You are in the afterlife now

 

In this part of Manhattan, on a mild sunny day, you can imagine you are in a village, even seventy blocks north of Greenwich Village. I stop into an old-time two-fisted bar and order a martini, straight up, from an approving bartender. The couple who take the stools beside me are red from an island vacation, sporting sunglasses and bright prints. They ask for piña coladas.The bartender snarls, “We don’t serve none of them fruit drinks here.” This is precious, in an era when other establishments pretend that something made with chocolate can be called a martini. My drink is perfectly chilled. 
    I see across the Big Pond to a friend who is burning juniper in an old-time ritual on a hill above the Baltic Sea. The water gleams behind her, through pines and silver birches. An eagle owl soars overhead, searching. Her eyes are searching the juniper smoke. Can she see me in the shapes that form? Is she trying to call something through? 
     I toast her, and the Sisters, with the last of my gin. I give the bartender a $5 tip. I don’t know when I’ll see him again.
     I have an appointment on the other side of the island, at The Dead Poet. 
     I walk across the park. 
     On the corner next to The Dead Poet, a panhandler with black eyes, beaked like a crow, has come up with a creative line. He croaks at bypassers, “You are in the afterlife.” 
     A well-fed lady squeaks and hurries by. A man in a suit looks aghast. He pulls cash from his pocket and drops a large bill in the beggar’s cup.
      I lean against a mailbox, watching the pattern repeat. “You are in the Underworld,” the wild-eyed panhandler riffs on his theme. People either rush by, pretending not to hear, or they tremble and throw money at him, hoping to buy a Get Out of Jail Free card.
      It’s my time. They are waiting for me in The Dead Poet. 
      Crow Man is watching my feet when he caws, “You are in the afterlife.” 
      “Finally,” I say very clearly and distinctly. “It is a pleasure to meet a man who understands where he is.”
      Crow Man looks in my face and starts to tremble. He holds out his cup, but not for me to donate. He is offering me the payment for the Ferryman.

 

[from a 15 minute timed writng exercise]

Photos by RM

 

Writing while the blue sand runs

 

 

When I approach a major writing project, I sometimes notice I have decades and decades of journals and drafts and sketches that hold relevant material. They are alluring but perilous. I can get trapped and enmeshed in them, like a tomb raider in an Indiana Jones movie when the roof of the underground temple starts coming down. I need to find how to get out of my self-made literary necropolis and write fresh words.

I often fall back on a practice I lead in all my creative writing retreats: timed writing.  I have found it's incredibly productive to tell people to do something in a very short period of time. When I say a short time, I mean five or fifteen minutes. I find that fifteen minutes is a terrific space in which to get something down.

For my own writing practice at home, I have a marvelous assistant. It is a quarter hourglass. It runs for fifteen minutes. I found it online. It has blue sand in it. Blue is my favorite color. Whether I feel ready or not, if I have fifteen minutes, I will upend the hourglass and start writing. This is especially good to do when I do not feel ready, maybe utterly uninspired. I write anyway. And I stop when the sand runs out. 

My hope is that I pretty soon I’ll be writing consecutively in these swift sessions so I may have the whole draft of a book, or at least a chapter or essay, if I keep doing this for a few weeks. I know that if my fingers go fast enough, as the sand runs down, there’ll be no time for my inner editor and my inner critics to take command of my thoughts. Some days I have no clue about what I am doing or what I want ti to come of this. That’s okay.  I write for that quarter hour anyway and sometimes something wonderful or terrifying or both breaks through – a bigger story that has been stalking me, the soul of a book I had not planned, a trickster spirit who wants to remind me that play is always the thing. 

While the blue sand runs, I do not look at those notes and digital files and piles of books and folders. I keep my eyes on the page I am writing, on paper or screen. Let me say this as clearly as I can. I'm not looking at old drafts or sketches. I'm not looking at my journals full of treasures though they are. I'm just writing. I might be drawing from my memories of things that have happened in my life and things that I've written about in some form somewhere else, but I'm not looking at anything. . I'm not struggling with the old furnishings of the mind. I'm writing while the blue sand runs.

I often say that creativity requires us to play first, work later. If you have heard me say that, you may object, “What if you don't feel like doing it?” My response is: however you feel before you get into the swim, doing something for fifteen minutes is no big deal. Make it a game. Play at writing, at being a writer. For quarter of an hour, do what writers do.

Have you heard what William Faulkner said to the wannabee writers who flocked to Ole Miss for the first and last creative writing workshop he ever gave? He looked at the eager faces in the lecture room and said, , "So you want to be writers?”. When the cheers had died down, he said, “So write." And he left the room. 

[from a guidance session I gave at a writing retreat] 

For a sample of raw product from one of my personal 15-minute sessions see "You are in the afterlife now"

 

 

A Master of the Third Eye

“You know what a master is like,” she cautioned me.

“Oh yeah.”

“He’s as likely to whack you as to talk to you.”

I climbed the last steps to the master’s hermitage resolved not to submit to any slap-in-the-face treatment.

I found him with his feet in a tub of hot water. Steam rose and the air was pleasantly scented with mountain herbs as one of his handmaidens palpated his feet. I was curious to see whether she would dry them with her lustrous black hair, that fell to the floor.

“Move the chest,” he directed me.

I contemplated the great iron-banded box without enthusiasm.

“Where?”

He indicated the far corner.

I half-lifted, half-carried the heavy trunk to the place he indicated, wondering what he kept in it.

“Now bring it back. And don’t drag it. Pick it up.”

I felt the veins bulge on my forehead as I struggled to carry out these instructions. I nearly made it back. Then the trunk slid from my grip, landing painfully on my left foot.

The master waited until I had stopped howling before he spoke again. “Why do you come to me?”

“Master, I come to you because I wish to see.”

“Then why are your pig eyes open?”

“Master?”

I realized, at that moment, that the master’s eyes were closed. I understood that I was to close my own.

“Closer,” he commanded.

I felt the stir of movement. I heard the swish of the loose silk of his garment, and pictured his arm swinging back, fist clenched. Here it comes.

I intended to duck the blow, but something kept me in place, on my knees in front of him. What was that buzzing sound? It made me think of a bee, trapped behind glass. It came closer.

I felt burning pain as something pierced me at the third eye, like a drill bit. Immediately the girl was at my side, soothing my forehead with an ointment that smelled like yoghurt.

When she left off, there was absolute stillness in the cabin. Then I heard the soft slap of water from the footbath.

I opened my eyes. There was no change in the scene. The black-haired girl squatted at the master’s feet, as before. I felt no surge of enlightenment. I did notice that one of the master’s eyes was now open. Above and between his closed eyelids, it fixed me with its blue light, cold and unwinking.

I wrote this little story during a 15-minute timed exercise while leading an adventure in "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming". It appears here unedited. The starter dough was a card I drew in a literary version of my Coincidence Card Game that included the words "third eye."I am leading "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming" again this year at magical Mosswood Hollow, near Seattle, from May21-25 and in a green paradise near Česká Skalice  in the Czech Republic from September 12-16.

Image: "Watching" by Zen-Master on DeviantArt.

When the clock is the writer's friend

Timed writing. 30 minutes max. So you can make room for it in almost any schedule, and make yourself do it when you don't want to.
    You stop when the time is up, like on Top Chef. Drop the pen, close the Word document. You're not finished? Great, that means when you return to the draft, you know exactly where to pick up. Oh yes, and since you are not on Top Chef with the clocks running in front of the cameras, you can always cheat and steal a few minutes more.
    We do this in my writing playshops. We do it every day during my writing retreat "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming." Sometimes we raise the bar. For example, you have 30 minutes, in your own space, to produce a page you can read to the group. Or: you have just 5 minutes, in the space of the whole group, to write a quick sketch that you can share.
    Yes, writers can make the clock their friend. If you have only 30 minutes or less, perfection is not on the agenda. There is simply no time to entertain the inner critic, or indulge the procrastinator. They'll come after you later, but not right now.
    In my writer's life, the clock can be a friend in larger ways. I love fierce delivery dates, like 5:00 p.m. this afternoon, or tomorrow, or the first of next month. Possibly because I used to be a journalist, accustomed to rushing copy together for almost instantaneous publication, I'm not impressed by deadlines that are too far into the future. On a certain level, I have learned that you can't really start a book (as opposed to an article) the night before a due date and expect to hand it in on time. But part of me still wants to approach any writing project, even of book length, that way. I would have thrived on the serial model of publication of both fiction and nonfiction that prevailed in the heyday of Balzac, Dickens and H.G. Wells.
   Blogging is a consolation, and a gentle workout for the writing muscles, but not the same thing.
   I don't put blog writing on a timer, just the big stuff. When I next turn the dial on my timekeeper - you can see he is a very fierce enforcer - it will be in the cause of bringing through some more pages of a new book.