Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

Over and over I have done timed writings beginning with “I remember,” “I am looking at,” “I know,” “I

feel, I don’t feel.” I use these for warm-ups. It stretches my mind in positive and negative directions, in obvious and hidden places, in the conscious and the unconscious. It also is a chance to survey my mind and limber me up before I direct my thoughts to whatever I am working on.

Style requires digesting who we are. It comes from the inside. It does not mean I write like Flannery O’Connor or Willa Cather, but that I have fully digested their work, and on top of this or with this I have also fully digested my life: Jewish, American, Buddhist woman in the twentieth century with a grandmother who owned a poultry market, a fath

I thought I would be redundant, but reading a book about writing is different from actually getting down and doing writing. I was naïve. I should have remembered that after I read the Tibetan Book of the Dead, I was still afraid to die.

6. You are free to write the worst junk in America.

So our job as writers is not to diddle around our whole lives in the dot but to take one big step out of it and sink into the big sky and write from there. Let everything run through us and grab as much as we can of it with a pen and paper. Let yourself live in something that is already rightfully yours—your own wild mind.

2. Lose control. Say what you want to say. Don’t worry if it’s correct, polite, appropriate. Just let it rip.

“Why, Naa-da-lee, this book should be very successful. When you are done with it, you know the author better. That’s all a reader really wants”—she nodded her head—“to know the author better. Even if it’s a novel, they want to know the author.”

It’s better to figure out what you want to say in the actual act of writing.

If I give myself a little gap, I’m off for an hour daydreaming. You have to learn your own rhythm, but make sure you do some focused, disciplined “keeping the hand moving” to learn about cutting through resistance.