Category Archives: Literature

A Little Zen Help With Perfectionism

My friend peter posted this today and I thought it might do some good for those of us mired in perfectionism.

“Facing Roadblocks

When poet William Stafford (1914-1993) was asked how his daily practice of writing one poem a day could possibly produce quality poetry of high standards, he replied: “I lower my standards.” During last week’s retreat, Zen Teacher Hogen Bays offered similar advice, “When the roadblocks are too daunting and you feel stuck, lower your expectations and go on from there.” My visceral response was one of relief. You mean it’s OK not to aim for perfection? I felt unburdened of a life-time obsession with “getting it right” and “doing more.” Anything less, I’d always thought, would mean being a slacker. Phew!”

Find Peter’s blog here.”

How Not to Write #2 – The In-joke.

I was reading a free e-book: it was impenetrable. Couldn’t understand a single thing the writer was trying to say. Oh, I did get the setting: a universe with few people in it. I also understood that the author’s characters were playing a game. There was a listing of the game’s rules, but I suspect the game was never tested out by the author. The game made no sense to me. Maybe the rules were just badly described. But were the rules important to the story, and if they were, is it a good idea to base a story on rules? And the author’s tone of voice was most irritating, like listening to someone tell an elaborate joke that only the in-crowd could understand; it was like having someone shouting at you, “I know something you don’t know.”

This reader failed to understand the joke; there wasn’t enough relevant information, explanation, description, characterization, motivation—we don’t want too much, but we want enough. It is quite possible that after the first thirty pages or so things might have become clear, pellucid even, but my time is precious to me and I want the story to start in the first sentence, and I want to be intrigued, even if the story is not yet fully explained: something must ring true, immediately. If one wants to capture a reader’s attention, and leave him or her wanting more, then one had better learn all the skills of the art and craft of writing.

What I perceived as the book’s faults can probably be put down to the author’s inability to imagine the reader’s response. Even the writer’s tone was likely only an accidental effect that arose from the pleasure he/she had at getting something down on the page: he/she had a first draft, and in neophyte excitement, mistook the draft for a finished piece. And the authors’ excitement got garbled into a seeming of smugness by the author’s lack of control over word usage, sentence construction, and an inability to read the piece critically.

Being a beginner is not a problem, but thinking you are not a beginner is. Right now I am reading everything I can get my hands on about writing and reading. This is something I learned from martial arts: the beginner’s mind. Come at everything you do as if you are empty, no preconceived ideas. I don’t mean be clumsy, I mean be open to seeing ones own limitations and strengths. Get help from a teacher. For a writer that means get a critic. If you have trouble remaining calm, objective, in the face of criticism, don’t ask a friend—if you want to keep that friend—they’ll probably just lie to you. And if you can’t sell an e-book, if you have to give it away, then either readers can’t stay with your story because you haven’t been critical enough, or you haven’t done enough marketing. But that’s another story.

Use and Abuse

I have just finished reading The Use and Abuse of The English Language, (Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, Second edition, Paragon House, NY. 1990).

Oh, my.

Originally and aptly titled, The Reader Over Your Shoulder, that is what you get. Or at least, after reading this book, one starts to develop the uncomfortable feeling that someone is looking over ones shoulder and critically watching every word one types into the computer. Admittedly, the book was written by two Englishmen in 1943, and so it is written in a style of English that is not currently used in North America. But the importance of this work, and its usefulness, is that it shows how easy it is to write something that is incoherent, unintelligible, or meaningless.

In this book, Graves and Hodge categorize the various components that go into making writing intelligible to a reader. They list twenty five principles concerning the clarity of statement, and sixteen principles concerning the graces of expression. They then give examples of common errors in writing that transgress these principles; they use examples of writing by some rather famous authors—Graves and Hodge even include examples from their own published works; I suppose they do this so one does not become overly paranoid about how hard it is to stay on top of the craft of writing—and the book thereby welcomes every writer into the presence of famous authors who make mistakes. You could be one of them. Better yet, by avoiding all the errors listed, your writing could become clearer and more coherent (although, referring back to the information in the book I am discussing, I suspect that one is either coherent or not, there is nothing more or less about it. Maybe I should write that after reading Graves and Hodge’s book, more of ones own passages might become coherent?)

All well and good. The benefit (and the trouble) comes when, after reading this book, one starts to look at everything one writes with a more finely-honed, (hyper)critical eye.

I hate to think about the errors in writing that I have, no doubt, committed in this piece.

How Not to Write, Part One: The Stand-in

I was once in a play under a director who was a perfectly nice person — with all that nice implies in these post-modern times: afraid to offend, to stick out in a crowd, to have a strong opinion, or to offer a critical observation in fear that it might be taken as a personal attack. The director’s niceness might not have mattered except that no matter what we actors did when we stepped out on stage during rehearsals, the director always told us that what we had done was “fine, good, excellent”. The next time we would do the scene in a completely different way, and it wouldn’t matter. “Fine. Good. Excellent.” After a few weeks of this, the actors panicked.

I wouldn’t want to say that all actors are walking bags of insecurities that are about to rip and spill, and that to stay sane they need the constant duct taping of firm direction from someone with a decided vision. But without a director riding herd on the actors there will be no consistent interpretation of a play. The play would come across as a group of actors all singing different songs.

The principle actors in our play held a meeting backstage. We all complained about the lack of criticism: of our delivery, of our blocking, of our timing, of our emotional understanding of the words, of our interactions. We never quite figured out what the director wanted. We were ready to pull the plug, to quit. And quitting is not something that actors are ever lightly going to suggest. No actor wants to disappoint a community that is waiting with bated breath for the latest theatrical blockbuster. We were doing a fundraiser on an island where everyone knew everyone else. We did not want to get up on stage in front of our friends and look pathetic.

In the context of this blog post, the details of how things finally worked out are not important. In the end things turned out well. The play went ahead and raised its quota of funds. But I always wondered what was going on in the director’s mind during all the time we were stumbling about on stage without a clue. And I think I finally figured it out.

Our director was using what we actors were clumsily doing as a reminder of the wonderful performance of a professional production the director had seen years before. Our amateur efforts were a stand-in for the director’s imagination.

The director’s problem was similar to one I had when I first started writing. I would imagine my scene in some detail, and then I would type it out. The problem was that my imagination was visual. In my imagination I was not forming sentences depicting action, nor was I hearing dialogue. I was imagining scenes in full colour, something like TV, but without the sound. And I didn’t need the sound because I already knew what the story was about. What I put down on paper was a mere precis of my imagined story. The precis was composed only of visual clues, a visual shorthand in a secret code that could only mean something to me. When I read my story, the writing stood in for what I had previously imagined, and it allowed me to re-imagine the scene. But for anyone else who read what I wrote, it was almost impossible for them to decipher my coding. What I wrote did not contain enough clues or directions for readers to form their own images. And as no reader can see into my mind, no reader could ever be party to what I had imagined by reading what I wrote. Communication failed.

How is the writer to avoid using their words as a mere memory device that only functions properly for their own self? How can one ever know that the reader can see what we want them to see?

The best way to avoid the pitfall of the stand-in when writing is to seek out a critic, not merely a nice friend, who will tell you what they really think about your work. Scary thought. Real critics are heartless. If they can’t see something clearly, they tell you so. Don’t get angry. Brave the critique and listen. It’s the only way to write well enough to be understood. Does the reader/critic understand what you are writing? Do they see what you see? How would you know without asking them?

Not everything the critic says will be useful to you. But if you listen carefully to them, some of what they say will ring bells. The task of the author is not to write words that let him or her see what they have already seen. The task of the author is to write words that stimulate the reader into imagining a scene for themselves, in their own way, albeit a scene that fulfills the author’s purpose.