For the last few days (3-4-5?) I’ve been researching Bookbinding (youtube, Gutenberg Project. And now I’ve made my very first bound book, blank. I had to use what ever was laying round the house as I have none of the specialized tools or materials. But using ordinary paper and canvas from my painting, including an old paint rag, I cobbled together the book in the photos. Now I feel like I can go ahead and make a few more in preparation for a commission, 40 – 60 pages of abstract drawings. The reason that I needed to make my own book is that most books that are blank are not suitable for art. They are mostly used and intended for writing. Thanks for your attention to my joy at doing.

25 things writers should stop doing

And that is my Zen blog for the week last.

“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.”

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.

The most often voiced complaint about tourists is that they are forever stopping in the middle of the road to gawk at deer. When you are speeding down the narrow, island roads, late as always for your doctor’s appointment, or for your meeting with a necessary client to go over the design for their kitchen cabinets, the last thing you need is an off-island car, stopped at an angle across the centre line, filled with sightseers blissed-out on seeing a tiny, spotted bambi walking tentatively across the road. A few islanders who have found themselves stuck behind such a vehicle have been known to honk their horns loudly, a tactic which invariably frightens the deer and makes it leap into the underbrush. How sad for the visitors, but it does make them drive on.

I feel sorry for tourists who come to the island, in the summer, for their yearly dose of wilderness; in the city they see so little of nature that they get all excited by something as mundane as a deer. Whenever I find myself sitting behind a stationary car full of visitors, I grit my teeth and wait. I’ve worked with a lot of tourists, and to my way of thinking, city folk can use some authentic country experience to teach them how to calm down, get less frantic, notice things; and if I have to practice some of that laid-back, stress-reduced lifestyle that islanders are so famous for, then so be it.

Summer is the favoured vacation time; the trouble is that in the warm months, one is lucky if one sees anything of the island’s abundant fauna other than the deer. Maybe a raccoon or two. A flicker. A few robins. The crows. And we can’t forget the sea gulls. But all these creatures, except for the flicker, are city folk themselves. All the other animals are busy hiding from the summer onslaught of vacationing humanity.

Some islanders would have it that deer are a hazard to life, health, and happiness, and should thereby be cleared out, shot, eaten. At the least expected moment, a deer might jump out in front of a vehicle and smash themselves up—along with the vehicle’s front grill and hood. On the other hand, a deer struck dead by your own automobile is a freezer full of winter meat. For myself, I have slowed down from my former rushed lifestyle. Why not live at deer speed while on the road? Why should there be anywhere that I have to get to in a hurry?: isn’t it simpler to leave sooner. The result of my change of pace is that while I have had to brake suddenly a time or two for a deer, I have no deer meat in my freezer.

I had this go-slow lesson drilled home one day, early in the morning, while driving to work. I was reciting poetry from memory. The island once held a yearly poetry festival. Sometimes off-island poets came to read, but mostly the line up was a string of local writers. And I was one of them. I was working up a selection from one of my long-winded early efforts at epic obfuscation and I had slowed down to negotiate Ruby’s corner—the one where the road goes down a quick drop to a sharp, blind, left-hand turn. There is a large rock situated at the bottom of the slope in exactly the right place; if you lost control of your car, you would hit the rock, total your vehicle, and be saved from dropping off a steep embankment into the sea.

All the clearances are tight on Ruby’s corner; the lanes are non-standard, narrow. I’ve never heard of any head-on collisions happening there, but I have had some close calls. Those headed up-hill around the corner have to negotiate a deep ditch on the right hand side, and as they often want to work up a little momentum to help get them up the grade, they often careen, accidentally, over the centre line. So I was being extra careful, doing about 5 kilometres an hour, when a deer broke cover and leaped immediately in front of my car. I slammed my foot down hard on the brake pedal. The deer disappeared under the front fender. My heart was thumping rather dangerously, but I poked my head out the window, fully prepared to see all of Armageddon stretched out bloody on the road side.

The deer was lying beside the car, on its back. Its spine curved into a comma-like shape. Its legs were sticking up in the air, quivering. I was close enough to watch its eyes roll up into its head far enough that I could only see the whites. Its tongue was hanging out of its mouth. But as I opened the door to inspect the damage I had caused, the deer leaped to its feet, did a momentary, spastic dance, then dashed off into the bush.

Back in the car, I pulled over on the side of the road and wrote down the following poem. I read it at the festival that weekend.

THE MORNING FAWN

But then, my small lacuna, protracted in dismay,
was punctuated by the fawn, which bounded up,
and dashing through the brambles, made good its getaway.
I imagined that the deer had only run to die alone.
It might have grazed my garden years on down the road.

And that, for good reason, was the last poem I ever wrote.

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.

It was only later, in the full light of day, that I heard the noise again. I looked over to the kitchen sink and saw the wee bird. Funny little round thing, brown, with a tiny tail that stuck straight up in the air. At first I thought the bird was outside, clambering along the mullion, trying to get in. Lately, similar little birds have been doing just this at night, hopping about on the sill, illuminated by the light that spilled from the window. But then I realized that the bird wasn’t outside. It was inside, trying to get out.

Luckily I know a thing or two about chasing down birds that are trapped in the house: #1: Don’t do it. Stand respectfully aside, and if you know anything about their language, talk to them in a soothing tone.

I had often watched these particular birds as they searched on the ground with quick abrupt motions, looking amongst the dead grasses and wood piles for whatever it is they eat. They are always making soft little chirps. You can carry on a sort of conversation with them by making the same chirping noises back at them. Call and response. Call and response. I often wonder if I am getting any of their language’s subtleties down. Maybe the birds are curious about what kind of weird bird is making such a hash of their dialect.

Sometimes I change the pattern and chirp twice where they would only chirp once. When I do this, it messes up the regular call and response. They pause, and it is almost as if they are thinking about the new kind of statement that has been made. When they finally get it together to comment with another single chirp, I swear it sounds tentative. I give a hearty chirp in reply, and then we continue with our happy call and response. Chirp. Chirp. Chirp. Chirp.

So for the benefit of the creature trapped in my kitchen, I made some soft, chirp-like tsks, just to let the beastie know that I knew it was there. I don’t know what I was saying in bird language. I might have been challenging all and sundry to a battle to end all battles. No matter. If I misspoke, the bird would likely tender to me the same forgiveness that you or I would give to a foreigner who was trying out our own language for the first time. I’m sure my tone carried my good intentions.

But the problem remained: how to get the bird out of the house. I tried to show it that there was a way out by opening the kitchen door. But at the first sound of the knob turning, the bird flew off into the dinning room. They’re flighty little things. Far less bold than your basic robin. I decided to go around opening all the doors until the bird got the idea and flew out. I’ve had success with this method before. The important thing with this method is that you have to make sure you are not between the door and the bird. But first you have to find it. Given the natural kind of habitat the wee thing hid in when it suspected that any creature bigger than itself was hanging around, I checked my potted Jade tree. No such luck.

I was about to give up, thinking that the bird would reveal itself at some point. But then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the wee beastie sitting on the stairs. It was sort of perched there, leaning with a sever sideways tilt. It’s beak was hanging open. Old school scientists admonish us not to do any anthropomorphizing of creatures. But I know the look of exhaustion when I see it. The bird had been inside all night long, probably flying around in a panic to get out. Knocking itself half dead on window glass. Parched and hungry. I walked over and simply picked it up. It squawked in alarm, just once, but then it stilled in my grasp. “Don’t worry little bird. I’m not going to eat you.”

I took it outside and opened my hand. At first the bird was facing away from me, but it made a little hop and turned around. This tiny thing, far smaller than my palm, looked up at me.

We all have similar muscles in our faces. Minor variations here and there. Some of us can wiggle our ears. Some of us can make our scalp move fore and aft. But basically, there is only a set number of muscles that control all the movements of all human faces. All the other animals have a similar set of face muscles, give or take a few, attached to bones that perform similar functions. Our muscles can move our faces around in a set number of ways, into a set number of expressions. All the other animals have (again more or less) a similar set of possible expressions, with humans having the greatest number of expressions in their set and insects having the fewest (given that they have no soft tissue on the outside of their faces). Expressions telegraph emotions. The set of human emotions is probably the same set that animals have, albeit in different proportions for each animal. Why then shouldn’t we be able to read an animal’s expressions and thereby know what its emotions are? We read each other’s emotions well enough. The major difficulty in reading bird expressions can be overcome by making adequate allowance for the bird’s feathers. This should pose no more of a problem than we have in reading the emotional expressions on a bearded man’s face. And maybe the feathers, unlike the whiskers, have an advantage in that they might be mobile enough to magnify the movements of the face muscles.

When that wee wren looked up at me it did so in wonder and perplexity.

You had me. You didn’t eat me. What kind of creature are you?

This response is understandable. In the Winter Wren’s world, most larger animals are either trying to eat it, or to drive it away from the good food sources.

I smiled down at the bird and watched it watch me. But then my partner opened the door to see what was going on. The bird flew off into the air. It went and hid in the hawthorn bush.

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.