Approach your writing with a beginner's mind

And get ready for week one of Thirteen Ways of Looking, which begins tomorrow.

Photo by Chris Ensey on Unsplash

Tomorrow is the first week of the new course for paid subscribers, Thirteen Ways of Looking, which you can read about here:

Today, in preparation, a reminder to approach your work with joy. There’s so much pressure to perform as a writer at this time of year, I am hereby going you permission to enjoy your work. Here’s something I wrote a few years ago for another online course I ran. perhaps time to re run this one, I need to remind myself to enjoy my work too.

What is the Beginner’s Mind?

‘In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.’

Shunryu Suzuki

This short video is a helpful resource: Beginner's Mind

To approach anything with a beginner’s mind means looking at things with freshness and openness. It’s a way of approaching life, and creativity, without the clutter of what you should be doing, what you are expected to do and even what you have learned to do. You might have been writing for a long time, and if you have then you’ll be used to writing in a certain way; you’ll have learned a certain set of skills and a style of writing which suits you, you might have read books on creativity, attended courses and retreats, and you might even be in a groove where you read the same style of books, without moving too far away from your comfort zone.

While striving to improve, focusing on learning your craft and honing your writing skills are all good practice, you might not be exploring what else is out there in terms of our writing potential; it might be stopping you from creating in new and dynamic ways. I meet a lot of writers, as a mentor, who worry a great deal about ‘getting it right’. They worry about placing in competitions and getting into good magazines and getting a collection or a book published, and this leads to them gnashing their teeth when they see others achieving these things and they don’t. It’s upsetting, it’s difficult to not take rejection in the writing world personally, but my experience as an editor and of judging writing competitions tells me that it is absolutely not personal, there is just a lot of good writing out there to choose from.

That psychological twisting up of self into a box that ‘fits’ an imagined perfect type of writing, the ‘right’ type, is detrimental not only to productivity but to enjoyment. Do you remember your first experience of completing a piece of writing? Do you remember the joy of getting paper and pens out, or opening that blank page on your computer? Do you still feel that sense of joy?

To approach your writing with a beginner’s mind is to find a way of uncoupling yourself from the routines of writing which you will find yourself in, and being more organically, naturally creative.

I think it’s important to recognise our anxieties, as people and writers, in context. If you know other writers, perhaps in real life or on social media, you might have noticed that there is a drive to improve, and a drive for success. This is not a bad thing, not at all. I would say that I am quite driven to achieve my goals and I always think that there are ways to improve my own writing. But when that supersedes the joy of the experience of writing itself, then we lose sight of why it was we began to write in the first place.

Let’s look at our external pressures, and how the world in which we are living might be affecting our creative process, and then let’s look at a mindfulness technique to help clear all that out before we begin writing.

Grounding Yourself in the Moment

Look at the world around us. Look at how much information, how much tragedy, how much catastrophe, how much chaos is going on in the world right now. It’s no wonder that people are starting to suffer from new forms of anxiety when we’re told that the world is in an extinction crisis, and politics are so terrifyingly polarised, and the culture of consumerism is creating death and destruction right around the world. There are famines and wars and street crime and violence and oh, I could go on and on and on.

Our natural tendency as humans is to grab at the information and store it so that we are able to defend ourselves with our enormous, complex brains when the danger comes. But in the age of instant information, the danger is always coming, always just about to arrive, which leaves us in a constant state of flight or fight. What has this got to do with creativity? Several things happen when creatives are under this sort of difficult to identify danger:

1. It causes the writer to wonder if writing is actually important and think that they are wasting their time writing when they should be stockpiling food and building a bunker. This is an exaggeration, but it does increase the natural tendency to not prioritise writing as other things seem to need doing in the seemingly very short space of time we have before the BIG DANGER comes.

2. It fills the head up. I don’t know about you, but news stories, especially the ones in which we are losing our wildlife, stick in my head. I’ll read something in the news in the morning and won’t be able to stop thinking about it all day. I’ll tweet* about it, chat with friends on social media, try to answer the unanswerable question that is what can I do? When I sit done to write, there it is still, taking up space in my creative zone. Perhaps I’ll try to write about it, to write it out of me, but if that isn’t the thing that I was going to write about before I read it, it’s difficult to settle into it, because I know I should be doing something else. So I end up doing nothing and drifting back to look for people who feel the same about the news item as I do, reaching out to help myself feel better. This would be fine if this was a one off, but with the world the way it is, and news reported on a loop, there is no ‘day off’ from it.

3. It perpetuates a feeling of not having very much time left, which means instead of writing happily, writers switch into striving to achieve what is necessary before it’s too late. It’s good to have goals, but if that’s hampering your creativity, if you are thinking about where to submit next, when you might hear about a competition, when a certain deadline is, it can be detrimental to the creative process.

4. It might cause you to compare yourself to other writers. That feeling of the clock ticking, it makes us look around at what everyone else is doing, and compare ourselves badly. This can lead to a cycle of punishment, striving and suffering. And that’s not conducive to the creative practice.

Wendell Berry is one of those poets who seems to be able to capture the heart of mindfulness in a way that is not preaching or self-serving. Here’s one that captures the idea of allowing things to happen without reacting to them.

A Timbered Choir (excerpt)

I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet around me
like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places where I left them
asleep like cattle.
Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings and I hear its song.
Than what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings and I hear its song.

By: Wendell Berry

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

What is the answer to coping with all those outside and inside stresses that the writer faces with the world seeming to burn down around them and the pressure to ‘succeed’ like a clock ticking in the ear all the time? You have to decide to step away. You have to decide that you want to be apart from all that for a while. Below is a simple mindfulness technique which helps to ground the user in the moment. Read the instructions through once before you try it.

1. Sit on a chair, preferably something like a dining room chair, with both feet on the floor and your hands on your knees. Try and keep you back straight and your head up. Set your timer for four minutes and start it. Close your eyes.

2. Listen to the sounds around you, but don’t react to them. Your brain (often referred to the ‘monkey brain’ because it fidgets away while you’re trying to meditate!) will want to name the sounds (car, wind, people talking) and will want to comment on it (what did she say? What was that noise?) Every time your brain starts chattering, be aware of it and imagine that thought as a letter, post the letter into an imaginary post box and get rid of it.

3. Allow all the sounds to go through you. You don’t have to do anything, allow them to happen while you sit still.

4. When the timer goes off, give yourself a few seconds to take a nice deep breath and come back to your sense, open your computer/notebook and begin writing.

A Writing Prompt

You can work in any genre you want – prose, fiction, creative non-fiction, life writing…whatever comes to you.

Concentrate on allowing the creativity to come to you, do not try and seek it out. Easier said than done! Stop, right now, and sit still, listen to the noises around you. Now, capture that moment, that’s all, just describe it. Don’t think about original and unique ways of describing it, don’t worry about anything except capturing the moment. If you’ve done my courses before, you’ll know I love an English Haiku (three lines, 5-7-5 syllable count) to act as a sort of post it note for a moment in time. I want you to create a tiny impressionist painting, in words, of this moment.

Here’s my example:

Outside the window
the sheep are baa-ing loudly,
ready for breakfast

It’s not winning the Forward prize but that’s not the purpose here. I like it. It’s made me smile. This little exercise might lend itself well to prose, creative non-fiction – does your sound remind you of something from your own life? Is there a memory that is wanting to break out? Or is there something about the act of listening that you want to capture on the page? There’s no time like the present.

If all you do today is a three line haiku, dashed off in five minutes of peace, know that you have done exactly what needed to be done today, exactly what your creative brain needed to do. But if your prompt takes you on a journey, allow that to happen too. Let the prompts be just that, prompts, not rules.

*not anymore actually, thanks Elon you massive bell end

I’m looking forward to working with my paid subscribers from tomorrow at new ways of looking at well worn subjects. I hope you’ll join me.

Until then

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