I'll be posting excerpts from a longer project on mindful writing under posts titled "Thus I Have Heard." Your feedback and observations are welcome.
Thus I have heard. At one time, the Writer gathered an
assembly of a thousand bloggers, a thousand poets, a thousand short story
writers, a thousand screen play writers, a thousand authors of scholarly books,
a thousand writers of magazine columns, a thousand troubadours, a thousand students who repeatedly failed required
college composition, lined before him like single-spaced rows of mountains.
They were gathered on rented folding chairs in the shared
knowledge that a person’s ability to write is always present. A literate
individual can write at any moment, in any place, using any type of utensil,
paper and pen, magic markers, typing into a keyboard, or speaking into a voice
recognition program, or to their smart phone.
And yet one doesn’t have to look far to find people who admit, often
with great pain, that they are unable to write—students who can’t turn
assignments in on time and who dread writing courses, book-less
colleagues who worry about tenure, acquaintances who twist themselves into
knots because of a New Year’s resolution to write a novel. Even the teachers of
stuck writers are often themselves stuck. Scratch an academic, a theorist well known
for talking about writing as a process once said, and chances are you’ll find a
struggling writer.
One person arose from her seat and approaching the Writer
asked, What is the suffering of writing and what is the cessation of that
suffering? And the Writer said, the suffering of writing is caused by the
failure to take advantage of the vacancy of the present moment, by
acting as though the reader is physically present, by not paying
attention to the present moment, and by contemplating a fictional
audience and a fictional text instead of the actuality before one. Dear
disciples, many people treat occasions of writing as occasions of public
speaking. Thus they fail to take advantage of the emptiness of the moment and
instead populate it with the shadowy figures of an anticipated audience. The
suffering of writing is caused by overlooking the present for a strictly
fictional future; it is a future that contains a hypothetical reader and a hypothetical
finished final draft. The opposite of the suffering of writing is therefore
possible when one notices the present moment to gain the privacy of
writing and to take charge of the proximity of audience in one’s head. We
notice the present, oh writers, to gain this freedom from the future but also to contact our internal talk, internal
rhetoric, or intrapersonal dialog. We survey our internal to see how we are discussing our writing abilities with ourselves
as well as to find potential content for the piece we seek to write.
What are the Four Noble
Truths of Writing?
THE
FIRST TRUTH
Your ability to write
is always present.
THE
SECOND TRUTH
The present moment
contains all that you need in order to write.
THE
THIRD TRUTH
Writing difficulties
occur because of a lack of awareness of the present moment. In order to write,
you need to practice mindful awareness of the present moment. Mindlessness is
the standard or default position; a mindful writing practice can not be
“allowed to happen” or passively arise. Mindlessness needs to be actively
countered. An individual’s success or lack of success in writing can be traced
back to that person’s relation to the present moment.
THE
FOURTH TRUTH
In order to write
without struggle, develop a practice that heightens your engagement with the
present moment through the Sevenfold Path:
1. Right
Understanding
2. Right
Discipline
3. Right
Effort
4. Right
Attentiveness
5. Right
Invention
6. Right
Acceptance
7. Right
Listening and Feedback
Upon hearing the
Writer’s word, several disciples immediately Tweeted the discourse.
* image provided by vitalwrite.com
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