Transcript: Episode 14

Hey friends, and thank you for being here for today’s episode. I’m Mary, and I hope you’re doing well whenever and wherever you’re listening.

This month’s episode is part of a pair with last month’s, in which I am unpacking a couple terms I’ve been using in an admittedly sort of vague way to describe the ethos of this podcast. Last month I talked about what I mean when I say “visionary writing” or “visionary storytelling,” and why I think claiming our craft as visionary can potentially make us more fulfilled and prolific writers.

Today I’m tackling the term “writing praxis.” (That’s p-r-a-x-i-s; I know it sounds pretty similar to “practice,” so I’m going to do my best to enunciate those words clearly without completely murdering your eardrums with sibilance).

(Just as an amusing anecdote for anyone listening who also has recording experience, I made a homemade pop guard for this episode and I’m now, like… holding it awkwardly in front of my microphone, because I hold my mic when I record. So you can imagine the low-tech shenanigans that are happening right now. I hope it actually sounds good; we’ll see. We’ll find out together!)

Praxis is the word I use for the exercises and practices that folks on the podcast newsletter list get each month, to go along with the topic of the monthly episode. I started using the term “praxis” to try to get at a certain discomfort I have with writing practice – because I’ve always found it hard to do writing practice on a concrete level in ways that actually align with my creative ideals, my beliefs about the transformative potential of engaging with a creative craft.

This entire podcast is about what is often called writing practice or “the writing life.” And I’m going to be quoting today from several famous books and essays on writing. So I have to start off the episode with a confession, which is that I have historically not really been one for reading books about writing. Books about craft technique, and about revision, and about editing as a profession, yes – but books about the writing life? Not so much. This is partly due to being a sort of contrarian type of person, both for better and for worse.

On the one hand, this personality trait does give me a certain amount of protection from getting sucked into dogmatic ideologies or eating Tide pods or whatever… but it also means I am probably never going to read Steven King’s On Writing. I am genuinely sorry, I know you have a copy you would be happy to loan me, I know there is a really good audiobook version, I know I am only hurting myself and should not be like this, please don’t email to recommend it to me for the hundred-and-eleventieth time.

But there’s more to my avoidance of writing life books than just having a perhaps overly developed inner smartass. I think the reason I actually resisted reading these kinds of books is that by the time they were on my radar, I was already struggling enough with writing that I kind of didn’t want to hear what any talented, successful, famous authors had to say about it. Not out of spite – honestly. But out of such a deep frustration with myself that I felt there was no advice Margaret Atwood or Ray Bradbury could give me that would be relevant to my own creative life.

I already knew I was supposed to be finishing as many projects as possible and writing every day, which had frankly begun to fill me with dread and function much more as a form of self-punishment than as a creative habit. And in my post-writing-degree early adulthood, this painful reality made any sort of advice about writing as a practice – as a way of living – feel like a referendum on how much I probably wasn’t supposed to be a writer.

I don’t have an MFA, but my undergrad English degree is in creative writing, and that formal training had a few major cons to go along with all of the craft skills it taught me. One of those cons was a vague but persistent sense that everybody in our cohort was fundamentally competing with each other to prove who was actually a writer. I remember one class when our professor said that some of us would undoubtedly still be writing twenty years down the line, but most of us wouldn’t. Most people just don’t see it through.

(Picture fifteen early-aughts hipster kids in various unfortunate haircuts eyeing each other around the room, with looks of either badly concealed existential terror or blandly smug self-assurance. I was definitely in the former camp. Most of the straight guys were in the latter.)

My post-college writing life quickly became pretty grim, as I did my best to prove to my now-nonexistent audience that I was Definitely Not One Of the Quitters, even while I struggled to access any sort of creative wellspring to keep me going. And it began to seem like my frustration was the real truth about me and my so-called writing, exposed at last.

I was well aware that struggling with creative practice is common, even for the most established artists. But I just wasn’t capable of seeing my own struggles as something I shared with writers and creatives I admire. I was too hung up on what I saw as separating me from those creatives. After all, they were celebrated authors – they had made good work. In my view, that alone was what transformed their struggles into something edifying.

It was like I could only believe in that reverse alchemy of success. I wasn’t capable of believing that creative practice itself is actually the gold, and that struggle and frustration could become just one aspect of it, and not its sole and defining feature.

Because… What if I keep writing and it’s just never any good?? What do you have to tell me about that, Atwood??

It’s not like I ever made a conscious decision to avoid or ignore books on writing practice. It was just always something I put off in favor of reading something else. (I’m not too cool and miserable for your advice, I just don’t want it *right now*.)

And eventually the advice I did know – write every day, finish everything, no exceptions – just got too painful and paralyzing to keep following. I mean, even I could tell that at some point it was counterproductive to sit down and have a panic attack once a day in front of my keyboard. That’s not a writing practice, that’s a mental health crisis.

But once I’d officially failed to follow this core writer’s roadmap, that became its own barrier to seeking out any sort of wisdom on creative living that might actually have helped me. I was sure I’d just see iterations of another common writing life soundbite: Being a writer is awful. So if you’re able to walk away from your writing, you should – but if you’re too obsessed to quit, no matter how miserable you get, that’s how you know you’re the real deal.

I think there’s a specific person who gets credited with first coining this advice, phrased in a much snappier way than I just did. But I didn’t bother to look up who it is, because: Fuck that advice. That is awful advice – or at least, it’s an awful bar to set as a creative ideal. “Real, serious art will destroy you, but if you truly love it, you can’t help going back.” Why should we glorify a creative identity that’s modelled on an abusive relationship?

For a long time, though, I felt that this was the truth, even if I wasn’t consciously aware of this belief. I believed that my creativity had been tested, and that by being unwilling to go on with it as it was, I had failed the test, permanently. And while I did still write sometimes, at the core, I didn’t think I deserved to take my own work seriously anymore.

A real creative life was supposed to be all or nothing, all the time, so clearly my writing had proved to be worth nothing. Clearly I was one of those wretched ex-writers my college professor had been talking about, a mere shell of the self I might have become, somebody who just couldn’t see it through.

I’ve come some way (in both experience and years) from that younger version of me who genuinely thought her options were full-octane virtuosity or mediocre death. And I’ve spent a lot of time slowly digging myself out of those deepest pits of creative despair that swallowed me up throughout my twenties.

But up until now, I still had not really read much content on the writing life. And when I started figuring out if I wanted to do any new research for this episode, I honestly sort of tricked myself into it.

I just recently finished re-reading some Ursula K. Le Guin and I thought, why not see what Auntie Ursula has to say about writing practice in some of her essays? That sounds fun. And why not compare that to some interviews with Octavia Butler? And then why not finally skim through the copy of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird that somebody gave me in 2006 and which I have packed up and moved to each of my adult addresses without once actually reading it? And then why not compare that to Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones because that’s the classic one all the chill, well-adjusted Zen people seem to like and it has that cool inkpot art on the cover?

This is how I ended up finally reading a bunch of stuff about the writing life in the span of a week and a half, like ripping off a psychic band-aid with an unfortunately silly cartoon print on it. (I could have sworn this wound was wrapped in gossamer layers of righteous suffering and hard-earned wisdom, but nope: it’s SpongeBob SquarePants and self-delusion all the way down.)

Pretty early into this writing life content binge, I started to notice some common threads, both in terms of the actual advice being given and in some of the metaphors used to describe and contain that advice. And I also started to notice that some of these ideas and metaphors have been surfacing in the way I talk about writing in my own work on this pod – even though I haven’t read any of this material before.

(I actually paused in my reading a few times to be like, wait, did I read this and completely forget about it, and is that where such-and-such an idea or phrasing came from when I wrote that episode?? But I know that I haven’t read this stuff before, so for once I’m confident that’s not the case.)

I’m not saying this to imply that I’ve got some sort of special line into the wisdom of great authors or anything like that. I think it’s just that when you allow yourself to connect with writing as a collaborative process of creation in which you’re participating – not writing as a solo suffer-fest, or writing as a sequence of virtuosic to-do items with immortal brilliance as the output – when writing becomes less ego-driven and more exploratory and contemplative, there are common ways that it shapes your experience and perception of your life. Just as there are common ways that practices like prayer and meditation shape human perception, across time and culture and individual egos. And that’s really what it seems many of us are talking about when we talk about “writing practice.”

Before I get deeper into this, I want to make a quick distinction between this idea of writing as a process that we don’t fully control, and the idea that all truly great writing should be freeform and totally unplanned and should, like, appear on the page in channeled, stream-of-conscious perfection, whispered to us by our muses.

Basically I want to say for the record that I don’t think spending time outlining and planning before you write a big project means your writing isn’t as deep or pure or enlivened. There are ways to write with structure and with goals that don’t have to conflict with a writing practice that is more process-focused than product-focused.

This leads me into the first common thread that I saw as I was reading the advice of my writing elders over these recent days – writing as a sort of dialogue of trust between the writer and the story. Here’s how Natalie Goldberg describes it in Writing Down the Bones: “One of the main aims of writing practice is to learn to trust your own mind and body; to grow patient and nonaggressive. … We must continue to open and trust in our own voice and process.”

And Ursula Le Guin describes it this way in her essay “A Matter of Trust”:

“I have to trust the story to know where it’s going, and after I’ve written it I have to trust myself to find where it or I got off track. … And only after all that—usually long after—will I fully know and be able to say what, in fact, the story was about and why it had to go the way it went. Any work of art has its reasons which reason does not wholly understand.”

Le Guin talks about the parameters and practices that can lead to this kind of dual trust: First, a familiarity with the tools of the writing trade, the actual craft skills needed to put a story onto the page (and later, to revise it). Second, she describes a phase of getting to know a new creative idea before putting it to paper; she calls this “a period of approach,” whether it takes the form of exploratory outlining and making notes, or whether the approach is more of an unconscious incubation.

Then comes the part that gets at the heart of why I think trust is a recurring theme in advice on the writing life (at least, what I’ve read thus far). Le Guin says, quote, “During the actual composition… an insistent consciousness of the intention of the writing may interfere with the process of writing. The writer may get in the way of the story. … What I need, once the story gets going, is to… get my damned intentions and theories and opinions out of the way, and let the story carry me.” (end quote)

Without trust, we can’t free ourselves from intention and expectation and move fully into the more fluid process required to actually create instead of plan. Without trust, we might end up arriving at the page every day, just like we’re supposed to, and we might even write words on it – but we aren’t practicing the process. We’re practicing putting things in the way of the process. We’re actually undermining trust, in both ourselves and the story.

Here’s what Goldberg says about this: “Some people hear the rule ‘Write every day’ and do it and don’t improve. They are just being dutiful. … [It’s a waste] because it takes tremendous energy to just follow the rules if your heart isn’t into it. … Don’t set up a system – ‘I have to write every day’ – and then numbly do it.” (end quote)

Trust is our defense against numbness or despair. It’s the way we put our heart into what we’re doing and turn our rules and goals and ideals into something that’s generative and not restrictive. So, then how do we find that trust?

There are two connected but distinct angles on building creative trust that I’ve seen emerging in my own writing life and that were reflected in the advice I read for this episode. One angle has to do with building craft skills (so we can trust that our writing ability is always growing and available to us). The other angle has to do with nurturing our creative connection to the world (so we can trust that our creative capacity is always growing and available to us).

And this is where my distinction between “practice” and “praxis” comes into play. I haven’t seen this kind of distinction made anywhere else so far, and I don’t think it’s strictly necessary. All of the writers I’m referencing today use the term “practice” to describe both honing one’s craft and deepening one’s creative connection. But given my history with writing, I personally find it useful to have multiple words to think about these aspects of creativity, even if they overlap with each other and feed each other.

The dictionary definition of “praxis” is the “exercise or practice of an art, science, or skill” or the “practical application of a theory.” It’s used in some more specific ways in political philosophy and religion, but I’m mostly just using it in my own way here without directly referencing those other uses.

“Writing practice,” as I see it, is the actual act of practicing writing – it’s doing craft skill exercises, or completing a planned writing session, or working on an outline. “Writing praxis” describes the ways I approach those practices, in order to ensure that the actions I’m taking actually align with a living, collaborative creative process – the kind of process where I can trust myself and my stories. Praxis is anything and everything I do to make sure that I’m not dutifully, painfully, numbly writing down words without actually experiencing that creative process.

Here’s an example of what I mean: Last month I set a goal of writing every day for 21 days, to reinforce the habit of writing more frequently throughout the week, which has been a goal of mine lately. That’s writing practice.

My creative aspiration for each day was to write until something surprising came out – whether what I wrote was two new pages of my fiction project, or if what I wrote down for the day was just a weird little haiku that I worked out while taking a shower. As long as I captured that feeling of discovery through the writing, it counted, even if it wasn’t externally impressive or productive. That’s writing praxis.

Praxis is the act of intentionally bringing what I believe (or want to believe) about creativity into the concrete practices that make up my writing. In this case, the act of writing with the aim of being surprised, of affirming that my writing is capable of surprising and delighting me and that I’m capable of showing up consistently to meet that revelation. That’s the creative theory I wanted to put into practical application.

I think all the common threads of writing life advice from the authors I read this month can fit into this framework of practice and praxis. In addition to that theme of trust, I also noticed themes of patience, compassionate attention, and persistence.

(I had to mightily resist an urge to phrase all of those so that they started with “p” but as much as I hate to admit it, there is such a thing as too much alliteration, and this episode has honestly probably already crossed that line. Also, hence making the pop guard, because I have so many “p” words this month…)

I could easily have put together an entire hour-long recording just of quotes from these authors, but I’m going to share just a sampling, just so you can hear these threads a bit for yourself…

First, here’s a Le Guin quote on trust and patience, from the essay “The Question I Get Asked Most Often”: “First you have to be able to wait. To wait in silence. Wait in silence, and listen. Listen for the tune, the vision, the story. Not grabbing, not pushing, just waiting, listening, being ready for it when it comes. This is an act of trust. Trust in yourself, trust in the world. The artist says, the world will give me what I need and I will be able to use it rightly.”

Here’s Octavia Butler on attention, from a compilation of interview quotes: “It’s one of the things that I try to keep young writers from thinking… that it’s all luck, lightning will strike and then you’ll have a wonderful bestseller. So I think it’s like the old idea that fortune favors the prepared mind. If you’ve developed the habit of paying attention to the things that happen around you and to you, then, yeah, you’ll get hit by lightning.”

Here are two quotes from Natalie Goldberg that encompass all four threads of trust, patience, compassionate attention, and persistence: “Have a tenderness and determination toward your writing, a sense of humor and a deep patience that you are doing the right thing. Avoid getting caught by that small gnawing mouse of doubt. See beyond it to the vastness of life and the belief in time and practice.”

“Our task is to say a holy yes to the real things of our life as they exist. … We must become writers who accept things as they are, come to love the details, and step forward with a yes on our lips so there can be no more noes in the world, noes that invalidates life and stop these details from continuing.”

And here are a couple quotes from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: “Your job is to present clearly your viewpoint, your line of vision. Your job is to see people as they really are, and to do this, you have to know who you are in the most compassionate possible sense. Then you can recognize others.”

“There is a door we all want to walk through, and writing can help you find it and open it. Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up.”

What strikes me about all these quotes, and all the material I read, is that the core of this advice on writing practice isn’t actually about specific practices. Beyond “write a lot,” there really isn’t much focus on methods that will improve your writing life. It’s primarily about the kind of intentional approach that I’m placing under the label of praxis. It’s about how you practice, more so than what your practices are.

Another way of saying this is that writing praxis is about embodying your creative ethics within the methods that currently make up your writing practice. When you engage with praxis as well as practice, you’re consciously incorporating some specific aspect of your creative ethics into each practice that you undertake – essentially making a bridge between the nuts and bolts of the writing and your values (which at least in my mind are pretty synonymous with your values for your life, what Anne Lamott calls “a passionate caring inside of you”).

To reference the example I gave earlier, about writing for 21 days with a goal of writing until something surprising came out – that goal of surprise is the bridge between the very tangible practice of a set period of daily writing and the very abstract value of being open to creative revelation.

The praxis piece is a sort of conceptual stepping stone; it’s an abstract or emotional goalpost, sure, but it’s far more concrete than just sitting down with a notebook like, “Okay, I am now open to creative revelation.”

Praxis keeps me from over-identifying with any one particular practice or outcome. It keeps me from conflating the tangible practice with the real creative aim. Who cares if I write for 21 days in a row, or every other day for three months, or whatever, if I’m not actually engaged in and with a creative process that makes me more alive?

Who cares if I finish the essay or the poem or the novel if I did so numbly or despairingly, because it was a rule I was following, hoping that would somehow magically make me worthy of greatness? That’s not much of a creative life.

Anne Lamott describes it this way, in two quotes that I am shamelessly gluing together to make my point: “You have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here? … Think of reverence as awe, as presence in and openness to the world. … To participate requires self-discipline and trust and courage, because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself… ‘How alive am I willing to be?’”

One of the more fanciful reasons I like the word “praxis” is that I really like that “x” in the middle, its physicality in the mouth or on the page. It’s a point of interconnection, of tooth on tongue, of location in the living now. (X marks the spot.)

Praxis is the crossroads you build so that your life, your imagination, your values, and your writing are rooted in the same earth – always travelling back to and through each other. Praxis keeps you grounded in yourself while reminding you that the creative process is larger than yourself. It creates a space of reverence where you can both participate and get out of the way.

Here’s Auntie Ursula again: “A writer has to learn to be transparent to a story. The ego is opaque. It fills the space of the story. … Fiction, like all art, takes place in a space that is the maker’s loving difference from the thing made.”

I think it’s fundamentally this space, this “loving difference” as Le Guin calls it, that enables us to have the persistence so many great writers talk about. Octavia Butler was always very clear that she felt it was her persistence and her attention to the world that made her the writer she was, and not any sort of innate individual brilliance. (Although, I think most of her fans would say there was a little bit of that, too.)

In her essay “Furor Scribendi,” she says, quote, “Play with your ideas. Have fun with them. Don’t worry about being silly or outrageous or wrong. So much of writing is fun. It’s first letting your interests and your imagination take you anywhere at all. Once you’re able to do that… then the real work of fashioning them into a story begins. Stay with it. Persist.”

In both her interviews and the few essays she left us about writing, Butler was extremely straightforward and practical when it comes to her writing advice. I have a feeling she’d be… let’s say politely bemused by the more metaphysical and spiritual lens that I bring to my own relationship with creativity and storytelling.

Butler even liked to share a quote from Harlan Ellison, one of her teachers and later her peer, that “if anything can stop you from being a writer, don’t be one.” And I’ve established pretty clearly how that advice hits for me.

It might seem fairly obvious to classify Butler’s no-nonsense encouragement to persist as simply a gentler rhetorical way of saying the same thing: That creating art is primarily painful, and if you can’t show up to do it every day, guess what, you aren’t really an artist. But I don’t think a value of persistence is just the kinder way to frame that same core sentiment. Or rather, I think the different framing truly does make a difference.

There’s not much room for hope if you believe that a creative life is actually best avoided and that most people can’t measure up to the burden. If that’s really true, then there’s really no room for meaning in the creative process itself, only in the outcome – and only if the outcome meets external parameters of success.

Otherwise, the whole endeavor becomes just something you should have been self-aware enough to walk away from. It’s a bit of a double-bind; if you quit, you’re proving your own mediocrity, but if you don’t quit and you never publish a bestseller, then what kind of deluded idiot are you??

But persistence, on the other hand, leaves room for hope and meaning in the creative process. It’s a belief that the process will undoubtedly yield worthwhile results because the process itself deepens your experience instead of just burdening it.

And during those periods when the process is indeed a struggle, persistence becomes the thread of your writing life that weaves all the other ones together. Through persistence, you offer compassionate attention both to yourself and to your story, trusting that within that space of loving difference, you’ll be able to keep your creative connection to the world alive.

Butler says that a creative habit will, quote, “sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. … Habit is persistence in practice.”

Or, to rephrase that slightly, praxis is persistence in practice. (The triple alliteration strikes!!! I am genuinely sorry, please forgive me, if it will make us even you can email me to recommend Steven King’s On Writing, because apparently I should have gotten over myself and read all of these books fifteen years ago.)

(And if this episode has convinced you that you also need to finally read any or all of these writing life classics, sources for everything I quoted are linked in the show notes, which you can find by scrolling down in whatever app or page you’re listening in.)

For newsletter subscribers, this month’s writing praxis tip is designed to help you identify some specific praxis goals of your own, so you can build those stepping stones between your creative values and your actual writing practice.

If you’re not yet part of the newsletter circle and would like to get access (or if you really would like to contact me with any writing life reading recommendations), scroll down to the link in the show notes or head to inspiritedword.com/contact. To get on the list to receive praxis tips each month right in your inbox, just hit the big peacock green button that says Join the Newsletter.

And just to be clear, I’m not joking about those reading recommendations – I know the sources I read for this episode are leaning very retro and classic, and while I do still see them all referenced currently, I’d love to hear what more recent books or essays you might be seeing getting a lot of praise, or that might have helped you in your own writing life.

Okay, that’s it from me for this month. As always, keep well, keep writing, and I’ll see you in the next episode.