“You do not have to be good” — Mary Oliver, 1935-2019

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I won’t even try to eulogize the fabulous Mary Oliver — too many people have already done it for us. But here, just in case you missed it, is NPR’s tribute, and the poem that adorned my office door back in my teaching days:

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

 

 

photo by Denis Linine, via pexels.com

“Because once someone dared”

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I keep Rainer Maria Rilke’s Book of Hours near my bed, and this morning I opened it and read this poem.

 

Because once someone dared
to want you,
I know that we, too, may want you.

When gold is in the mountain
and we’ve ravaged the depths
till we’ve given up digging,

it will be brought forth into day
by the river that mines
the silences of stone.

Even when we don’t desire it,
God is ripening.

I, 16

Writing the Circle: Prompt #3

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“Your ability to make a choice and stick to it—your will—is your most powerful inner resource.” –Laura Day

Whether you used the last prompt as encouragement to generate 8 of your top writing wishes or 100, today’s prompt is all about choosing just one of these, for now, to focus on.

I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around this prompt for awhile, and I think part of the difficulty for me lies in a reluctance to encourage anyone to have pie-in-the-sky dreams about their writing career.  Two books that have helped me with this are Rachel Ballon’s The Writer’s Portable Therapist and Robert Maurer’s One Small Step Can Change Your Life. 

In short, Ballon showed me how “unrealistic expectations [can] block your creativity and prevent you from ever realizing your writing dreams,” and Maurer taught me to take on the big stuff one small–really small–step at a time.

There’s (still) nothing wrong with your desires, by the way, no matter how large, but I want to give you a lesson now in imagining the smaller, moving parts to your desire. (Because before you can have a novel hit the best-seller list, you have to write a novel. Before you can write a novel, you have to develop a habit of writing that will sustain a long-term project.)

Even the “baby steps” can turn out to have smaller moving parts. If you need to learn how to write dialog, you’ll have to figure out the steps for how to learn to write dialog. (Buy a book? Take a class? Study authors who have killer dialog? Join a writing group and practice? All of the above?)

I learned this the hard way. If you look at my 10-year planner (or the one before that) you’ll see that I’ve been writing “Take a walk every day,” or “Be a person who walks every day” (and other variations) ever since my kids were small. For a short time I was able to muscle my way through this and actually do it, but then I missed a few days, and soon I was back to almost never taking an intentional walk.

Then I decided to make my goal of walking more specific and way, way smaller. I committed to taking a 5-minute walk each day (click on the link to read my blogpost about this), and just like Maurer promises in his book, accomplishing that small goal led me to increasing my minutes until now it’s a rare day that I don’t walk 30 or 40 minutes.

This achievement made me wonder if I couldn’t use the same strategy to move closer to one of my big writing goals, which was to write a mystery novel. (Something I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid!)

Unlike earlier attempts at writing novels, this project was not going to be open-ended. I set myself up for failure to start with by saying I’d write my mystery in a month. I had to regroup at the end of the month, but it worked to an extent–I had something tangible by the end of 40 days of writing, a working premise, a cast of characters, and about 100 pages. It was enough to give me forward momentum. Despite being a rather slow writer (and my mom…and teaching fall quarter…) I kept the project inching forward and by December 31 I had a complete if very rough draft. And on January 1, I turned my sights toward revision. I am still working on the steps: I enlisted another wannabe novelist to revise with, creating our own very small mastermind/encouragement group, and I set some interim goals (submit to PNWA in February) to motivate me.

So, to return to Laura Day, she gives very clear advice about how to word your desire in positive, present-tense, specific language, and why that’s important.

1) To start with, narrow your focus to a single wish. Yes, you can take on more, but for now you’re practicing focusing–and focus requires us to, well, focus.

Distinguish, too, between the things you can control, and the things that are better given over to God or the universe. You have no control over the whims and moods of the editors at _______ poetry journal, but you do have control over how many submissions you make this year. You have no control over whether your book will be a best-seller, but you do have control over writing the best book you are able to write.

“One of the most profound traits that distinguishes you from other animals is your ability to imagine things that do not yet exist; your ability to envision future possibilities and to choose among them; in short, your ability to create.” -Laura Day

2) State your wish in positive, present-tense language. Not, I will no longer suck at dialogue, but I write AMAZING dialogue!

Stating your wish positively simply means saying what you want, not what you don’t want. While you’re at it, you also need to give up the word “wanting.” There’s a little psychological roadblock here (think of it this way, want = lack), and I think it also has to do with our deeply engrained language patterns. In essence, I’ve come to feel that a “want” list is often a “can’t list” in disguise. I want a new car, but I can’t have one. I want to get my novel published, but it can’t…. I want to have a better marriage, but there are all these reasons that I can’t. (Wah, wah, wah!)

Of course you want it, but let’s try putting it into different language. Not I want to write a mystery novel or I want to walk every day, but–

I am writing a mystery novel.

I walk every day. 

3) Finally, be specific! I’ve already addressed this above, but I want to emphasize the power of breaking your wish into smaller parts, and making it visible. Even “write a novel” is on the vague side (and so large it is more the universe’s job than yours). But you can write an outline of a novel, and then a paragraph and a page and a chapter. You can decide what sort of novel it is, who your readers are, and how long you want it to be. All of these things are specific and they’re 100% in your control.

I am revising my first chapter so I can read it aloud to my Wednesday writing group. 

I’ve used this strategy, by the way, on poems, too. This summer I was invited to write a poem for an Orca anthology, and–given that my mother was dying–I just couldn’t seem to do it. But I knew that writing a single poem wasn’t an unrealistic desire, and I truly wanted to write it. So I began drawing my circle in my journal each morning and writing inside it: I am writing a poem for Tahlequah and her calf. I built that poem image by image and line by line, but I managed to workshop it with an amazing group at Litfuse, and I submitted it to the anthology editors five days prior to the deadline–and three days before my mother died. I didn’t know if they would accept it or not, but they did. The poem, as it turned out, is as much an elegy for her, as it is for the orcas, and I’m grateful that I made time for it.

Here’s your assignment:

I’m a little worried that all my qualifiers in this prompt will be discouraging. They’re not meant that way. What I wish for you is traction for your writing dreams.

Whatever you’ve come up with–this wish that you know you can turn into reality, given the focus–your job right now is to draw a circle in your journal (the bottom of a coffee cup or a lid or a round coaster work great for this), then to write your wish in that space (in positive, present-tense, specific language!). You may want to write it on another sheet of paper to post above your writing desk.

I’d love it if you’d take a picture of your circle and send it to me!

On this first time through The Circle, this is a free series, and I plan to continue with emails to a small group of subscribers, so comment below or email me at bethany.alchemy@gmail.com — I’d love to have you on the journey with me.

Writing the Circle: Prompt #2

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Your 2nd prompt for WRITING THE CIRCLE

(If you missed the first prompt, click here. For the introduction to this short series of FREE prompts, go here.)

“Without the motivation of desire, without hunger, you would achieve nothing since you would want for nothing.” –Laura Day

Laura Day’s The Circle is all about making a wish and turning it into reality. Today, I want you to home in on what that wish can POSSIBLY be.

When I work one-on-one with students on this exercise, I see two ways in which they get stuck. First, we have learned so well how to squelch our desires, to not get “too big for our britches,” to be ashamed of our desires, that it’s hard to remember or even to recognize what we really want.

I do this all the time. I get what my husband wants and what my daughters want all mixed up with what I want. I suspect I have spent a lot of my life trying to keep my desires way way in the background, to keep myself small and invisible so that I didn’t draw attention to myself. (What happened to the Bethany that wanted to learn to scuba dive, walk the Great Wall of China, own a horse, climb a mountain?)

A second way we get stuck is—believe it or not—the flip side of gratitude, or of “gratitudes,” those lists of things we’re thankful for, or that we feel we should be grateful for.

In other words, we feel guilty if we aren’t grateful for what we have. But we can be grateful, and still want what we want. We can even be grateful for our desires! Sure, some of them may turn out to be false paths, but if you never allow yourself to explore them, how will you know?

We want to write a best-selling novel or have an award-winning book of poems, but once we finally admit what we want, we then spend the next several minutes (or weeks, or months) beating ourselves up for wanting what we know eludes so many other writers.

But in this exercise, there’s only approval. The longer your list, the better!

As my friend Louise says whenever anyone says, “I wish that I could…”:

“Permission granted.”

In the next prompt, I’ll be writing about action steps, but I’ve found that the first action step I always have to take is to give myself permission to want what I want. (Well, to figure out what it is that I want, and then to own it.) Only then can you come up with what steps are necessary. When I wanted to travel, for instance, my first actionable step was to get a passport.

So here’s your assignment:

In your Writing the Circle journal, list everything you’d like to create for your life. As I said above, at this stage, don’t censor yourself. Write down every possible desire that comes to mind. Wild, crazy, sane, everyday, general, specific. It can be messy! You aren’t choosing, not yet; you’re simply bringing into focus what you might want.

Of course you can list anything you want to create, but I want to encourage you (in this context) to think about what kind of writing / writing life you’re imagining.

Set your timer for 10 minutes (if you’re comfortable with more, by all means, go for 15 or 20).  If you’re floundering, try setting a numeric goal, 8 things or 10 or 20.  Let’s say you start with 20. Or–to borrow an exercise from How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci by Michael Gelb–you can go for 100. If you’re like me, you’ll find that the higher goal will tease things out that you haven’t thought of in years. The higher number will also help you get really really specific. Try breaking down your desires into more manageable chunks.

For instance, I might start with, “I want to write about my mother.” But what are 5 or 10 ways I can imagine that unfolding?

  • a poem about how she named the trees when she was a girl
  • a blog post about what my mother taught me about gardening and how that relates to writing
  • a book of her recipes that I can give to my nieces and nephews
  • a poem about mom and Nancy Drew
  • an essay about how she read nothing but mysteries
  • a mystery novel or novella about a woman who reads nothing but mysteries

So what do you dream of creating? Write it down, and, remember, NO JUDGMENT.

Step two for today’s work (you can spread this out over two days if you’d like) is to go back over your long list and CIRCLE only a few items that you really, really, really, really, really want. Yes, you can do the work of developing action steps for almost anything–but what are you willing and ready to begin working toward now?

Once again, I’d love to hear from you. Email me (bethany.alchemy@gmail.com), or leave a comment below.  I’ll have one more post later this week; if you would like to take part in the entire FREE series, all you have to do is subscribe to my blog.