Ornoth

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!

What were your favorite childhood stories?

I don’t have any specific affinities for any writing prior to 7th grade (12 years of age). However, my English teacher at that time read some juvenile lit aloud each day in class. We went through Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time” and J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit”. The latter made enough of an impression that I went on to read and enjoy the slightly more adult “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and become a hardcore Tolkien fan.
 
I also aped “The Hobbit” the following year in the first piece of fiction I ever wrote, a 4-page, 2200-word quest to bring healing medicine to an afflicted prince. Instead of Gandalf the Grey, I had Galor the Elder. In place of Mirkwood my story introduced the Wood of Darkness, a place haunted by the spirits of the dead trees, which took the form of skeletal flying monkeys (a là “Wizard of Oz”). Instead of the Misty Mountains, I had the Murky Mountains, and instead of Gollum I provided the Farog, a solitary subterranean beastie with a poisonous bite. Tolkien’s Beorn was replaced by a healer named Thodin living alone between the wood and the mountains. The story was titled, appropriately enough, “Ornoth’s Journey”, after the protagonist, a prince who undertook the quest along with his brother and sister and the wizard. The opening line, reworked a thousand times in dozens of subsequent revisions, is forever branded in my mind:

Spring came early to Gamdorn, and all of the fields were alive with color, as a stranger clad in a dark robe stroke up the walk to the doors of the large Royal Hall…

But that’s getting rather afield from the original line of inquiry.
 

What books from your childhood would you like to share with [your] children?

My what???
 

Have you re-read any of those childhood stories and been surprised by anything?

Re-reading Tolkien was something of a letdown, because by then I’d become a very proficient fantasy writer and editor myself, and I found his work quite different in style from that which I preferred. While he still retained the sense of wonder that is absolutely critical to the success of any fantasy story, I disagreed with his pacing, and had outgrown the remoteness and the moral absolutes of high fantasy, having found low fantasy both more palatable and more fertile for stories of real human interest.
 

How old were you when you first learned to read?

I have no recollection. A typical age. Three to five?
 

Do you remember the first 'grown-up' book you read? How old were you?

No real recollection, although the “Lord of the Rings” might qualify.

You’d think that as a writer I would have stronger opinions about fiction, but in truth I consider prose a rather cheap commodity. After all, much of it is poorly-written, and even the stuff that’s well-written is easily come by and available in a near inexhaustible quantity. Therefore I don’t tend to value fiction very highly. That might seem an odd view for someone who claims creative writing as their primary method of artistic expression, but so it is.