath,
My blood, my nerves.
But where in all that stuff does he abide?
In all my rampant seekings, where’s he hide?
Behind this ear like gum,
That
