Crying is Beside the Point

Zestful Blog Post #231

Not long ago I watched a video of a young boy in a martial arts class trying to break a board. The instructor was on one knee, holding the piece of wood in his hands, and he was coaching the boy. The rest of the class, all boys around age eight or nine, I guess, were sitting cross-legged in a row, watching. Another instructor stood by.

The boy, as he’d been taught, lunged forward, yelled, and struck the board with his fist. It might be accurate to say he struck at the board. It didn’t break.

You pulled that one, the teachers said. Do it again. The boy did. The board didn’t break. The class was riveted in silence.

You pulled that one too, said the teacher. The boy tried again, and the board didn’t break.

Why are you crying? asked the teacher. The boy could not articulate why. He was, of course, embarrassed, afraid, and frustrated. Why are you crying? the teacher asked again.

At last the boy said, it’s hard.

Yes. The teachers were compassionate in that wonderful simple way some men have, and told the transfixed class that it’s all right to cry. You could see in all the other kids’ faces that they knew they could be the guy up there, the one failing to break the board, the one crying. The teachers didn’t comfort the boy. They didn’t explain anything to the class. It’s all right to cry. If they had told the boy to stop crying, then crying would have become the focus. Crying is beside the point.

To pull a punch is to take away the effort at the last instant. In crooked boxing matches, a fighter throws a punch only to take the force off of it just before it lands, so it looks like he punched this opponent, only he didn’t really hurt him. To metaphorically pull a punch is to hold back from saying something or doing something completely, honestly. It’s related to chickening out.

The instructors encouraged the boy to do it again. Notice they didn’t say try it again. Do it again. This was the most important element of this little video clip, to me.

It dawned on the boy that he was not going to be permitted to sit down until he broke the board. There was no way out except to succeed. He set himself, lunged forward, yelled, and broke the board.

He had committed. He made a literal breakthrough, and I don’t imagine he’ll ever forget the first time he broke a board. He had wanted it to be easier. It was as easy and as difficult as it was.

Commitment, as we see, as we know deep down, takes courage. Wise achievers learn this for themselves, over and over. The moment the boy mustered his courage to commit to breaking the board, he committed, he executed, and he succeeded. There’s belief in there, too, isn’t there? If you doubt the board will break, it won’t.

As it is with our work, every day. Courage. Don’t think you don’t need it. Call upon your supply of it. How do you replenish your supply of courage? What an idea. Let’s think about that, let’s talk about that. It’s all right to cry.

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How to Write Scared

In my undergraduate days I hung out with other students who questioned the value of book-learning over direct experience. There's a lot to be said for direct experience, and one of the direct experiences I had was getting stoned.

This happened several times.

One night I was visiting a friend at her apartment off campus, where we enjoyed some of the latest imports, and it was time for me to get back to my dorm, some ten miles away. We went out to her car. I headed toward the passenger door but she stopped me, pushed her keys into my hand, and said, "You drive."

"Oh, I'm too stoned."

"Elizabeth. You've got to learn to drive stoned."

Although these days I'm known for prudent judgment and a strong sense of social responsibility, in those days I was not.

"Well, how do I learn to drive stoned?" I inquired.

"By driving stoned."

"Oh."

"You just have to believe you can do it."

At the moment, the logic was pure and powerful. So I got behind the wheel, believing I could drive perfectly well stoned, including the part of the route that went past the state police post. In fact I drove back to campus perfectly well.

I took from that experience an important lesson, and it was this: An impairment need not be an impediment.

Needless to say, I don't advocate driving under the influence of anything but caffeine. But this lesson relates to much in life, especially writing.

Fear comes to all writers sometimes: fear of failure, fear of success, fear of mediocrity. Fear makes you tighten up. Tightness is no good. Therefore, it's a fact that the state of fear is an impairment. But it need not be an impediment.

The cool, fantastic reality is that we don't have to vanquish fear in order to write with zest and freedom. If you're too scared to write, just write a little bit and see how you feel.

Understand that the way to consistent output in writing is to be able to write under any emotional load. And there is no trick or technique to doing it.

Every day, simply act on your writing goals, no matter how good you've gotten at inventing obstacles for yourself, like anxiety. Welcome cold fear, let it rush to you, fangs foaming.

Then go about your writing.

Surprisingly, your fear will snuggle up close to you while you write. It will get warm.

What's fear but another friend, anyway?

Breaking news p.s.:
I'll be presenting two sessions at Writer's Digest Conference West,
Sept 27 - 29 in Los Angeles.  Early registration before July 19 is $50
off the full price.
http://www.writersdigestconference.com/ehome/61986/speaker/
Sessions by me:
"How to Write a Dynamite Mystery or Thriller That SELLS"
and "Quit Your Day Job - Seriously!"
More on this soon. 

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Bad Writer, Good Writer, Great Writer

 What's the difference between a bad writer, a good writer, and a great writer?

When I was a college freshman, my English professor said, "Lots of young people want to write. But before you write, you must first have something to say."

The message was: The yearning to write is not sufficient to produce something worthwhile to read.

At the time, I thought that was an extremely wise insight.

Later, having written a book or two, I realized that great writers do not write because they have something to say. They write in order to find out something, or to get at something. Writing like that can be as thrilling for the reader as for the writer. You can get fire and ice that way.

Moreover, even if you begin a piece of writing knowing quite exactly what you want to say, if you’re relaxed about it you’ll find your heartbrain going off in interesting, unexpected directions. And if you begin with nothing but your pencil and a sense of vague desperation, you’ll eventually find yourself focusing and sharpening on something worthwhile, and smiling as you go.

I've learned that way too many writers get confused and think they're preachers.

Bad writers preach badly: "Mean people suck and should be hated."

Good writers preach well: "Mean people suck and should be pitied."

Great writers draw on their deepest courage and humility: "Mean people are the likes of you and me."

Nobody needs a preacher. Just shed light. Great writing is a journey of discovery, and it can be undertaken by anybody.

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Good Writing Doesn't Flinch

Recently I was at a party and spent some time talking with and getting to know a firefighter. Given my early experience as a reporter, I'm comfortable asking probing questions of strangers.

Since this firefighter was female, I indulged my curiosity about the aspects of the job that require physical strength. She gave her height and weight: a couple of inches shorter than me, and only five pounds heavier, definitely not a thick chick. Yet she said she could deadlift 225 pounds, which just astounded me. (By contrast, I can probably deadlift forty pounds max, unless I have to lift a car off of a baby, in which case I would run like hell to find somebody with muscles.) (A deadlift is where the barbell starts on the ground, and you bend down and lift it with straight arms until your back is straight, which makes the bar end up around your knees. Lower it and you've completed one rep.)

The firefighter said that her strength strategy, to keep up with the guys, was to acknowledge that she couldn't lift as much as most male firefighters at one time, but she had trained so that she could repeat lifting heavy weights more times than most of the male firefighters. "So I can't lift as much, but I can repeat and endure as long or longer than they can, and a lot of the job is endurance, rather than explosive strength."

(OK, I didn't have a picture of a female firefighter. These guys work putting out flames in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Don't you love the Spanish word for them?: Bomberos!)

Then I asked the firefighter how she copes with the emotional vicissitudes of the job, thinking of the broken bodies she deals with, being that firefighters do a lot of EMT work as well.

Here is what she said: "We get there after it's over. We don't see the trauma occur, so we don't get that shock. We don't see the leg breaking, we don't see the stroke happening."

And I realized that that's a huge difference, one I never thought about. Certainly the job can be traumatizing, but it's not like I thought.

She went on, "And if somebody's dead, they're dead, and it's all over for them. Nothing's going on."

What about the survivors? I wondered how she deals with their grief and shock.

"We get in, we do our job, and we get out."

In other words, they don't stick around.

Because, really, the only way they can survive is to not become emotionally involved in the dramatic, often defining moments, of other people's lives.

What does this have to do with writing?

As writers, we must be like firefighters and we must not be like them.

We must be like them in that when the shit goes down, we have to jump in our truck and rush to it. But of course we must create the shit that goes down, and we must be different from firefighters. We must stick around.

We must be there for the tough stuff, we must be deeply involved in it, we must not gloss over trouble, agony, difficulty. We must be there deeply because we want our readers to be there deeply. So we have to show the leg breaking. The heart breaking. The bullet piercing the flesh, the fire licking the Picasso, the floodwater inching toward the nostrils. And we must show these things as vividly as possible, discomfort bedammed.

Of course, we as writers also get to indulge in the flip side: We get to be there for the ecstasy, and we must not only let our readers know it's happening, we must portray it as deeply as we portray the pain.

Sometimes this is even more a challenge than portraying suffering! Why is that? I think it's because suffering is drama, while joy is…well, joy is nice.

Which is why novels go like this: "Once upon a time, a dreadful thing happened. But they lived happily ever after." instead of like this: "Once upon a time they lived happily ever after."

Gotta have that drama, gotta have that suffering!

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