Six years ago, I posted a poll to my blog,
asking for feedback from my readers. One of the questions was whether I
posted too often or not enough. Their answer was unambiguous: 60 percent
of respondents chose “too infrequently”, while none chose
“too frequently”. Surprisingly to me, my readers wanted more
of my “stuff”.
From 2003 through 2008, I averaged 85 blog posts per year. Since
then, however, I’ve become steadily less prolific
each year: 49 blog posts in 2009, then 44, then 39, then only 31 in
2012 (with a quarter of those being PMC voice posts). Around that same
time, I also stopped writing fiction.
This is a massive change for me. What caused me to step away
from an entire lifetime of writing?
In the case of blogging, I think there are some
obvious reasons.
Five or ten years ago, blogging was the new, cool thing. A lot of
people were entranced by the novelty of it, and started dumping their
thoughts out on screen. More than the novelty of blogging, I was
motivated by the opportunity to have my posts seen by many of my close
friends. Having my musings read by my social circle has always been
important to me, but that motivator gradually dried up as people
abandoned blogging and my readership dwindled.
And some of the blogs that used to post topics to write
about—like the old Friday Five
questions—also fell by the wayside as the novelty wore off,
taking away a regular prompt to write.
And although I don’t think Facebook killed my need to write,
I did find myself posting many of my very short one-time
observations there, rather than writing them up in my blog. For most
people, Facebook provided a better way to share the details of their
lives than blogs ever did.
But it’s not all about the medium, either. When I stepped away
from the consulting world, that reduced the number of places I traveled
to and people I met, which were always good writing fodder.
And let’s face it: I’ve ranted and raved my way through
over a thousand blog posts. It takes a bit of creativity to come up with
a topic I haven’t already spewed about more than once!
Even my Buddhist practice, which filled more than a hundred posts,
has matured to the point where I’m not being introduced to many
new concepts, and I no longer feel the need to review every book I read
or dhamma talk or retreat that I go to.
The bottom line being that there’s simply less for me
to say these days.
Now, that explains blogging, but what about
fiction?
While there are many factors involved, I want to explore one
particular one: the impact my meditation practice has had upon
my writing.
I’ve long held the belief that Buddhism and creative artistic
expression have an uneasy relationship, and that’s doubly so for
something like prose, which is so heavily based in language and concept.
But a recent article
in Buddhadharma magazine has prompted me to commit my thoughts here.
A lot of this may sound a bit strange to non-meditators, but hopefully
some of the concepts can get across.
I used to think that Buddhism’s focus on being in the moment
was a boon to me as a writer. It allowed me to be fully present with my
daily experiences, so that I could then draw on those observations to
create
compelling imagery for my stories. If my story needed a description of a
swimming hole that used to be a granite quarry, I could compile an image
composed of the detailed observations I’d collected by being very
present and focused in prior, similar experiences. And for a while that
worked out great.
But I failed to consider the other side of that coin. Being
fully present
and physically embodied in the present moment takes one out of
one’s head and the endless stream of consciousness that
preoccupies the human mind. If one is living in the moment, one
doesn’t spend hours ruminating on purely
conceptual what-ifs, which is where great story ideas come from. Such
reverie—being literally “lost in thought”—might
be the fertile breeding ground for imagination and creativity and
inspiration, but a Buddhist would view it as an unproductive distraction
from what’s real.
While it’s nice to think that you could choose to turn that
facility on or off at will, the whole Buddhist project is to
establish a constant habit of stepping outside the mind and observing
one's thought process so that thought itself can be evaluated and
critiqued. Once unlocked, turning that observer off is no more
controllable than asking yourself to not think about elephants.
The writer wants to take something impermanent—his
thoughts—and make them permanent; the Buddhist realizes that
thought is ephemeral and resists the unexamined desire to concretize
something that—like all things—is subject to change and
dissolution.
The article’s author, Ruth Ozeki captures some of this in the
following passage:
What’s required in Zen is the opposite of
what’s required for fiction. In zazen, we become intimate with
thought in order to see through it and let it go. In fiction writing, we
become intimate with thought in order to capture it, embellish it, and
make it concrete. Fiction demands a total immersion in the fictional
dream. This is not compatible with sitting sesshin, which demands total
immersion in awakened reality. You can’t do both at once. Believe
me, I’ve tried.
The Buddhist views discursive thought as untrustworthy and largely
wasted energy, while the writer values discursive thought so highly as
to want to freeze it, share it, and make it last. Ms. Ozeki acknowledges
this herself when she refers to “my relentlessly discursive
novelist’s mind (a handicap for a spiritual
practitioner)”.
Buddhism instills a profound skepticism of one’s own thoughts
and perceptions and habitual preferences: they are to be examined
carefully, rather than believed unquestioningly. We look at our thinking
in order to hold it more lightly and release some of its hold on us.
This erodes one of the most basic premises of the fiction writer:
that there is somehow something important about the imaginary world of
your thoughts… and that it’s important that those thoughts
and emotions be communicated to and shared with others.
When thought about that way, it becomes clear that writing is at its
heart an emotional act, driven by ego. The author is responding to a
compulsion—“the creative urge”—which the
Buddhist views as unskillful.
The Buddhist realizes that fiction writing is largely prompted by
vanity, the thought that I have something new or special or important to
say. The underlying compulsion to create is the product of an overactive
and often counterproductive defense against the impermanence and
uncertainty of our world.
It was reassuring to find that I wasn’t alone
in my experience of Buddhist practice getting in the way of my writing.
It’s not something I could have foreseen, and I’m not
entirely happy to see the last vestiges of my imaginative writing career
wither.
But fiction aside, I’m sure I’m good for a
few hundred more blog posts. After all, there’ll still be
lots of things for me to rant about. If nothing else, I can provide a
daily first-hand report of all the exciting effects of aging!
Colonoscopies, ho!
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